The Whitney Museum of American Art - Past Events
Below is a list of all past events for The Whitney Museum of American Art. Current and upcoming events, as well as other details, are available on the venue's page.
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Ruth Asawa “Through Line”
Ruth Asawa Through Line spotlights the work of groundbreaking artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013). Known broadly for her rhythmic looped-wire sculptures, Asawa dedicated herself to daily drawing exercises, which...More »
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“Trust Me” Exhibition
Floor 3 Drawn from the Whitney’s collection, Trust Me brings together photographic works that invite shared emotional experience. The artists in the exhibition embrace intuition and indeterminacy as part...More »
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Ilana Savdie “Radical Contractions”
Floor 1, Lobby Gallery Ilana Savdie (b. 1986, raised in Barranquilla, Colombia and Miami, Florida; based in Brooklyn, New York) explores themes of performance, transgression, identity, and power in her...More »
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“Inheritance” Exhibition
Floor 6 Inheritance traces the profound impacts of legacy and the past across familial, historical, and aesthetic lines. Featuring new acquisitions and rarely-seen works from the Whitney collection by...More »
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Jaune Quick-to-See Smith “Memory Map”
On view, Floors 3, 5 This exhibition is the first New York retrospective of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940, citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), an overdue but timely look at the...More »
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Josh Kline “Project for a New American Century”
On view, Floors 5, 8 Josh Kline (b. 1979, Philadelphia, PA; lives and works in New York, NY) is one of the leading artists of his generation. Kline is best known for creating immersive installations using...More »
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“no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria” Exhibition
On view, Floor 6 no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria is organized to coincide with the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Maria—a high-end Category 4 storm that...More »
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Edward Hopper “New York”
Edward Hopper’s New York, opening October 19, 2022, brings together many of Hopper’s most iconic city works to showcase a complex and compelling portrait of a rapidly developing New York. Edward Hopper’s...More »
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“At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism” Exhibition
At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism showcases art produced between 1900 and 1930 by well-known American modernists and their now largely forgotten, but equally groundbreaking...More »
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“Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept”
The Whitney Biennial has surveyed the landscape of American art, reflecting and shaping the cultural conversation, since 1932. The eightieth edition of the landmark exhibition is co-curated by David Breslin...More »
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Jennifer Packer “The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing”
Jennifer Packer’s paintings and drawings combine observation, memory, and improvisation. Featuring over thirty works from the past decade, The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing is the largest survey of...More »
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“Labyrinth of Forms: Women and Abstraction, 1930–1950” Exhibition
The Whitney Museum of American Art presents Labyrinth of Forms: Women and Abstraction, 1930–1950, an exhibition of works drawn primarily from the Museum’s collection that celebrates the innovative abstract...More »
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Jasper Johns “Mind/Mirror”
The radical, inventive art of Jasper Johns (b. 1930) continues to influence today’s artists like few others. In an unprecedented collaboration, the Whitney and the Philadelphia Museum of Art will stage...More »
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Dawoud Bey “An American Project”
Six polaroids combined to make an image of two women seated next to one another Since the mid-1970s, Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) has worked to expand upon what photography can and should be. Insisting that it...More »
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Madeline Hollander “Flatwing”
This first solo museum exhibition by artist, dancer, and choreographer Madeline Hollander (b. 1986) features a new video installation, Flatwing, and related works on paper. Hollander’s work is inspired...More »
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Julie Mehretu Exhibition
This mid-career survey of Julie Mehretu (b. 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) covers more than two decades of the artist’s examination of painting, history, geopolitics, and displacement. Including approximately...More »
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“Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop” Exhibition
Working Together is an unprecedented exhibition that chronicles the formative years of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of Black photographers established in New York City in 1963. “Kamoinge” comes...More »
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“Nothing Is So Humble: Prints from Everyday Objects” Exhibition
The Whitney Museum of American Art presents Nothing Is So Humble: Prints from Everyday Objects, a focused exhibition of works drawn from the collection that highlights the creative and irreverent ways...More »
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Salman Toor “How Will I Know”
For his first museum solo exhibition, Salman Toor (b. 1983) presents new and recent oil paintings. Known for his small-scale figurative works that combine academic technique and a quick, sketch-like style,...More »
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“Around Day’s End: Downtown New York, 1970–1986” Exhibition
Anticipating the completion in late fall 2020 of David Hammons’s Day’s End, a major public artwork located in Hudson River Park, the Whitney will present a selection of works from the Museum’s collection...More »
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Agnes Pelton “Desert Transcendentalist”
Agnes Pelton (1881–1961) was a visionary symbolist who depicted the spiritual reality she experienced in moments of meditative stillness. Art for her was a discipline through which she gave form to her...More »
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Cauleen Smith “Mutualities”
