The new home of the Whitney Museum of American Art, in all its 28,000 tons of glory (as architect Renzo Piano pointed out during the preview Thursday), opens to the public May 1 in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District (see Does the New Whitney Museum Herald a Golden Age for New York Institutions?).
artnet News joined the preview, along with hundreds of other members of the press. Our hot take? The new Whitney is a great success, with spacious, welcoming galleries and a lively opening show that packs in plenty of work without seeming crowded. Visitors had the opportunity to peek into the theater, classroom spaces, and a conservation lab that now measures 3,000 square feet, as opposed to about 400 square feet at the museum’s former Brutalist digs in the Breuer Building, according to Whitney Museum conservator Matthew Skopek, who giddily chatted with this reporter near works by Robert Gober and Mark Rothko on display there.