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.
Nearly five decades of Smith’s drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures
The first U.S. museum survey of the artist's work
works from the 1970s to today explore ideas of (re)birth, (re)generation, repetition, and recursiveness
Twelve intergenerational photography artists from the Whitney’s permanent collection
Explores Asawa's lifelong daily drawing practice
150+ works from the late-1980s to the present.
Art and ephemera signify the esoteric, fantastic, and alternative cosmologies in Smith’s view of culture