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.
Queering the Collection
Talk by Patryk Tomaszewski
This session will explore some of the diverse ways in which gender, sexuality, and LGBTQ+ perspectives have shaped the landscape of American modern art, from Florine Stettheimer’s fabulous New York gay salons of the 1910s to Andy Warhol’s self-identity struggles in the 1960s to artists working today.
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.
Landscape, Architecture, and Environmentalism at the Whitney
Talk by Elizabeth Halide Akant
The idea of a painting as a window onto another world permeated the medium and landscape genre in the West for the following five centuries. Twentieth-century modernism disrupted this convention, and by the 1970s, artists began to conceive alternative renderings of the landscape through a range of large-scale, site-specific, and performative artworks, unable to fit into the architectural confines of museums. This talk explores how the Whitney’s architecture accommodates these ideals, looking at examples from our collection that break from both historical definitions of landscape and traditional approaches to museum display.
Reclaiming Narratives: Visual Biographies and the Black Experience
Talk by Jacqueline Cofield
Explore how societal dynamics are embedded into the depiction of individual lives portrayed in work from the Whitney’s collection by artists such as Henry Taylor, Dawoud Bey, Amy Sherald, Barkley L. Hendricks, and others. Gain a deeper understanding of the intricate threads that weave together biography and politics, empathy and social critique. Discover how artists infuse tenderness, care, and community into their work to amplify voices, reclaim stories, and weave a vibrant tapestry of human experiences.
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
Elizabeth Halide Akant is a PhD Candidate in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her research focuses on global modernist movements, nationalist art after empire, and the impact of social-political and artistic milieus on artworks. Her dissertation explores how folk art invocations in Turkish painting from the 1930s–50s mediated varying populist political movements. She has lectured at Brooklyn College since 2020 and previously served as an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Queens Museum.
Jacqueline M. Cofield is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Her primary research amplifies the voices of underrepresented individuals within art history to connect the spheres of culture, learning, and societal transformation. Cofield’s academic pursuits encompass diverse disciplines, including art history, Black studies, museum education, and curriculum design. She is also a documentary filmmaker, podcaster, educator, and curator. These varied roles underscore her dedication to nurturing global artistic dialogues and promoting cross-cultural understanding. Cofield additionally holds degrees from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, the University of Southern California, and the City College of New York, CUNY. She has curatorial and museum training from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem.
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.