It would be much easier to present the history of art as a simplistic line—but that’s not the Whitney.
— Donna De Salvo, Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs
Work is in progress at the Museum! More soon.
-
-
A museum should never be finished, but boundless and ever in motion.
— Goethe
Some big changes are afoot at the Whitney. Stay tuned! -
Art … should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination, and encourages people to go further.
—Keith Haring, born today in 1958. Haring’s Altar Piece (1990) is on view now in I, YOU, WE.
-
“Happiness seems to me a retrospective pleasure.”
David Hockney answers Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire in the May issue. His first video installation, The Jugglers, June 24th 2012, will premiere at the Whitney on May 23.
-
It took my breath away.
— The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl on Jay Defeo: A Retrospective
-
I always take something out of my pictures. I strip the design to the essentials.
— American painter Milton Avery, who was born today in 1885.
-
Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective—”which is as tenderly shaped and as visually stirring as a career survey could possibly be” (The New York Times)—opens today.
Jay DeFeo (1929–1989), The Rose, 1958–66. Oil with wood and mica on canvas, 128 7/8 × 92 1/4 × 11 in. (327.3 × 234.3 × 27.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the Estate of Jay DeFeo and purchase with funds from the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee and the Judith Rothschild Foundation 95.170. © 2013 The Jay DeFeo Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Ben Blackwell
-
Only by chancing the ridiculous can I hope for the sublime.
— Jay DeFeo. Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective opens tomorrow.
-
The blues is heartbeat music, it is human music.
— Henry Rollins discusses the blues on the occasion of Blues for Smoke, on view at the Whitney through April 28.
-
I wouldn’t say blues is about triumph—blues is about resistance.
— Dr. Cornel West discusses the blues. Blues for Smoke is on view at the Whitney through April 28.
-
With art, there’s freedom.
— Richard Artschwager via New York Magazine.
-
As a musical category blues is hard to pin down, and this show makes the job harder, which seems to be its point. It’s saying: Blues isn’t a thing; it’s a set of feelings, a state of mind, maybe a state of grace.
— Holland Cotter of The New York Times on Blues for Smoke, on view through April 28.
-
Art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom.
— Alice Neel, born today in 1900.
-
“Images of heaving ocean swells shot from a swimmer’s point of view, and of a man with a metal detector searching for treasure on a beach, suggest a kind of quest, a search for a Holy Grail … It is a pathetic Grail, this sad rock, which makes it all the more poignant to contemplate. It is, perhaps, a metaphor for our beleaguered spiritual condition.”
—The New York Times on Trisha Baga: Plymouth Rock 2, on view through Sunday.
-
My interest in printmaking is that prints mimic what we are as humans: we are all the same and yet everyone is different.
— Kiki Smith (and birthday gal today). Explore a variety of Smith’s work on whitney.org.
