Whitney announces opening date of its new home in Chelsea

Museum will launch "artist-centric" building next May

By Javier Pes. Web only

Published online: 20 November 2014

Whitney Museum of American Art, photograph by Timothy Schenck

The Whitney Museum of American Art announced today that it will open its new home in Chelsea on 1 May 2015. With double the exhibition space of its "old" Marcel Breuer-designed building, the museum will be able to show far more of its collection of Modern and contemporary American art in its Renzo Piano-designed new space in the Meatpacking District. In a statement, Adam Weinberg, the Whitney's director, called the two floors of collections galleries a "game-changer" for the museum. A year ago, he told us more about his hopes for the institution when it realises its long-held ambition to expand.

The Whitney had been wrestling for more than a decade with how to grow uptown, where real estate is super-prime and neighbours were lukewarm about having another museum behemoth on their doorstep. 

Weinberg, who has been donning a hard hat and conducting tours of the $422m building for more than a year, has been keen to make sure that many artists have been on site to inspect the 50,000 sq. ft of galleries, which include a cavernous column-free space measuring 18,000 sq. ft for temporary exhibitions. There will be space on the top floor for artists’ projects, and the outdoor spaces are generous. 

“The Whitney has always been artist-centric; how they take to the new building is critical,” Weinberg said. So what was the response from the likes of Frank Stella, Mark di Suvero, Christo, Barbara Kruger, Cory Archangel and George Condo? “Overwhelmingly positive,” he said. “They saw how flexible the spaces will be, and the variety: indoor and outdoor, smaller and larger spaces.” Although no one said so, “every artist is thinking about how their art will look in the space—which is good”. 

Weinberg told us that Piano saved the institution from making one decision that it would have lived to regret. “We wanted outdoor space facing the Hudson River, like the Tate [Modern, in London],” he said. But the Italian architect took Weinberg to the West Side Highway. “The views would be great but no one would spend any time there because of the noise of the traffic, and the ferocious wind off the river,” Weinberg said. “It sounds obvious, but it didn’t seem obvious. That’s why he’s an architect and I’m a director.” 

A site-specific work, the late Richard Artschwager's Six in Four, will have a special place in the new building. Its four lifts will feature six motifs that frequently appeared in the artist's work, including a door, mirror, rug and super-sized basket weave. Weinberg said he got the idea from a work included in the Whitney’s 1988 Artschwager retrospective: the piece looked like a lift and sounded like a lift, but visitors found that it didn’t take them up or down. “I thought it would be right to commission Richard to do the elevators [for the new building]; he loved the idea,” said Weinberg, who imagines families falling out over which lift to take. “I remember going to the Whitney as a youngster and seeing Calder’s Circus [1926-31] as the welcoming work,” he said. “It was delightful and accessible.” He hopes that Artschwager’s moving sculpture will set the tone for the new Whitney, just as Calder’s kinetic circus did in the Breuer building.

Last week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that its first exhibition in the Breuer building, which it is leasing from the Whitney, will feature unfinished art past and present. The inaugural show is due to open on 7 March 2016.

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Whitney-announces-opening-date-of-its-new-home-in-Chelsea/36300