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.
Exhibitions & Dates
Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1965
Apr 28 2017 -
More than 120 works inspired by the founding history of the Museum
Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s
Mar 2019 -
Works look to the power of color to activate the viewer’s perception
Julie Mehretu
Jun 26 2020 - Sep 20 2020
Some 30 paintings and 32 works on paper, from 1996 to today
Jasper Johns
Fall 2020 -
Retrospective of Johns’s seven-decade career
Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945
Feb 17 2020 - May 17 2020
300 works demonstrate Mexican art's impact on early 20th-century U.S. artists
Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019
Nov 22 2019 - Jan 2021
Eighty+ works by sixty+ artists explore materials, methods, and strategies of craft
Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist
Mar 13 2020 - Jun 21 2020
Some forty paintings (1917 to 1961) illuminate her contribution to American modernism
Order and Ornament: Roy Lichtenstein’s Entablatures
Sep 27 2019 - Fall 2020
Works on paper related to his Entablatures series from the 1970s
Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop
Jul 2020 - Oct 2020
Chronicles the formative years of a collective of Black photographers established in New York City in 1963
Around Day’s End: Downtown New York, 1970–1986
Jul 2020 - Oct 2020
A selection of works that explore downtown New York as site, history, and memory
Public Art Project by David Hammons: Day's End
Fall 2020 -
A permanent public art project located in Hudson River Park across from the Museum
Salman Toor: How Will I Know
Mar 20 2020 - Jul 5 2020
Intimate views into imagined lives of young, queer Brown men