The Whitney Museum of American Art was born out of a necessity to exhibit the living American artists normally excluded from the traditional art academies. The collection created by, as well as the Whitney Studio founded in Greenwich Village in 1914 by the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the first to realize this necessity, laid the foundations of today’s museum. Once the collection she wanted to donate to the Metropolitan Museum was rejected, she had to found her own museum.
As time passed the museum expanded and could not fit into its main building, relocating several times and creating various corporately funded New York branches. More recently, in May 2015 it relocated to its new building designed by the famous museum designer Renzo Piano.
The museum collection features approximately 21,000 artworks by more than 3,000 American artists created in the 20th and 21st centuries. The temporary exhibition program offers monographies as well as group exhibitions including film, video, photography and new media. Moreover, the Whitney Biennial, organized since 1932, is still the one and only regular exhibition held in the United States and surveying the most recent developments in American art. The biennial invites works produced within the preceding two years.