Cauleen Smith (b. 1967) draws on experimental film, non-Western cosmologies, poetry, and science fiction to create works that reflect on memory and Afro-diasporic histories. Mutualities, the artist’s first...More »
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“Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945” Exhibition
Mexico underwent a radical cultural transformation at the end of its Revolution in 1920. A new relationship between art and the public was established, giving rise to art that spoke directly to the people...More »
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Darren Bader “fruits, vegetables; fruit and vegetable salad”
For this exhibition, an untitled work by Darren Bader (b. 1978) stands alone in the gallery. Fresh fruits and vegetables—“nature’s impeccable sculpture,” according to Bader—are presented as formal objects...More »
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“Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019” Exhibition
Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 foregrounds how visual artists have explored the materials, methods, and strategies of craft over the past seven decades. Some expand techniques with long histories,...More »
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Rachel Harrison “Life Hack”
Rachel Harrison’s (b. 1966) first full-scale survey will track the development of her career over the past twenty-five years, incorporating room-size installations, sculpture, photography, and drawing....More »
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Alan Michelson “Wolf Nation”
Alan Michelson: Wolf Nation presents four works in video, sound, print, and augmented reality that invoke place from an Indigenous perspective. The artist—who is Kanyen’keha:ka (Mohawk), a member of one...More »
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Roy Lichtenstein “Order and Ornament”
This exhibition will present a diverse array of works on paper by Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) related to his Entablatures series from the 1970s. Inspired by the architectural facades and ornamental motifs...More »
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Jason Moran Exhibition
The boundary-bursting artist Jason Moran (b. 1975) grounds his practice in the composition of jazz, bridging the visual and performing arts through spellbinding stagecraft. Heralded as one of the country’s...More »
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“The Whitney’s Collection: Selections from 1900 to 1965” Exhibition
This exhibition of more than 120 works, drawn entirely from the Whitney’s collection, is inspired by the founding history of the Museum. The Whitney was established in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney,...More »
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“Whitney Biennial 2019” Exhibition
- Media: Painting - Drawing - Photography - Sculpture - Installation - Film
- 2019-05-17 - 2019-09-22
The Whitney Biennial is an unmissable event for anyone interested in finding out what’s happening in art today. Curators Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley have been visiting artists over the past year in...More »
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“Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s” Exhibition
This exhibition gathers paintings from the 1960s and early 1970s that inventively use bold, saturated, and even hallucinatory color to activate perception. During this period, many artists adopted acrylic...More »
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Kevin Beasley “A view of a landscape”
Kevin Beasley (b. 1985, Lynchburg, VA) engages with the legacy of the American South through a new installation that centers on a cotton gin motor from Maplesville, Alabama. In operation from 1940 to 1973,...More »
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Andy Warhol “From A to B and Back Again”
- Media: Painting - Photography - Prints - Installation - Film - Video installation
- 2018-11-12 - 2019-03-31
Few American artists are as ever-present and instantly recognizable as Andy Warhol (1928–1987). Through his carefully cultivated persona and willingness to experiment with non-traditional art-making techniques,...More »
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“Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018” Exhibition
The Whitney Museum presents Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018, an ambitious installation of more than fifty works by thirty-nine artists filling the Museum’s sixth floor galleries....More »
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Eckhaus Latta “Possessed”
Eckhaus Latta: Possessed highlights the work of Eckhaus Latta, a compelling young design team who belongs to a new generation of designers operating at the intersection of fashion and contemporary art....More »
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Louise Nevelson “The Face In The Moon”
The Face in the Moon: Drawings and Prints by Louise Nevelson opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art on July 20, 2018. Drawn entirely from the Whitney’s extensive holdings of her work, this exhibition...More »
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“Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art” Exhibition
The Whitney Museum of American Art debuts Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art, an exhibition investigating the complex ways in which Indigenous American notions of the...More »
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David Wojnarowicz “History Keeps Me Awake at Night”
This summer, the most complete presentation to date of the work of artist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz will be on view in a full-scale retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American...More »
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Mary Corse Exhibition
Mary Corse’s first solo museum survey is a long overdue examination of this singular artist’s career. Initially trained as an abstract painter, Corse (b. 1945, Berkeley, CA) emerged in the mid-1960s as...More »
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Nick Mauss “Transmissions”
- Media: Painting - Drawing - Photography - Sculpture - Installation - Performance Art
- 2018-03-16 - 2018-05-14
For his first solo museum show in the United States, artist Nick Mauss (b. 1980) will present Transmissions, an exhibition conceived for the Whitney, which explores the reciprocal relationship of modernist...More »
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Zoe Leonard “Survey”
New York–based artist Zoe Leonard (b. 1961) is among the most critically acclaimed artists of her generation. Over the past three decades, she has produced work in photography and sculpture that has been...More »
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Juan Antonio Olivares “Moléculas”
