This exhibition features renowned works from the Whitney’s collection alongside recent acquisitions, highlighting key ideas and approaches in American art from 1900 through the early 1980s. Beginning with the Whitney’s robust holdings in figurative and realist traditions, the presentation considers how artists have responded to place and memory in the American landscape, popular culture and the rise of consumerism, the seductions and illusions of mass media, and the spatial and cultural dynamics of abstraction.
In 1930 sculptor and philanthropist Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney founded the Whitney Museum of American Art as a means of supporting living artists and creating a platform for contemporary American art. Her vision has inspired the Museum’s collecting practice for nearly a century, even as the very idea of “America” has continued to evolve. “ Untitled” (America) pays homage to artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres , whose work of the same title illuminates a window in the exhibition, creating a passage between the Museum and the world beyond. Writing about this work, Gonzalez-Torres reflected: “America has always been an unattainable dream, a place to dream about. . . . The America that I now know is still a place of light, a place of opportunities, of risks, of justice, of racism, of injustice, of hunger and excess, of pleasure and growth. Democracy is a constant job, a collective dedication.” In that spirit, this presentation invites viewers to explore the distinct visions of “America” put forth by artists as they took stock of the pressing ideas of their time and imagined new possibilities.
Whitney Museum of American Art