Whitney Museum of American Art: Recent pages

Teaching Tips

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:53:16 -0400

Education/ForTeachers/TeachingTips

How do you lead an open-ended discussion with your students focused on a work of art? What questions can you ask to encourage them to look closely and think critically? Will sharing information about the art and artist stifle students’ imaginative responses? Whitney educators have some tips and suggestions to offer as you plan your inquiry-based lesson.

What’S New

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:47:00 -0400

Tickets

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:56:46 -0400

Visit/Admission

General admission tickets may be purchased online up to two months in advance. Tickets for select public programs are also available online. There is a $2 per ticket service fee for all online ticket purchases.

Jay De Feo: A Retrospective

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:12:11 -0400

Exhibitions/JayDeFeo

This retrospective is the definitive exhibition to date of the work of Jay DeFeo (1929–89). At the outset of her career in the 1950s, DeFeo was at the center of a vibrant community of Beat artists, poets, and musicians in San Francisco. Although she is best known for her monumental painting The Rose (1958–66, now in the Whitney’s collection), which she spent eight years making and which later languished hidden behind a wall for two decades, DeFeo created an astoundingly diverse range of works spanning four decades. Her unconventional approach to materials and intensive, physical process make DeFeo a unique figure in postwar American art who defies easy categorization. The full breadth of her work will be presented for the first time in this exhibition of more than 130 objects. This astonishing array of collages, drawings, paintings, photographs, small sculptures, and jewelry will illuminate DeFeo’s courageous experimentation and extraordinary vision.

Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective is organized by Dana Miller, Curator of the Permanent Collection.

Hopper Drawing

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:11:47 -0400

Exhibitions/HopperDrawing

Hopper Drawing is the first major museum exhibition to focus on the drawings and creative process of Edward Hopper (1882–1967). More than anything else, Hopper’s drawings reveal the continually evolving relationship between observation and invention in the artist’s work, and his abiding interest in the spaces and motifs—the street, the movie theatre, the office, the bedroom, the road—that he would return to throughout his career as an artist. This exhibition showcases the Whitney’s unparalleled collection of Hopper’s work, which includes over 2,500 drawings bequeathed to the museum by his widow Josephine Hopper, many of which have never before been exhibited or researched. The exhibition will survey Hopper’s significant and underappreciated achievements as a draftsman, and will pair many of his greatest oil paintings, including Early Sunday Morning (1930), New York Movie (1939), Office at Night (1940) and Nighthawks (1942), with their preparatory drawings and related works. This exhibition also features groundbreaking archival research into the buildings, spaces and urban environments that inspired his work.

Hopper Drawing is organized by Carter E. Foster, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawing.

Wade Guyton Os

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:03:35 -0400

Exhibitions/WadeGuyton

Over the past decade, New York–based artist Wade Guyton (b. 1972) has pioneered a groundbreaking body of work that explores our changing relationships to images and artworks through the use of common digital technologies, such as the desktop computer, scanner, and inkjet printer. Guyton’s purposeful misuse of these tools to make paintings and drawings results in beautiful accidents that relate to daily lives now punctuated by misprinted photos and blurred images on our phone and computer screens. Comprising more than eighty works dating from 1999 to the present, Guyton’s first midcareer survey features a dramatic, non-chronological design in which staggered rows of parallel walls confront the viewer like the layered pages of a book or stacked windows on a monitor. The exhibition includes paintings, drawings, photography, and sculpture, and concludes with two spectacular new canvases, stretching up to fifty feet in length, which Guyton created specifically for the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer–designed building. The title, Wade Guyton OS employs the common acronym for a computer’s “operating system,” linking Guyton’s art to the technologies of our time.

Wade Guyton OS is organized by Scott Rothkopf, Curator and Associate Director of Programs.

Richard Artschwager!

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:03:06 -0400

Exhibitions/RichardArtschwager

Richard Artschwager’s first solo exhibition was in 1965 at the age of forty-two at Leo Castelli Gallery. Since then his work has been shown throughout the world, and his enigmatic and diverse oeuvre has been influential, yet not thoroughly understood. This exhibition is a comprehensive review of Artschwager’s remarkable creative exploration of the mediums of sculpture, painting, and drawing and the first retrospective exhibition of Artschwager’s work since one organized at the Whitney in 1988.

Richard Artschwager! is organized by Jennifer Gross, Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Yale University Art Gallery.

