Introduction to Where We Are

David Breslin: My name is David Breslin. I’m the DeMartini Family Curator and the director of the collection here at the Whitney Museum of American Art. I’m the curator of Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection 1900-1960. 

The exhibition looks at artworks in the Whitney's collection made between 1900 and 1960. The idea behind the exhibition was to really show themes or groups of works that American artists have traditionally, even habitually returned to. The idea was to look, during a particularly divisive current American history, at these groups of works to show how American artists have looked at these ideas in very different ways and to put forth the idea that we can have difference without division or divisiveness. 

The exhibition is broken into five groups or themes: Family and Community, the Home, Labor, the Nation, and the Spiritual. 

The title of the exhibition, Where We Are, comes from W.H. Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939. It’s a poem that Auden wrote shortly after he emigrated to the United States from the United Kingdom and September 1, 1939 is the day that Germany invades Poland, really setting in motion World War II. And in the poem, Auden begins to play out how the shadow of this global emergency will play itself out in every corner of everyday life, so the Family, the Home, the Nation—all the themes that this exhibition takes under consideration. The exhibition has been framed also with lines from the same poem, so in addition to Where We Are coming from the poem, each section or theme is also titled after a line from the poem.