This exhibition by Juan Antonio Olivares (b. 1988) presents his 2017 video Moléculas, along with a suite of related drawings. Moléculas relates a highly personal narrative that is part autobiographical,...More »
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Grant Wood “American Gothic And Other Fables”
Grant Wood’s American Gothic—the double portrait of a pitchfork-wielding farmer and a woman commonly presumed to be his wife—is perhaps the most recognizable painting in twentieth century American art,...More »
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Laura Owens Exhibition
For more than twenty years, Los Angeles–based artist Laura Owens has pioneered an innovative approach to painting that has made her one of the most influential artists of her generation. Her bold and experimental...More »
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Jimmie Durham “At the Center of the World”
Artist and activist Jimmie Durham (b. 1940) has worked as a visual artist, performer, essayist, and poet for more than forty-five years. A political organizer for the American Indian Movement during the...More »
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Toyin Ojih Odutola “To Wander Determined”
The Whitney Museum of American Art debuts Toyin Ojih Odutola’s first solo museum exhibition in New York on October 20, 2017. The exhibition presents an interconnected series of portraits that chronicle...More »
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Willa Nasatir Exhibition
The emerging artist Willa Nasatir (b. 1990) creates photographs routinely informed by a cinematic vocabulary, inspired by the shifting landscape and individuals who inhabit New York, where she works and...More »
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Hélio Oiticica “To Organize Delirium”
Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium is the first full-scale retrospective in the U.S. in two decades of the Brazilian artist’s work. One of the most original artists of the twentieth century, Oiticica’s...More »
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Bunny Rogers “Brig Und Ladder”
In her work, Bunny Rogers draws from a personal cosmology to explore universal experiences of loss, alienation, and a search for belonging. Her layered installations, videos, and sculptures begin with...More »
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Lorna Mills “Caughtinmoment”
In Caughtinmoment Lorna Mills continues her explorations of the gif as an iconic visual form of the online environment by breaking down images of sunrises and sunsets into pixelated components that wriggle...More »
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“Calder: Hypermobility” Exhibition
Calder: Hypermobility focuses on the extraordinary breadth of movement and sound in the work of Alexander Calder. This exhibition brings together a rich constellation of key sculptures and provides a rare...More »
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“Where We Are” Exhibition
At a time when debate continues over what it means to be American, Where We Are proposes a framework of everyday relationships, institutions, and activities that form an individual’s sense of self. The...More »
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“Whitney Biennial 2017” Exhibition
- Media: Painting - Drawing - Photography - Sculpture - Installation - Film - Video installation
- 2017-03-17 - 2017-06-11
The formation of self and the individual’s place in a turbulent society are among the key themes reflected in the work of the artists selected for the 2017 Whitney Biennial. The exhibition includes sixty-three...More »
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“Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s” Exhibition
In the 1980s, painting recaptured the imagination of the contemporary art world against a backdrop of expansive change. An unprecedented number of galleries appeared on the scene, particularly in downtown...More »
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“Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016” Exhibition
Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016 focuses on the ways in which artists have dismantled and reassembled the conventions of cinema—screen, projection, darkness—to create new experiences of...More »
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Virginia Overton “Winter Garden”
Virginia Overton (b. 1971; Nashville) creates exhibitions in response to the natural and man-made environments in which she works, often overlaying these sites with diverse references ranging from the...More »
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Carmen Herrera “Lines of Sight”
Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight is the first museum exhibition of this groundbreaking artist in New York City in nearly two decades. Focusing on the years 1948 to 1978, the period during which Herrera developed...More »
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Jill Kroesen “Collecting Injustices, Unnecessary Suffering”
Artist, composer, and singer Jill Kroesen was an essential figure in the 1970s downtown New York performance milieu, working at the intersection of experimental music and then-emerging performance art....More »
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Sophia Al Maria “Black Friday”
For her first solo exhibition in the United States, Sophia Al-Maria (b. 1983) debuts a new video and installation. For nearly a decade, Al-Maria has been finding ways to describe twenty-first-century life...More »
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Danny Lyon “Message to the Future”
Danny Lyon: Message to the Future is the first comprehensive retrospective of the career of Danny Lyon (b. 1942) to be presented in twenty-five years. The exhibition is organized by the Fine Arts Museums...More »
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Stuart Davis “In Full Swing”
Stuart Davis (1892–1964) is one of the preeminent figures of American modernism. With a long career that stretched from the early twentieth century well into the postwar era, he brought a distinctively...More »
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Virginia Overton “Sculpture Gardens”
For the second commissioned project on the Whitney’s fifth-floor terrace, New York-based artist Virginia Overton (b. 1971; Nashville, TN) explores the contrast between the concepts of the “sculpture garden”...More »
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“Mirror Cells” Exhibition
This exhibition brings together artists Liz Craft, Rochelle Goldberg, Elizabeth Jaeger, Maggie Lee, and Win McCarthy, who often conceive of interconnected works that suggest strange invented worlds. While...More »
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“Open Plan: Steve McQueen” Exhibition
From February 26 through May 14, 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents Open Plan, an experimental five-part exhibition using the Museum’s dramatic fifth-floor as a single open gallery, unobstructed...More »
