The Whitney Museum in New York houses one of the world's foremost collections of modern and contemporary American art.
This Friday, experience an immersive evening of live performance and culinary invention at SYNONYM FOR UNTITLED. Untitled chef Chris Bradley will prepare a tasting menu based on a grocery list created by artist Andrew Lampert, which makes associative pairings between artists in the Whitney’s collection and culinary ingredients. The evening will also feature contributions from poet Mónica de la Torre, cellist Okkyung Lee, and violinist C. Spencer Yeh. Visit whitney.org for more information.
Opening December 22, American Legends: From Calder to O’Keeffe will feature works by eighteen leading artists from the first half of the twentieth century. Individual galleries will be devoted to Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Jacob Lawrence, and others at the core of the Museum’s collection.
Joseph Stella (1877–1946), The Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme, 1939. Oil on canvas, 70 × 42 in. (177.8 × 106.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 42.15
One needs just a certain amount of trouble. Some people need more trouble to operate, and some people need less.
— Another great Robert Rauschenberg quote from an audio recording from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
“When you get to New York take your pictures under your arm and show them to anyone you think might be interested. … You will just have to find your way as best you can. It seems to me very odd that you are so ambitious to show your paintings here, but I wish the best for you.”
Georgia O’Keeffe in a letter to Yayoi Kusama, which is on view in our Kusama retrospective. Isn’t O’Keeffe’s handwriting beautiful?
As a young woman living in Japan, Kusama found O’Keeffe’s address in a Who’s Who reference book at the American Embassy in Tokyo. The two began a correspondence which turned into a friendship.
Can’t make it to see The Clock at Lincoln Center? Get your Christian Marclay fix with performance videos, graphic “scores,” and more from our summer 2010 exhibition Christian Marclay: Festival.
(Credit goes to © Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York and White Cube, London. Photo: Todd-White Photography. Christian Marclay; Detail of The Clock, 2010; Single-channel video with sound; 24 hours.)
Earlier today, we talked to people waiting in line (some for up to four hours!) for Christian Marclay’s spectacular 24-hour work of video art The Clock at Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium. You only have one more day to check it out as part of this year’s Lincoln Center Festival if you haven’t already!
Hey US Olympic Team—don’t forget to ice! We’re rooting for you back here in the States.
Visitor review of Signs & Symbols, which features postwar American abstraction from the Whitney’s collection.
the painting is Adolph Gottlieb’s Frozen Sounds, Number 1.
Yayoi Kusama in her New York studio in 1960.
Yayoi Kusama, a major retrospective of the Japanese artist’s work, will be on view at the Whitney July 12-September 30, 2012. Kusama’s “infinity mirror room” Fireflies on the Water is on view now in the Whitney’s lobby gallery.
Photograph via W Magazine, courtesy Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Victoria Miro Gallery, London/Gagosian Gallery, New York/Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc.
Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), Fireflies on the Water, 2002. © Yayoi Kusama. Photograph courtesy Robert Miller Gallery
This installation, one of Kusama’s “infinity mirror rooms,” was originally shown in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and is part of the Whitney’s collection. Fireflies goes on view June 13 in anticipation of a large Kusama retrospective, which opens July 12, 2012.
John C. Welchman, co-director of the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, gave a lovely presentation on Kelley’s work on May 20, 2012. One of Welchman’s slides, above, features photos of Kelley and his childhood home, which was the inspiration for his Mobile Homestead project.
The 2012 Biennial is dedicated to Mike Kelley.
“I’ve worked out a series of no’s. No to exquisite light, no to apparent compositions, no to the seduction of poses or narrative. And all these no’s force me to the “yes.” I have a white background. I have the person I’m interested in and the thing that happens between us.”
Richard Avedon, 1994. Avedon was born today in 1923.
May 11, 2012: In the stairwell, conservator Eleonora Nagy works on Charles Simonds’ Dwellings.
Photographs by Gretchen Scott
“For the Whitney Museum’s farewell show at its current building in 2014, it will mount a giant retrospective of Jeff Koons’s work.”
Learn about our new building.
(Source: The New York Times)
Keith Haring was born today in 1958. The Haring Foundation is posting scans from his journals to coincide with the current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.
NB-0
c.1971 (age 12)
“I’m not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it–drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea.”
—Willem de Kooning, born today in 1904
