Virtual Tours and Talks for Groups
Collection-Themed Talks
Led by the Whitney’s Joan Tisch Teaching Fellows, these sessions highlight works in the Museum’s collection to illuminate critical topics in American art from 1900 to the present.
Art and Social Change
Whether representing our current reality or challenging dominant cultural narratives, art inspires emotional responses and critical conversations. Explore the roles art has played in twentieth-century United States history, from immigration to economics to the fight for gender and racial equality.
Abstract Art in America
Discover how artists throughout American history have used abstract languages to explore perception, emotion, physical experience, and more. Covering works by a range of artists, this session spans Cubism and the American Abstract Artists union in the 1930s to Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s and Minimalism in the 1970s.
Stories from the Collection
Art in the Whitney’s collection highlights social, political, and artistic developments in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. This exploration of the Museum’s collection and its development takes an expansive view of American art history and complicates the meaning of “American.”
Exhibition Talks
Led by the Whitney’s Joan Tisch Teaching Fellows, these sessions explore topics raised in the Museum’s current exhibitions.
Special Talks
Joan Tisch Teaching Fellows apply their scholarship to important issues engaged by artists in the Museum’s collection.
Material, Making, and Craft in Modern Art Practice
Talk by Angela Brown
Visual artists have long taken up the materials, methods, and strategies of craft to subvert prevalent standards of so-called “fine art,” often in direct response to the politics of their time. By embracing the decorative or creating functional items like bowls or blankets, they reclaim the artistic practices of Indigenous and colonized peoples and visual languages typically coded feminine, domestic, and vernacular. In highlighting marginalized modes of creative production, these artists challenge the power structures that determine artistic value.
Queering the Collection
Talk by Patryk Tomaszewski
From Florine Stettheimer’s fabulous New York gay salons of the 1910s to Andy Warhol’s self-identity struggles in the 1960s to twenty-first-century artists, this session will explore some of the diverse ways in which gender, sexuality, and LGBTQ+ perspectives have shaped the landscape of American modern art.
Realisms and Revolutions
Talk by Patryk Tomaszewski
Galvanized by emerging socialist ideas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European realist artists sought to challenge the idealized representations prevalent in Academic art by shifting their attention toward common or everyday activities. As the movement spread to the U.S., realism offered American artists a potent tool to address urgent social and political issues. Including works by Paul Cadmus, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Norman Lewis, Alice Neel, Faith Ringgold, and Henry Taylor, among others, this program will highlight selections from the Whitney’s collection to examine the diverse ways modern and contemporary American artists have utilized realistic vocabularies as a site for visual and political revolution.
Radical Enchantment: The Politics of Transcendental American Art
Talk by Jason Vartikar
From the early twentieth century to today, artists have used “enchantment”—forms that evoke magic, universalism, or spirit—to offer a transcendental response to societal and political challenges. The Chinese American artist Yun Gee, for example, painted his vibrant Street Scene in 1926, two years after the racist Asian Exclusion Act was passed. How might we see Gee’s painting as a response to this event? Elemental, bright blocks of color make a rainbow, perhaps suggesting what the artist would later describe as “something universal, which had meaning for every [hu]man regardless of race or station.” Biennial artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose text-based art evokes a cosmic form of speech, explores the transcendental as resistance to colonization and racialization, among other issues.
Asian American Perspectives
Talk by Xin Wang
This session will explore artworks by American artists of Asian descent, including Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Martin Wong, Ching Ho Cheng, and An-My Le, alongside works that engage with aspects of “Asian-ness” by artists from other backgrounds, such as Roy Lichtenstein and Ed Ruscha. Looking at these works together, consider what it means for ethnic and cultural identity to be the framework through which we experience and understand representation and artistic expression.
Art, Work, and Labor
Talk by Joseph Henry
Since industrialization, American artists have grappled with how to depict, honor, or critique the different ways we work, from the assembly line’s manual labor to the office’s administrative labor. This talk will explore how artists from the Whitney collection—including Thomas Hart Benton, Elizabeth Catlett, Robert Morris, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles—have engaged with the changing nature of work throughout the twentieth century. What lessons could these histories have for our current concerns with burnout and the so-called “Great Resignation”?
Teaching Fellow Bios
Angela H. Brown is a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art and Archeology at Princeton University. Her research interests include modern craft traditions, artisanal labor, and rural/campesino pedagogies in the Caribbean and Latin America. She has worked as a writer and editor for art galleries, magazines, and independent publishers, including Gagosian, ARTnews, and Badlands Unlimited.
Joseph Henry is a former Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney and a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center, where his research focuses on Expressionism and the relationship between art and labor. He has written on contemporary art, design, dance and performance, primitivism, and queer visual culture in exhibition catalogues and for publications such as Artforum, Frieze, and Art in America.
Patryk Tomaszewski is a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney and a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center, researching global twentieth-century realisms. His dissertation offers the first scholarly examination of exhibitions of Socialist Realist art in Stalinist Poland (1948–56). His writing has appeared in ARTMargins Online and MoMA’s post: Notes on Art in a Global Context, among other publications, and he is an adjunct lecturer at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.
Jason Vartikar is a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. He is writing a dissertation on melancholy in American art from 1915–45, focusing on the paintings of Charles Burchfield and Edward Hopper. Committed to curatorial practice informed by feminist, critical race, and decolonizing perspectives, Vartikar was founder/director of the New York City gallery Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden/Pocket Utopia (2011–15) and has developed exhibitions with contemporary artists Marie Watt (Seneca) and Rina Banerjee.
Xin Wang is a former Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney and a Ph.D. candidate in modern and contemporary art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She is the curator of numerous exhibitions in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, and her writing has appeared in Art in America, Art Agenda, and Wallpaper China. She is currently organizing an exhibition on Asian futurism for New York’s Museum of Chinese in America.