Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street | also 555 West Street, 93 Gansevoort Street | West Village | built 2011
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 2008
The Whitney announces a Renzo Piano building at 99 Gansevoort Street beside the High Line
In 2008 the Whitney Museum of American Art said it would put up a second home to Renzo Piano's design at 99 Gansevoort Street, just west of Washington Street. The site sat beside the southernmost entrance to the High Line, whose first section opened in June 2009. Together the two projects were turning points that helped turn the Meatpacking District from a gritty manufacturing area into a high-end shopping, dining and residential neighborhood.
Source: Wikipedia
- 2010
Construction begins on Renzo Piano's new Whitney at the southern end of the High Line
The museum built its downtown home on a formerly city-owned site at Gansevoort and Washington Streets, which marks the High Line's southern entrance. Work started in 2010, at a price of $422 million. The Whitney aimed to raise $760 million to cover construction and its endowment, and in 2011 the Metropolitan Museum agreed to take over its Madison Avenue home for a minimum of eight years.
Source: Wikipedia
- 2015
America Is Hard to See, drawn entirely from the collection, inaugurates the new building
The Whitney's first exhibition at Gansevoort Street, America Is Hard to See, ran from May 1 to September 27, 2015. It drew entirely on the museum's own holdings, more than six hundred works arranged chronologically in twenty-three chapters spread through the building. Curators led by Donna De Salvo took the title from a Robert Frost poem and an Emile de Antonio documentary. Jonathan Borofsky's Running People at 2,616,216 was installed on the fifth-floor west ambulatory.
Source: whitney.org
- 2015
The Whitney opens its new building after a ribbon-cutting with Michelle Obama
The museum closed its Madison Avenue building in October 2014 and held a ceremonial ribbon-cutting at Gansevoort Street on April 30, 2015, attended by Michelle Obama and Mayor Bill de Blasio. It opened to the public on May 1. The eight-story building has 200,000 square feet, including the city's largest column-free gallery spaces, and two floors devoted wholly to the permanent collection.
Source: Wikipedia
- 2015
Piano shapes an asymmetrical building with a glass-walled lobby and outdoor stairs between terraces
Renzo Piano echoed the industrial Meatpacking District in the building's form and called its glass-walled lobby a piazza, meant to draw in passersby from Gansevoort Street. Exterior stairways link the sixth, seventh and eighth floors, with catwalks overlooking the High Line. More than 4,000 tons of steel keep the galleries free of columns, and movable walls let curators reconfigure them. The first exhibition was America Is Hard to See.
Source: dwell.com
- 2015
Richard Artschwager's four elevators are the only permanent artwork made for the building
The only permanent artwork commissioned for the new building is its set of four main elevators, conceived by Richard Artschwager. Observation decks on the fifth through eighth floors are connected by an exterior stair, and visitors can rest at an eighth-floor cafe, on the terraces, or on fifth-floor couches facing glass walls toward the Hudson and Greenwich Village.
Source: Wikipedia
- 2017
The 2017 Biennial is the first held downtown and the largest ever in gallery space
The 2017 Whitney Biennial opened on March 17 and ran to June 11. It was the seventy-eighth in the series begun by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the first at the museum's downtown home, and the largest ever in gallery space. Co-curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, it presented sixty-three individuals and collectives, from painters to video-game designers, and Pope.L received the Bucksbaum Award.
Source: whitney.org
- 2017
Dana Schutz's painting of Emmett Till draws a protest and a petition at the Biennial
The 2017 Whitney Biennial included Open Casket, Dana Schutz's painting of Emmett Till. Artnet News reported on March 21, 2017 that the work had sparked a protest. A petition that circulated widely demanded that the painting be taken down and destroyed.
Source: Wikipedia
- 2018
Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again brings more than 350 works to the museum
Running from November 12, 2018 to March 31, 2019, the Warhol retrospective was the first by a U.S. institution since 1989. With more than 350 works, many gathered together for the first time, it was the largest single-artist exhibition yet held at the Whitney's new location. Organized by Donna De Salvo, it argued that Warhol kept experimenting after surviving the 1968 shooting rather than slowing down.
Source: whitney.org
- 2019
The 2019 Biennial brings seventy-five artists and collectives to the Gansevoort galleries
The 2019 Whitney Biennial ran from May 17 to October 27. Curators Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley made hundreds of studio visits before choosing seventy-five artists and collectives working in painting, sculpture, film, performance and sound. Their curatorial statement noted that the museum itself had become the site and subject of protest while they organized the show.
Source: whitney.org
- 2019
Vice chair Warren Kanders resigns after months of protests and artists withdrawing from the Biennial
Since November 2018, groups including Decolonize This Place had protested vice chair Warren Kanders, whose company Safariland made tear gas used against migrants. In July 2019 a wave of artists withdrew their work from that year's Whitney Biennial, and on July 25 Kanders stepped down from the museum's board.
Source: Wikipedia
- 2021
Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror splits a retrospective between the Whitney and Philadelphia
From September 29, 2021 to February 13, 2022 the Whitney showed half of Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, with the other half simultaneously at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Called the most comprehensive Johns retrospective ever, it covered paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture from 1954 on. The two-city structure echoed the artist's fascination with mirrors and doubles, pairing galleries in each city. Scott Rothkopf co-organized it for the Whitney, with Carlos Basualdo of the Philadelphia museum.
Source: whitney.org
- 2022
Edward Hopper's New York draws on the museum's Hopper archive to chart his city
Edward Hopper's New York ran from October 19, 2022 to March 5, 2023. Organized by curator Kim Conaty, it followed the painter's nearly six decades in the city, from early sketches and illustrations to late paintings. The show relied on the Whitney's own holdings and on the recently acquired Sanborn Hopper Archive of ephemera, letters, photographs and journals.
Source: whitney.org
Further reading
- Whitney Museum of American ArtWikipedia
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