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June Leaf “Thought Is Infinite”
For nearly seven decades, June Leaf (b. 1929) has created a deeply imagined world of unreal creatures and settings that metaphorically probe the human condition. She has worked in a long tradition of visionary...More »
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“Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection” Exhibition
Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection offers new perspectives on one of art’s oldest genres. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s holdings, the more than two hundred works in the exhibition...More »
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“Open Plan: Cecil Taylor” Exhibition
From February 26 through May 14, 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art will present Open Plan, an experimental five-part exhibition using the Museum’s dramatic fifth-floor as a single open gallery,...More »
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“Open Plan: Michael Heizer” Exhibition
From February 26 through May 14, 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art will present Open Plan, an experimental five-part exhibition using the Museum’s dramatic fifth-floor as a single open gallery,...More »
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“Open Plan: Lucy Dodd” Exhibition
From February 26 through May 14, 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art will present Open Plan, an experimental five-part exhibition using the Museum’s dramatic fifth-floor as a single open gallery,...More »
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Andrea Fraser “Open Plan”
The Whitney Museum of American Art presents Open Plan, an experimental five-part exhibition using the Museum’s dramatic fifth-floor as a single open gallery, unobstructed by interior walls. The largest...More »
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Laura Poitras “Astro Noise”
Laura Poitras: Astro Noise is the first solo museum exhibition by artist, filmmaker, and journalist Laura Poitras. This immersive installation of new work builds on topics important to Poitras, including...More »
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“Flatlands” Exhibition
This exhibition brings together paintings by five artists—Nina Chanel Abney, Mathew Cerletty, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Caitlin Keogh, and Orion Martin. Highlighting an engagement with representation among...More »
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Akunyili Crosby “Before Now After (Mama, Mummy and Mamma)”
Over the course of the next five years, a series of public art installations by key American artists will appear across from the Whitney’s new building and the southern entrance to the High Line, on the...More »
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“Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner” Exhibition
Co-organized by the Whitney and the Centre Pompidou and composed of selections from the noted collection of Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner, this exhibition celebrates American and international...More »
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Rachel Rose “Everything and More”
An emerging artist based in New York, Rachel Rose will receive her first solo exhibition in the United States this fall in the Museum’s fifth-floor Kaufman Gallery. Rose (b. 1986) is known for her striking...More »
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Frank Stella “A Retrospective”
The Museum presents a career retrospective of Frank Stella (b. 1936), one of the most important living American artists. This survey will be the most comprehensive presentation of Stella’s career to date,...More »
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Jared Madere Exhibition
Jared Madere (b. 1986), an emerging artist based in New York, will receive his first solo exhibition in the United States at the Whitney, creating a new installation in the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation...More »
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Archibald Motley “Jazz Age Modernist”
Archibald Motley (1891—1981) was one of the most important figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance and is best known as both a master colorist and a radical interpreter of urban culture. Archibald...More »
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“The Whitney’s Collection” Exhibition
The more than two hundred works on display on the seventh and sixth floors represent a selection of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s collection. Organized in a rough chronological sequence beginning...More »
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Yuji Agematsu “Walk On A,B,C,”
Location: Floor Three Susan and John Hess Family Theater Since the late 1980s, the obsessive and visionary artistic practice of Yuji Agematsu has included daily walks through Manhattan’s streets, during...More »
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Mary Heilmann “Sunset”
Mary Heilmann’s site specific installation Sunset inaugurates the fifth-floor outdoor gallery with sculptural chairs and pink wall elements that play off the geometries of the building. The video Swan...More »
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“America Is Hard to See” Exhibition
- Media: Painting - Drawing - Photography - Sculpture - Installation - Video installation
- 2015-05-01 - 2015-09-27
When the Whitney Museum of American Art opens its new Renzo Piano-designed home in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District on May 1, 2015, the first exhibition on view will be an unprecedented selection of works...More »
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Jeff Koons “A Retrospective”
Jeff Koons is widely regarded as one of the most important, influential, popular, and controversial artists of the postwar era. Throughout his career, he has pioneered new approaches to the readymade,...More »
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“2014 Whitney Biennial” Exhibition
- Media: Painting - Other - Sculpture - Other - Video installation - Media Arts
- 2014-03-07 - 2014-05-25
The 2014 Whitney Biennial will take a bold new form as three curators from outside the Museum—Stuart Comer (Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at MoMA), Anthony Elms (Associate Curator at the Institute...More »
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“American Legends: From Calder to O’Keeffe” Exhibition
American Legends: From Calder to O’Keeffe showcases the Whitney’s deep holdings of artwork from the first half of the twentieth century by the eighteen leading artists: Oscar Bluemner, Charles Burchfield,...More »
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“Edward Steichen in the 1920s and 1930s: A Recent Acquisition” Exhibition
