The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as “the Whitney”, is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City. The Whitney’s permanent collection comprises more than 19,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, films, videos, and new media by more than 2,900 artists. The Whitney places a particular emphasis on exhibiting the work of living artists for its collection as well as maintaining an extensive permanent collection containing many 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 less well-known artists whose work is showcased by the museum.

JAY DEFEO: A RETROSPECTIVE

 

This retrospective is the definitive exhibition to date of the work of Jay DeFeo (1929–89). At the outset of her career in the 1950s, DeFeo was at the center of a vibrant community of Beat artists, poets, and musicians in San Francisco. Although she is best known for her monumental painting The Rose (1958–66, now in the Whitney’s collection), which she spent eight years making and which later languished hidden behind a wall for two decades, DeFeo created an astoundingly diverse range of works spanning four decades. Her unconventional approach to materials and intensive, physical process make DeFeo a unique figure in postwar American art who defies easy categorization. The full breadth of her work will be presented for the first time in this exhibition of more than 130 objects. This astonishing array of collages, drawings, paintings, photographs, small sculptures, and jewelry will illuminate DeFeo’s courageous experimentation and extraordinary vision.

BLUES FOR SMOKE

 

Blues for Smoke is an interdisciplinary exhibition that explores a wide range of contemporary art through the lens of the blues and blues aesthetics. Turning to the blues not simply as a musical category but as a field of artistic sensibilities and cultural idioms, the exhibition features works by over forty artists from the 1950s to the present, as well as materials culled from music and popular entertainment.

The exhibition’s title is drawn from a 1960 solo album by virtuoso jazz pianist Jaki Byard in which improvisation on blues form becomes a basis for avant-garde exploration. The title suggests that the expanded poetics of the blues is pervasive—but also diffuse and difficult to pin down. By presenting an uncommon heterogeneity of subject matter, art historical contexts, formal and conceptual inclinations, genres and disciplines, Blues for Smoke holds artists and art worlds together that are often kept apart, within and across lines of race, generation, and canon.

A series of performances, events, screenings, and readings will accompany the exhibition.

AMERICAN LEGENDS: FROM CALDER TO O’KEEFFE

 

American Legends: From Calder to O’Keeffe showcases the Whitney’s deep holdings of artwork from the first half of the twentieth century by the eighteen leading artists: Oscar Bluemner, Charles Burchfield, Paul Cadmus, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Ralston Crawford, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Gaston Lachaise, Jacob Lawrence, John Marin, Reginald Marsh, Elie Nadelman, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Joseph Stella. Organized as one- and two-artist presentations, this exhibition provides a survey of each artist’s work across a range of mediums.

DARK AND DEADPAN: POP IN TV AND THE MOVIES

 

From Andy Warhol’s commercial for Schrafft’s restaurants to Sherman Price’s film The Imp-Probable Mr. Weegee, starring Weegee as a crazy photographer, footage of the moon landing, and George Kuchar’s mock Hollywood melodrama HOLD ME WHILE I’MNAKED, this exhibition brings together rarely seen films, advertisements, and political campaign messages that reflect the extravagant yet deadpan excess of Pop. Together they reveal the central role played by television and cinema in articulating the excitement, anxiety, and desire underlying both Pop art and popular culture in the 1960s.

SINISTER POP

 

Sinister Pop presents an inventive take on the Museum’s rich and diverse holdings of Pop art from the movement’s inception in the early 1960s through its aftershocks a decade later. Although Pop art often calls to mind a celebration of postwar consumer culture, this exhibition focuses on Pop’s darker side, as it distorts and critiques the American dream. Themes of exaggerated consumption, film noir and the depiction of women in art, the dystopic American landscape, and the intersection of popular culture and politics, are explored through works by acknowledged masters such as Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol, as well as by many artists not traditionally associated with Pop whose art may be understood within its wider field of reference. These include William Eggleston, Peter Saul, Christina Ramberg, and Vija Celmins, among others.