Whitney Museum of American Art. Photograph by Ed Lederman

We have a thing for public spaces, especially when they combine with community activism. We try to get firsthand experience, and when we have learned enough about such places, we share what we can here. Ditto for museum exhibits, special library exhibitions, and unusual library thingys. It is not every day we get to announce the opening, or re-opening, of one of the greatest museums in the world, right in the midst of such a public space:

THE NEW WHITNEY OPENS MAY 1, 2015 BUY ADVANCE TICKETS NOW

The reviews convince us that this will be worth the visit, and this particular wording puts it in perspective:

The Whitney Museum of American Art, long the odd duck among the Big Four of Manhattan art museums—a cohort that includes the mighty Metropolitan, the starry Modern, and the raffish Guggenheim—takes wing on May 1st, when it reopens in a new, vastly expanded headquarters downtown. The fledging owes a lot to the Italian architect Renzo Piano’s ingenious building, on Gansevoort Street, which features six floors of shapely galleries, four open-air terraces, spaces for performance and screening, a library and reading rooms, a restaurant, a café, and an over-all feeling of seductive amenity—a bar on the piazza-like ground floor bodes to be one of the toniest trysting spots in town. It is likely to win far more fans than the Whitney’s old home, Marcel Breuer’s brutalist “inverted ziggurat,” which opened in 1966, on Madison Avenue, and which it vacated six months ago and leased to the Met. Piano’s museum stands at the southern end of the High Line and hard by the Hudson River, in what remains of the tatterdemalion meatpacking district. It looms like a mother ship for both gallery-jammed Chelsea, to the north, and the puttering West Village, to the south. It is instantly a landmark on the cultural and social maps of the city—and on its poetic map, as a site to germinate memories. Continue reading →