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