Trisha Baga: Plymouth Rock 2

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:01:17 -0400

Exhibitions/TrishaBaga

Plymouth Rock 2, New York–based artist Trisha Baga’s first US solo show, is a two-channel projection compiled from a variety of found and original video and audio material. Baga projects this collaged narrative, based on the history of the Pilgrim landing site and its current state as a dilapidated tourist attraction, onto and past objects placed throughout the space that, along with the bodies of the viewers, further interrupt and disrupt the already distorted tale. Like much of her nascent practice, Plymouth Rock 2 is an adaptation and reinstallation of an earlier work, Plymouth Rock, first shown in London earlier this year.

Trisha Baga was born in Venice, FL, in 1985; she currently lives and works in New York, NY. She received her B.F.A. from the The Cooper Union School of Art in 2007 and her M.F.A. from the Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College in 2010. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Munchen (World Peace, 2012) and Vilma Gold, London (Rock, 2012). Group exhibitions include Hasta Manana, 2011, Greene Naftali, New York; Greater New York Cinema Program, 2010, PS1, Long Island City; and Adventures Close to Home, 2009, Anthology Film Archives, New York.

Trisha Baga: Plymouth Rock 2 is organized by Elisabeth Sherman, Curatorial Assistant.

Dark And Deadpan: Pop In Tv And The Movies

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:00:52 -0400

Exhibitions/DarkAndDeadpan

From Andy Warhol’s commercial for Schrafft’s restaurants to Sherman Price’s film The Imp-Probable Mr. Weegee, starring Weegee as a crazy photographer, footage of the moon landing, and George Kuchar’s mock Hollywood melodrama HOLD ME WHILE I’M NAKED, this exhibition brings together rarely seen films, advertisements, and political campaign messages that reflect the extravagant yet deadpan excess of Pop. Together they reveal the central role played by television and cinema in articulating the excitement, anxiety, and desire underlying both Pop art and popular culture in the 1960s.

Dark and Deadpan is organized by Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator Chrissie Iles, and curator Jay Sanders.

Sinister Pop

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:00:28 -0400

Exhibitions/SinisterPop

Sinister Pop presents an inventive take on the Museum’s rich and diverse holdings of Pop art from the movement’s inception in the early 1960s through its aftershocks a decade later. Although Pop art often calls to mind a celebration of postwar consumer culture, this exhibition focuses on Pop’s darker side, as it distorts and critiques the American dream. Themes of exaggerated consumption, film noir and the depiction of women in art, the dystopic American landscape, and the intersection of popular culture and politics, are explored through works by acknowledged masters such as Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol, as well as by many artists not traditionally associated with Pop whose art may be understood within its wider field of reference. These include William Eggleston, Peter Saul, Christina Ramberg, and Vija Celmins, among others.

Sinister Pop is organized by Donna De Salvo, Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs, and Scott Rothkopf, Curator and Associate Director of Programs.

Blues For Smoke

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 10:59:56 -0400

Exhibitions/BluesForSmoke

Blues for Smoke is an interdisciplinary exhibition that explores a wide range of contemporary art through the lens of the blues and blues aesthetics. Turning to the blues not simply as a musical category but as a field of artistic sensibilities and cultural idioms, the exhibition features works by over forty artists from the 1950s to the present, as well as materials culled from music and popular entertainment.

The exhibition’s title is drawn from a 1960 solo album by virtuoso jazz pianist Jaki Byard in which improvisation on blues form becomes a basis for avant-garde exploration. The title suggests that the expanded poetics of the blues is pervasive—but also diffuse and difficult to pin down. By presenting an uncommon heterogeneity of subject matter, art historical contexts, formal and conceptual inclinations, genres and disciplines, Blues for Smoke holds artists and art worlds together that are often kept apart, within and across lines of race, generation, and canon.

A series of performances, events, screenings, and readings will accompany the exhibition.

Blues for Smoke is organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The exhibition is curated by Bennett Simpson. At the Whitney Museum, the installation is overseen by Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator.

The Whitney Museum Shop

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 10:20:07 -0400

Visit the Whitney Museum shop and browse our exceptional selection of books, media, and gifts reflecting the breadth of American artistic expression and cultural thought of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

You will find a wide selection of titles from monographs to historical texts, unique stationery, t-shirts, accessories, jewelry, tableware, and children’s toys and books—all inspired by the work of American artists, including Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alexander Calder, and Andy Warhol.

Home

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 10:14:23 -0400

In celebration of its new graphic identity, the Whitney has re-launched its website. Log in to explore new and improved features: customize your calendar of events, start your collection, manage your membership, and interact with the Museum’s social channels.