Edward Steichen in the 1920s and 1930s: A Recent Acquisition presents an extraordinary gift of Edward Steichen photographs given to the Museum by Richard and Jackie Hollander. This exhibition includes...More »
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“Rituals of Rented Island” Exhibition
This exhibition illuminates a radical period of 1970s performance art that flourished in downtown Manhattan, or what filmmaker and performance artist Jack Smith called “Rented Island,” and still remains...More »
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Robert Indiana “Beyond LOVE”
Robert Indiana (b. Robert Clark, 1928) first emerged on the wave of Pop Art that engulfed the art world in the early 1960s. Bold and visually dazzling, his work embraced the vocabulary of highway signs...More »
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T. J. Wilcox “In the Air”
For T. J. Wilcox: In the Air, the New York-based artist has created a remarkable new panoramic film installation, which will fill up most of the second floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Here...More »
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“Test Pattern” Exhibition
A selection of recent acquisitions from the Museum’s permanent collection, Test Pattern brings together works, made mostly in the last three years, that demonstrate artists’ shared interests in investigating...More »
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Robert Irwin “Scrim veil—Black rectangle—Natural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1977)”
Scrim veil—Black rectangle—Natural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1977), by California Light and Space artist Robert Irwin, is a large-scale installation that uniquely engages the Whitney’s...More »
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Edward Hopper “Hopper Drawing”
Hopper Drawing is the first major museum exhibition to focus on the drawings and creative process of Edward Hopper (1882–1967). More than anything else, Hopper’s drawings reveal the continually evolving...More »
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David Hockney “The Jugglers”
This exhibition marks the U.S. premiere of David Hockney’s first video installation: The Jugglers, June 24th 2012 (2012). Filmed using eighteen fixed cameras, this multiscreen tableau shows a group of...More »
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“I, YOU, WE” Exhibition
I, you, we: three very commonplace words. These pronouns—with all their implied complexities of meaning—provide an unexpected guide for assessing the works of art from the 1980s and early 1990s in the...More »
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Bruce Conner “THE WHITE ROSE”
Screened in conjunction with Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective, Bruce Conner’s short film, THE WHITE ROSE (1967), chronicles the removal of DeFeo’s nearly one-ton masterpiece, The Rose (1958-66), from her second-story...More »
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Jay DeFeo Exhibition
This retrospective is the definitive exhibition to date of the work of Jay DeFeo (1929–89). At the outset of her career in the 1950s, DeFeo was at the center of a vibrant community of Beat artists, poets,...More »
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"Blues for Smoke" Exhibition
Blues for Smoke is an interdisciplinary exhibition that explores a wide range of contemporary art through the lens of the blues and blues aesthetics. Turning to the blues not simply as a musical category...More »
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"American Legends: From Calder to O’Keeffe" Exhibition
- Media: Graphics - Painting - Drawing - Photography - Other - Installation - Other
- 2012-12-22 - 2013-03-31
American Legends: From Calder to O’Keeffe showcases the Whitney’s deep holdings of artwork from the first half of the twentieth century by the eighteen leading artists: Oscar Bluemner, Charles Burchfield,...More »
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"Dark and Deadpan: Pop in TV and the Movies" Exhibition
From Andy Warhol’s commercial for Schrafft’s restaurants to Sherman Price’s film The Imp-Probable Mr. Weegee, starring Weegee as a crazy photographer, footage of the moon landing, and George Kuchar’s mock...More »
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"Sinister Pop" Exhibition
Sinister Pop presents an inventive take on the Museum’s rich and diverse holdings of Pop art from the movement’s inception in the early 1960s through its aftershocks a decade later. Although Pop art often...More »
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Trisha Baga "Plymouth Rock 2"
Plymouth Rock 2, New York–based artist Trisha Baga’s first US solo show, is a two-channel projection compiled from a variety of found and original video and audio material. Baga projects this collaged...More »
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"Richard Artschwager!" Exhibition
Richard Artschwager’s first solo exhibition was in 1965 at the age of forty-two at Leo Castelli Gallery. Since then his work has been shown throughout the world, and his enigmatic and diverse oeuvre has...More »
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"Wade Guyton OS" Exhibition
Over the past decade, New York–based artist Wade Guyton (b. 1972) has pioneered a groundbreaking body of work that explores our changing relationships to images and artworks through the use of common digital...More »
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Sharon Hayes "There's So Much I Want To Say To You"
Sharon Hayes (b. 1970) is a New York–based artist whose work in photography, film, video, sound, and performance examines the nexus between politics, history, speech, and desire. This exhibition, conceived...More »
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Yayoi Kusama Exhibition
Well known for her use of dense patterns of polka dots and nets, as well as her intense, large-scale environments, Yayoi Kusama’s art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing,...More »
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"Signs & Symbols" Exhibition
Drawn from the Museum’s deep holdings of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, and photographs, Signs & Symbols sheds new light on the development of American abstraction during the critical postwar...More »
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Oskar Fischinger Exhibition
This exhibition presents one of the first multimedia projections ever made—Oskar Fischinger’s Raumlichtkunst (Space Light Art), a recreation of his multiple-screen film events first shown in Germany in...More »
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". . . As Apple Pie" Exhibition
Images, like words, trigger a cultural and emotional knowledge of a shared national ethos. Artists have used this pictorial shorthand—sometimes straightforward, often obliquely—to comment on this country,...More »
