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.
120 works by more than eighty artists from the 1960s to the present
The work of 100+ artists reappraise American art from 1958 to 1972
A selection of software-based works
Site-specific installation provides "a place to hang out"
1974 camera chain traveled to a hundred participants in thirty-six states
Revealing his early fascination with movement, balance, suspense, and ephemerality
10+/- recent works, primarily large-scale paintings, made since 2022
82nd showcase of what's new in the world of American art
1960s drawings playfully reimagine places and objects of daily life
Key ideas in American art from 1900 through the early 1980s