Whitney Museum Receives $1.5 Million From Henry Luce Foundation
Whitney Museum Receives $1.5 Million From Henry Luce Foundation
The New York City-based Whitney Museum of American Art has announced a $1.5 million grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to help support the installation of works from the museum's permanent collection in its new building.
Designed by architect Renzo Piano, the building, which is scheduled to open in 2015, is located at the southern end of the High Line, a 1.5-mile-long elevated railway that runs along the west side of Manhattan. When completed, the building will include three times more gallery space than the Whitney's current location on Madison Avenue, allowing the museum to better accommodate its permanent collection, which has grown to more than nineteen thousand works from two thousand in 1966.
A longtime supporter of the museum, the Luce Foundation awarded the grant to mark its seventy-fifth anniversary. In conjunction with the grant, the foundation's American art program committed seed funding for the Whitney's Collections Documentation Initiative, which aims to improve documentation of the museum's permanent collection in anticipation of exhibiting it in its new building.
"We are deeply grateful to the foundation, and in particular to its president Michael Gilligan and program director Ellen Holtzman, for recognizing the importance of our goal to exhibit more works from our collection," said Adam D. Weinberg, the Alice Pratt Brown director of the Whitney Museum. "The new building...will enable us to increase the size and scope of all our exhibitions and programming and in particular will fulfill our dream of showing a far more comprehensive view of the Whitney's unsurpassed collection of modern and contemporary American art. The foundation's support of this essential institutional effort is enormously encouraging."
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