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"2012 Whitney Biennial" Exhibition
Sculpture, painting, installations, and photography—as well as dance, theater, music, and film—will fill the galleries of the Whitney Museum of American Art in the latest edition of the Whitney Biennial....More »
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Sherrie Levine "Mayhem"
Sherrie Levine (b. 1947) has transformed and re-contextualized images and objects in her work since the late 1970s, often presenting them as installations that provide a compelling sense of context. This...More »
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Aleksandra Mir "The Seduction of Galileo Galilei"
Aleksandra Mir (b. 1967) develops projects that take her around the world to examine the dynamics of popular cultural myths and historical events. In The Seduction of Galileo Galilei (2011), Mir engages...More »
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David Smith "Cubes and Anarchy"
A fresh look at the work of the great American sculptor David Smith (1906–1965), Cubes and Anarchy offers new insights into the artist’s career-long involvement with geometric forms. Traditionally, the...More »
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"Three Landscapes: A Film Installation by Roy Lichtenstein" Exhibition
This exhibition presents Three Landscapes, a little-known triple screen film installation by Roy Lichtenstein, unseen since its showing at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1971 as part of the groundbreaking...More »
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"Real/Surreal" Exhibition
This exhibition, drawn entirely from the deep holdings of the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection, will focus on the tension and overlap between two strong currents in twentieth century art. Although...More »
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Lyonel Feininger "At the Edge of the World"
Born and raised in New York, Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956) moved at the age of sixteen to Germany, where he became one of the leading practitioners of German Expressionism and the Bauhaus. In the late 1930s,...More »
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Xavier Cha "Body Drama"
New York–based artist Xavier Cha incorporates video and installation in performances that play with multiple perspectives and deferred access, reflecting our fractured contemporary experience. For her...More »
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“Designing the Whitney of the Future” Exhibition
On May 24, 2011, the Whitney Museum breaks ground on a new building designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano and located between the High Line and the Hudson River Park in the Meatpacking District. In...More »
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"Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools" Exhibition
"Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools", an exhibition of new work, revolves around the concept of “product demonstrations.” All of the works featured in the exhibition—ranging from video games, single channel video,...More »
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"Breaking Ground: The Whitney's Founding Collection" Exhibition
At the turn of the twentieth century, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, an heiress and sculptor born to one of America’s wealthiest families, began to assemble a rich and highly diverse collection of modern...More »
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"More Than That: Films by Kevin Jerome Everson" Exhibition
Kevin Jerome Everson (b. 1965) works in film, painting, sculpture, and photography. His filmic fables, the focus of this exhibition, articulate the profound within the ordinariness of everyday life. Everson,...More »
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Dianna Molzan "Bologna Meissen"
Dianna Molzan’s canvases engage in an open and unpredictable dialogue with the history of abstract painting. While the works display a range of material approaches that vary from painting to painting,...More »
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Glenn Ligon "America"
This exhibition features roughly one hundred works, including paintings, prints, photography, drawings, and sculptural installations, as well as striking recent neon reliefs, one newly commissioned for...More »
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"Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection" Exhibition
Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection presents a selection of works from the historic gift of art pledged to the Whitney in May 2010 by longtime Museum trustee Emily Fisher Landau. Considered one...More »
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Singular Visions
At a time when images barrage us everywhere from our televisions to our mobile phones, the latest reinstallation of the Whitney’s permanent collection galleries invites visitors to slow down and experience...More »
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Karthik Pandian "Unearth"
Los Angeles-based artist Karthik Pandian uses 16mm film and architectural constructions to examine the relationship between ancient and modern cultures and the ways in which contemporary societies understand...More »
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Charles LeDray "WORKWORKWORKWORKWORK"
Over the past twenty years, New York-based sculptor Charles LeDray (b. 1960, Seattle) has created a highly distinctive and powerful body of work using such materials as sewn cloth, carved human bone, and...More »
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Slater Bradley and Ed Lachman "Shadow"
Shadow (2010), a new video work by Slater Bradley in collaboration with Academy Award–nominated cinematographer Ed Lachman, takes as its inspiration the unfinished Hollywood film Dark Blood (1993), which...More »
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Edward Hopper "Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time"
Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time traces the development of realism in American art between 1900 and 1940, emphasizing the diverse ways that artists depicted the sweeping transformations in urban...More »
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Paul Thek "Diver, a Retrospective"
Paul Thek: Diver, a Retrospective is the first retrospective in the United States devoted to the legendary American artist Paul Thek (1933-1988). A sculptor, painter, and one of the first artists to create...More »
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Trisha Brown "Off the Wall: Part 2"
Off the Wall: Part 2: Seven Works by Trisha Brown, features the Trisha Brown Dance Company, on the occasion of the company’s fortieth anniversary, performing iconic works from the 1970s, including the...More »
