The Whitney’s collection includes over 21,000 works by more than 3,000 American artists during the 20th- and 21st-centuries.
The Museum's founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, supported living American artists of her time, particularly younger or emerging ones, and this focus on the contemporary has guided the Museum’s collecting since.
The collection begins with Ashcan School painting and follows the major movements of the 20th-century in America, with strengths in Modernism and Social Realism, Precisionism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Postminimalism, identity- and political-art of the 1980s and 1990s, and contemporary work. Among many others, holdings include work by Peggy Bacon, George Bellows, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Mabel Dwight, Edward Hopper, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and John Sloan as well as Alexander Calder, Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha and Cindy Sherman.
The Museum’s signature exhibition is its biennial.
Please check the museum website for updated exhibition information. Scheduling may have been modified as a result of the temporary museum closure.
More than 120 works inspired by the founding history of the Museum
Works look to the power of color to activate the viewer’s perception
Retrospective of Johns’s seven-decade career
Eighty+ works by sixty+ artists explore materials, methods, and strategies of craft
A permanent public art project located in Hudson River Park across from the Museum
Direct and poetic, immediate and symbolic photographs portray African-American history