Whitney Museum. The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as the Whitney, is an art museum in Manhattan. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, a wealthy and prominent American socialite and art patron after whom it is named. The Whitney focuses on 20th-and 21st-century American art. Its permanent collection comprises more than 23,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, films, videos, and artifacts of new media by more than 3,400 artists. It places particular emphasis on exhibiting the work of living artists as well as maintaining an extensive permanent collection of important pieces from the first half of the last century. The museum's Annual and Biennial exhibitions have long been a venue for younger and lesser-known artists whose work is showcased there. From 1966 to 2014, the Whitney was at 945 Madison Avenue on Manhattan's Upper East Side in a building designed by Marcel Breuer and Hamilton P. Smith. The museum closed in October 2014 to relocate to a new building designed by Renzo Piano at 99 Gansevoort Street in the West Village / Meatpacking District neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan; it reopened at the new location on May 1, 2015. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the museum's namesake and founder, was a well-regarded sculptor as well as a serious art collector. As a patron of the arts, she had already achieved some success with the Whitney Studio Club, a New York-based exhibition space she created in 1918 to promote the works of avant-garde and unrecognized American artists. Whitney favored the radical art of the American artists of the Ashcan School such as John French Sloan, George Luks and Everett Shinn, as well as others such as Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, and Max Weber. With the aid of her assistant, Juliana R. Force, Whitney collected nearly 700 works of American art. In 1929, she offered to donate over 500 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but the museum declined the gift. This, along with the apparent preference for European modernism at the recently opened Museum of Modern Art, led Whitney to start her own museum, exclusively for American art, in 1929. Whitney Library archives from 1928 reveal that during this time the Studio Club used the gallery space of Wilhelmina Weber Furlong of the Art Students League to exhibit traveling shows featuring modernist work. In 1931, architect Noel L. Miller converted three row houses on West 8th Street in Greenwich Village, one of which, 8 West 8th Street had been the location of the Studio Club, to be the museum's home as well as a residence for Whitney. Force became the museum's first director, and under her guidance it concentrated on displaying the works of new and contemporary American artists. In 1954, the museum left its original location and moved to a small structure on 54th Street connected to and behind the Museum of Modern Art on 53rd Street. On April 15, 1958, a fire on MOMA's second floor that killed one person forced the evacuation of paintings and staff on MOMA's upper floors to the Whitney. Among the paintings evacuated was A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which was on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1961, the Whitney began seeking a site for a larger building. In 1966 it settled at the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and 75th Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The building, planned and built 1963-1966 by Marcel Breuer and Hamilton P. Smith in a distinctively modern style, is easily distinguished from the neighboring townhouses by its staircase facade made of granite stones and its external upside-down windows. In 1967, Mauricio Lasansky showed The Nazi Drawings. The exhibition traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where it appeared with shows by Louise Nevelson and Andrew Wyeth as the first exhibits in the new museum. The institution grappled with space problems for decades. From 1973 to 1983 the Whitney operated its first branch at 55 Water Street, a building owned by Harold Uris, who gave the museum a lease for $1 a year. In 1983 Philip Morris International installed a Whitney branch in the lobby of its Park Avenue headquarters. In 1981 the museum opened an exhibition space in Stamford, Connecticut, housed at Champion International. In the late 1980s, the Whitney entered into arrangements with Park Tower Realty, I.B.M. and The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, setting up satellite museums with rotating exhibitions in their buildings' lobbies. Each museum had its own director, with all plans approved by a Whitney committee.