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Sara VanDerBeek "To Think of Time"
Sara VanDerBeek's quiet semi-abstract photographs are based predominantly on sculptural forms created by the artist. In the past, she has collected pictures from various sources, including art history...More »
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Lee Friedlander "America By Car"
Driving across most of the country’s fifty states in an ordinary rental car, master photographer Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) applied the brilliantly simple conceit of deploying the sideview mirror, rearview...More »
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"Off the Wall: Part 1—Thirty Performative Actions" Exhibition
The first installation in a two-part exhibition, Off the Wall: Part 1—Thirty Performative Actions, focuses on actions using the body in live performance, in front of the camera, or in relation to a photographic...More »
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Christian Marclay "Festival"
Artist/composer Christian Marclay (b. 1955) is known for his distinctive fusion of image and sound. Celebrated as a pioneer of turntablism, Marclay transforms sound and music into visual and physical forms...More »
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Jill Magid "A Reasonable Man in a Box"
In her first solo exhibition in an American museum, Jill Magid (b. 1973) continues to explore means of penetrating closed systems of power. Taking institutional structures, rules, laws, and language as...More »
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Charles Burchfield "Heat Waves in a Swamp"
Although he lived next door to Niagara Falls, artist Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) chose to focus his nature-based art on the ground beneath his feet. Curated by artist Robert Gober, this exhibition features...More »
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"Facing the Artist: Portraits by John Jonas Gruen" Exhibition
Writing in the volume of photographs from which this exhibition takes its title, art historian Justin Spring notes: “John Jonas Gruen has made it his business to be in the right place at the right time....More »
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Whitney Biennial 2010
- Media: Painting - Drawing - Photography - Sculpture - Installation - Video installation - Performance Art
- 2010-02-25 - 2010-05-30
The Biennial is the Whitney’s panoramic signature survey of the latest in American art. It includes a blend of well established artists together with a predominance of emerging artists from all over the...More »
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"Collecting Biennials" Exhibition
- Media: Painting - Drawing - Photography - Prints - Sculpture - Installation
- 2010-01-16 - 2010-11-28
As a prelude, counterpoint, and coda to the Biennial, the Museum’s fifth floor is devoted to artists in the Whitney’s collection whose works were shown in Biennials over the past eight decades. Collecting...More »
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Omer Fast "Nostalgia"
Omer Fast plays with the conventions of television and film, creating nonlinear narratives that blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction. This exhibition features recent work by Fast, who received...More »
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Alice Guy Blaché "Cinema Pioneer"
This is the first comprehensive retrospective of the films of Alice Guy Blaché (1873–1968), a key but unsung figure of the early years of cinema, the first woman director, and the first woman to establish...More »
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Roni Horn "Roni Horn aka Roni Horn"
For more than thirty years, Roni Horn (b. 1955) has been developing work of concentrated visual power and intellectual rigor, often exploring issues of gender, identity, androgyny, and the complex relationship...More »
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"Walter Annenberg Annual Lecture: Bill Viola" Conversations on Art
A pioneer in the medium of video art, Bill Viola has been instrumental in establishing video as a vital form of contemporary art. Often drawing on religious iconography and historical narratives, Viola’s...More »
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"Steve Wolfe on Paper" Exhibition
For over two decades, Steve Wolfe (b. 1955) has created objects and drawings of astounding craft and visual presence that investigate the intersections among material culture, intellectual history, and...More »
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"A Few Frames: Photography and the Contact Sheet" Exhibition
In this selection of works drawn principally from the Whitney’s permanent collection, the repetitive image of the proof sheet is the leitmotif in a variety of works spanning the range of the Museum's photography...More »
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Georgia O’Keeffe "Abstraction"
The artistic achievement of Georgia O’Keeffe is examined from a fresh perspective in Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction, a landmark exhibition debuting this fall at the Whitney Museum of American Art. While...More »
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Dan Graham "Beyond"
Dan Graham, one of the pioneering figures of contemporary art, is the subject of a landmark retrospective, "Beyond," the first-ever comprehensive museum survey of Graham’s career to be done in the United...More »
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"Photoconceptualism, 1966–1973" Exhibition
The final installment in a three-part series taking a closer look at photography in the Whitney’s collection, this exhibition focuses on works by conceptual artists of the late 1960s and early 1970s. During...More »
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Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen Exhibition
One of the most innovative artists of the postwar period, Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) is best known for sculptures and drawings that disrupt our expectations of how ordinary objects “behave.” In 1976, he...More »
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Sadie Benning "Play Pause"
First shown at the Whitney in the 1993 Biennial, Sadie Benning now presents her latest video installation Play Pause (2006) as part of the Whitney’s Contemporary Series. Recognized for her experimental...More »
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Jenny Holzer Exhibition
The work of Jenny Holzer, one of the leading artists of her generation, is the subject of this major exhibition co-organized by the MCA Chicago and the Fondation Beyeler. Holzer has consistently and inventively...More »
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"Sites" Exhibition
