My spouse and I visited the Whitney Museum of Art on a
Saturday afternoon in mid-July 2016. Since May 2015, the Whitney Museum has
been located on Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District/Chelsea
neighborhood of the city. Prior to that time, for almost 50 years, the Whitney
was located on Madison Avenue at 75th Street, the current home of
the Met Breuer museum. The Whitney Museum is open Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday,
and Monday from 10:30 am to 6:00 pm (closed Tuesdays except during July and
August), and Fridays and Saturdays from 10:30 am to 10:00 pm. Admission costs
$25 per adult at the door, or you can save a few dollars by booking your
admission online ($22 per adult). You can also pay-what-you-wish on Friday
evenings from 7:00 pm to closing. You can add an audio guide for an additional
$6. Docents offer guided tours periodically throughout the day, and the museum hosts
children’s activities and workshops on certain weekends.
The
new building designed by Renzo Piano contains 220,000 square feet spread over
nine floors. (Piano also designed the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the
Morgan Library addition and the New York Times building in NYC, the Art
Institute of Chicago expansion, and the California Academy of Sciences in San
Francisco.) Unlike the rooms at the old museum, the new galleries are flooded
with natural light and feature light-colored pine-plank hardwood floors.
Outdoor spaces, including various decks and a public plaza, offer panoramic
views of the Hudson River and Lower Manhattan.
Four elevators provide access to the various floors, with
two of those elevators also granting access to the lower levels. Three
different staircases grant entry to specific levels of the building (one staircase
links the third through eighth floors, one links the basement to the fifth
floor, and an exterior staircase links the sixth through eighth floors). Almost
every floor contains restrooms, and the basement has a coat check. The museum
offers two dining options: on the eighth (top) floor, the Studio Café offers
light refreshments during opening hours, with table service at both indoor and
outdoor tables as well as an indoor bar. The museum’s fine dining restaurant
called Untitled is located on the street level and is open both during and
after museum hours. Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group operates both
restaurants. A bookstore/museum shop is located on the street level, and you
can access the shop (as well as Untitled) without purchasing museum admission.
The Whitney’s permanent collection of 20th-century American
art consists of major works by Edward Hopper, George Bellows, Georgia O'Keeffe,
Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns. A second-floor space features rotating works
from the Whitney’s permanent collection from 1900 to 1950. Because only a
select portion of the museum’s permanent collection is on display at any one
time, guests can re-visit the museum without seeing the same items twice.
Although contemporary art is not our preferred genre (we are
partial to Impressionists), we enjoyed seeing the new Whitney space,
particularly the excellent views from the various outside terraces.
No comments:
Post a Comment