For Families With Babies Ages 0–18 Months

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 08:12:11 -0400

Education/Families/StrollerTours

Whitney Teaching Fellows, PhD candidates in art history, lead engaging tours of current exhibitions for new moms and dads when the Museum is closed to the public. Crying babies are welcome!

$25 per adult ($10 for Family Series members or Friend-level members and higher). Registration for this program is required.

Visit

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 08:06:02 -0400

Works On View Now

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 08:02:03 -0400

Collection/WorksOnViewNow

Film &Amp; Video

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 23 May 2013 07:58:04 -0400

Exhibitions/Film

The Film and Video program at the Whitney Museum began with the creation of the New American Filmmakers series in 1970. Developed in response to a new generation of filmmakers who were producing works outside the studio system, the series presented independent and experimental films that reflected many of the key issues of the day, from the Vietnam War, drugs, and the Black Panthers, to homosexuality and the women’s liberation movement. The series was launched with Skezag (1970) by Joel Freedman and Philip Messina, a searing documentary on Vietnam veterans and hard drugs. Several other key films premiered at the Whitney at that time, including Norman Mailer’s Maidstone (1971) and Steven Arnold’s Luminous Procuress (1972).

With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Film and Video Gallery on the Museum’s second floor was outfitted to be a flexible exhibition space for films, videos, and installations. The creation of a Film and Video Gallery within the larger galleries was—and remains—a unique innovation. Its flexible design allowed for installations of film and video as well as the screening of films in a theatrical setting. Additionally, unlike in other museums, the gallery has a fully equipped film booth, with Super-8, 16mm, 35mm film, and video projection.

Film and video were soon fully integrated into the Whitney’s exhibition program. Video first became part of the Whitney Biennial exhibition in 1975, followed by film in 1979. In the years since, film and video works on view have ranged from features and surveys of individual filmmakers to themed series to film and video installations and artists’ films. Several landmark large-scale film and video exhibitions have also been presented, including Video Art: Expanded Forms (1979), Nam June Paik (1982), and Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964–1977 (2001).

Another pillar of the Museum’s film and video program is The Andy Warhol Film Project. Initiated in 1984 as a collaboration between the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art and approved by Warhol himself, it remains the largest archival research project in the history of American avant-garde cinema.

A New Graphic Identityfor The Whitney

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 22 May 2013 21:47:06 -0400

As the Whitney approaches the opening of its new building in 2015, Museum staff are taking stock of all aspects of programming and operations. While much of this work is happening behind the scenes, one very visible aspect of this focus is the Whitney’s graphic identity. While the Museum has changed considerably in the thirteen years since it introduced the word mark designed by Abbott Miller of Pentagram, even more extensive institutional changes will come with the move downtown.

2012 Biennial

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:49:56 -0400

Exhibitions/2012Biennial

Sculpture, painting, installations, and photography—as well as dance, theater, music, and film—fill the galleries of the Whitney Museum of American Art in the latest edition of the Whitney Biennial. With a roster of artists at all points in their careers the Biennial provides a look at the current state of contemporary art in America. This is the seventy-sixth in the ongoing series of Biennials and Annuals presented by the Whitney since 1932, two years after the Museum was founded.

The 2012 Biennial takes over most of the Whitney from March 1 through May 27, with portions of the exhibition and some programs continuing through June 10. The 2012 Biennial is in constant flux, with artists, works, and experiences varying over the course of the exhibition.

The participating artists were selected by Elisabeth Sussman, Curator/Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney, and Jay Sanders, a freelance curator and writer who has spent the past ten years working both in the gallery world and on independent curatorial projects. Sussman and Sanders co-curated the Biennial’s film program with Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, the co-founders of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn

Whitney Press Office

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:07:28 -0400

Welcome to the Whitney’s online Press Office. Members of the media may view and download information for current and upcoming exhibitions and programs, access the press release archive, and download high-resolution images and video.

Merry Mee

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:49:54 -0400

ForKids/Kids/MerryMee

Douglas Davis

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 22 May 2013 13:45:12 -0400

Exhibitions/Artport/DouglasDavis

The World’s First Collaborative Sentence, created by Douglas Davis for a survey exhibition of his work in 1994 and donated to the Whitney in 1995, is a “classic” of Internet art. Allowing users to contribute to a never-ending sentence, it anticipated today’s blog environments and ongoing posts. In early 2012 the Whitney Museum undertook a preservation effort spearheaded by Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, Associate Director of Conservation and Research and Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media, in concert with Farris Wahbeh, Manager, Cataloguing and Documentation, and implemented by Ben Fino-Radin, digital conservator at Rhizome. The result of the initiative are the two versions of the Sentence accessible here.