In the postwar period, the traditional notion of art as a discrete object has changed to include environments, places, and sites. The critic Harold Rosenberg famously described painting as "an arena in...More »
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"Synthetic" Exhibition
In the 1960s, artists began to use a range of new products that changed the possibilities of painting and sculpture. Synthetic polymer paints— popularly known as acrylics—became the first widely used alternative...More »
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Elad Lassry "Three Films"
Elad Lassry's "Three Films" is the first New York museum exhibition of this Los Angeles based artist who produces carefully crafted images in both photography and film. While often drawing on traditional...More »
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"Artists Making Photographs" Exhibition
Artists Making Photographs focuses on five major artists from the Whitney's collection – John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg, Lucas Samaras, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol – all of whom are best known for...More »
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Alex Bag Exhibition
For her first solo museum presentation, Alex Bag is creating a newly commissioned video installation inspired by the 1970s children’s syndicated television show, "The Patchwork Family," on which the artist's...More »
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William Eggleston "Democratic Camera"
Nearly fifty years of extraordinary image-making by the photographer William Eggleston will be presented in a major retrospective, "William Eggleston: Democratic Camera—Photographs and Video, 1961-2008"...More »
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"Signs of the Time" Exhibition
Signs of the Time is the first in a series of three exhibitions in the Sondra Gilman Gallery that will take a closer look at the different ways that photography is considered within the Whitney's collection....More »
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Ninth Annual FREE Family Day "WhitneyKids at the Circus"
Kids and their parents are invited to come and discover Calder’s Circus through hands-on art-making activities, performance, and live music. Families will interact with contemporary artists Colin Gee...More »
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Alexander Calder "The Paris Years, 1926-1933"
When Alexander Calder (1898-1976) arrived in Paris in the mid-1920s, he aspired to be a painter; when he left in the early-1930s, he had evolved into the artist we know today, an international figure and...More »
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Corin Hewitt "Seed Stage"
Artist Corin Hewitt takes up occupancy in the Whitney's Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Lobby Gallery in this ongoing installation that is part performance art, part live theater, and part meditation on ideas...More »
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"Between the Still and Moving Image" Exhibition
This film series examines the relationship between the still and moving image from the 1930s to the present, by artists, filmmakers, and photographers who use stillness, cinematographic composition, and...More »
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"Between the Still and Moving Image" Film Program
This film series examines the relationship between the still and moving image from the 1930s to the present, by artists, filmmakers, and photographers who use stillness, cinematographic composition, and...More »
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"Progress" Exhibition
“Progress” brings together works from the Whitney’s permanent collection, highlighting connections between art and visions of utopia. In the early part of the twentieth century, artists and architects...More »
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Wordless Music at Whitney Live
Whitney Live and The Wordless Music Series take over the Whitney's indoor/outdoor Lower Gallery every Friday in June for shows pairing innovative rock and electronic music with adventuresome chamber music...More »
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Buckminster Fuller "Starting with the Universe"
R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was one of the great American visionaries of the 20th century. Best-known as the inventor of the geodesic dome, Fuller devoted much of his life to resolving the gap between...More »
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Paul McCarthy "Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement Three Installations"
This exhibition brings together a group of new and rarely seen works by Paul McCarthy (b. 1945), one of the most influential American artists of his generation. The show focuses on a core strand of McCarthy's...More »
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Wordless Music at Whitney Live
Whitney Live and The Wordless Music Series take over the Whitney's indoor/outdoor Lower Gallery every Friday in June for shows pairing innovative rock and electronic music with adventuresome chamber music...More »
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Wordless Music at Whitney Live
Whitney Live and The Wordless Music Series take over the Whitney's indoor/outdoor Lower Gallery every Friday in June for shows pairing innovative rock and electronic music with adventuresome chamber music...More »
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Robert Mapplethorpe "Polaroids: Mapplethorpe"
This special exhibition traces Robert Mapplethorpe's use of instant photography from 1970 to 1975. Included are self-portraits, figure studies, still lifes, and portraits of lovers and friends including...More »
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Whitney Biennial 2008
- Media: Illustration - Painting - Drawing - Photography - Sculpture - Installation - Film - Video installation - Digital
- 2008-03-06 - 2008-06-01
Today there are more artists working in more genres, using more varieties of material, and moving among more geographic locations than ever before. By exploring the networks that exist among contemporary...More »
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Whitney Biennial 2008 Installations at Park Avenue Armory
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Charles Demuth"Chimneys and Towers"
Between 1927 and his death in 1935, Charles Demuth produced a last major series of paintings based on the architecture of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the town in which he was raised and lived intermittently...More »
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"The Whitney's Collection" Exhibition
This presentation of the permanent collection highlights four broad themes that elucidate key developments of twentieth century art in this country. They include the fragmentation and abstraction of early...More »