Displaying items by tag: whitney biennial

It's official: the Whitney Biennial is now brought to you by Tiffany & Co.

With a $5 million gift, the high-end jeweler will be the lead sponsors for the next three editions of the contemporary art survey, through 2021. News of the sponsorship comes on the eve of the opening of the Whitney Museum of American Art's new Renzo Piano–designed building at the base of the High Line.

This past November, Francis Bacon’s triptych portrait Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) sold for $142.4 million at Christie’s, setting an artist’s record and becoming the most expensive work ever sold at auction. Less than a month later, the massive contemporary masterpiece turned up on loan, not at a modern-day art mecca like New York’s Museum of Modern Art (as Edvard Munch’s The Scream did), but on the opposite end of the US, at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. The painting, which remained on view there through early April, was loaned by its new owner Elaine Wynn, ex-wife of casino mogul and top collector Steve Wynn. Mrs. Wynn, a resident of Nevada, was reportedly entitled to save more than $10 million in taxes by first parking the painting at the Portland Art Museum before bringing it to her home state.

On March 7, the Whitney Museum of American Art launched its 77th Whitney Biennial -- a highly-anticipated survey of the latest developments in American art. This will be the last Biennial in the Whitney’s building on Madison Avenue before the museum moves downtown to its new Renzo Piano-designed building in the spring of 2015.

The 2014 Whitney Biennial was co-curated by Stuart Comer, the Chief Curator of Media and Performance at the Museum of Modern Art, Anthony Elms, an Associate Curator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art, and Michelle Grabner, an American artist and Professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The curators have selected 103 participants that together, offer a sweeping view of contemporary art in the United States. Two Whitney curators, Jay Sanders and Elisabeth Sussman, both of whom organized the renowned 2012 Biennial, oversaw the process. 

Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs, said, “The 2014 Biennial brings together the findings of three curators with very distinct points of view. There is little overlap in the artists they have selected and yet there is common ground. This can be seen in their choice of artists working in interdisciplinary ways, artists working collectively, and artists from a variety of generations. Together, the 103 participants offer one of the broadest and most diverse takes on art in the United States that the Whitney has offered in many years.”

The 2014 Whitney Biennial will take place through May 25, 2014.

The Whitney Biennial is one of the art world’s most anticipated events. Started as an annual exhibition of contemporary American art in 1932, the show became a biennale in 1973. Over the course of the past forty years, the Whitney Museum of American Art has not only had their own staff members curate the show, but the institution has invited outside curators, including Europeans, to organize the Biennial.

For the upcoming 2014 Biennial, museum staff members chose three non-Whitney curators to organize the show. Former art dealer and current Whitney curator, Jay Sanders, and Elisabeth Sussman, both of whom organized the renowned 2012 Biennial, will oversee the process. The three curators, Stuart Comer, film curator at London’s Tate Modern; Anthony Elms, an associate curator at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art; and Michelle Grabner, a professor and the chairwoman of the painting and drawing departing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, will each be given their own floor of the museum to create a compelling exhibition.

This will be the last Biennial to take place in the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer building as the museum will be moving to a new Renzo Piano-designed building in the meatpacking district in 2015.

The Whitney Museum of American Art announced yesterday that it had received a $1 million grant from the Keith Haring Foundation. The endowment is to go towards exhibitions in the Museum’s downtown Manhattan building, which will open in 2015. Designed by Renzo Piano, the building is currently under construction and will allow the Whitney to increase the size and range of its exhibitions, programs, and permanent works on view.

The Museum began working with Haring in 1983 when he was presented for the first time in a Whitney Biennial and in The Comic Art Show at the Museum’s downtown branch. Adam D. Weinberg, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney said, “Keith Haring was an extraordinary artist, exuberant, humane, passionate, and unflinching in his honesty. The Whitney has been a staunch supporter of Keith’s work for thirty years and this grant is a testament to our enduring relationship with Keith, his work, and his legacy.”

A year after his death, Haring went on to appear in the 1991 Whitney Biennial and in 1992 in an Independent Study Program exhibition, The Power of the City/The City of Power. The artist’s first full retrospective, Keith Haring, took place at the Whitney in 1997. He was also featured in American Century: Art and Culture 1950–2000 in 1999 and in 2010, the museum grew its Haring collection through a gift from longtime supporter of the Whitney, Emily Fisher Landau. The Whitney now counts four of his works in its permanent collection.