The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a modern and contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. The institution was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), a prominent American socialite, sculptor, and art patron after whom it is named.
The Whitney focuses on collecting and preserving 20th- and 21st-century American art. Its permanent collection, spanning the late-19th century to the present, comprises more than 25,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, films, videos, and artifacts of new media by more than 3,500 artists. It places particular emphasis on exhibiting the work of living artists as well as maintaining institutional archives of historical documents pertaining to modern and contemporary American art, including the Edward and Josephine Hopper Research Collection (the museum is the largest repository of Edward Hopper's artwork and archival materials in the world), the Sanborn Hopper Archive, and the Arshile Gorky Research Collection, among others.
