The Whitney Museum’s New Digs
June 11, 2015
As of May 1, any out-of-the-loop art lover visiting New York and venturing up to Madison Avenue and E.75th Street for a visit to the Whitney Museum of Art got a big jolt. The building was there, but it had been leased to that other stalwart of New York art museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Whitney had left the Marcel Breuer designed building it had occupied on Manhattan’s staid upper east Side since 1966; a world of uniformed doormen, gray-haired dowagers, and upper-crust private schools. Yes, it had pulled up stakes and headed downtown, to a new home in the Meat-Packing district, an edgy avant garde neighborhood, wedged in between Chelsea and Greenwich Village; an area of nightclubs and happening art galleries, inhabited by artists and actors, fashion models and young Wall Street strivers living in converted lofts, gentrified tenements, and a burgeoning assortment of high-rise condos with river views.
Innovation is nothing new for the Whitney, the first museum to devote itself to exhibiting and advocating for the work of living American artists, and the new building is the epitome of innovation. Designed by the in-demand architect Renzo Piano, it straddles the land between the High Line and the Hudson River. The two-level design with the lower portion suggesting a ship’s bow hovering toward the landscaping of the High Line, and the graduated taller half rising over the Hudson, it gives the suggestion of a mother-ship embarking on a new mission. But then, the Whitney was built on a mission. Its founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, long an appreciative collector of contemporary American art, in 1914, began exhibiting selected works of living artists in her studio in Greenwich Village. By 1929, when her collection had swelled to 500 pieces, she offered it as an endowment to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Recoiling from shock when the Met refused it, she went on to found her own museum, and the rest is history.
Today, as then, the Whitney is all about keeping art alive. In addition to its carefully curated collections and exhibitions, it endeavors to ensure American art remains alive and growing, offering performance art, film and video screenings, family programs, workshops, readings, lectures and talks. With this swirl of activity in mind, Piano created an airy modernist structure to enclose, without stifling, six floors of flowing galleries, performance spaces, screening areas, four outdoor terraces, reading rooms, a library, a cafe, restaurant, and in a move that promises to draw the socialistas, fashinistas, and paparazzis of the New York social scene, a bar on the ground floor piazza.
Many say the new neighborhood is a better fit for the Whitney, always the museum who danced to a different tune than that heard by its cohorts among New York’s big four, the other three being the Met, the Guggenheim, and the Museum of Modern Art. If you’re planning a move to New York, you can sample the treasures housed in all four and discover what makes each museum unique. As for your treasures, they’ll be safe with New York movers.
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