Whitney Museum of American Art

Update: Logistics

For those of us taking the train, the South Orange N.J. transit train deports at 11:57. It will get us there by 12:40. Parking is free on Sundays. I am leaving from this station and will arrive there by 11:40. If you are leaving from this station, please let me know via text at (914) 343-9299. If you are leaving from a different train station or driving, please let me know via text when your train will arrive at N.Y. Penn or your eta (for drivers).

Meeting Spot for N.J. Transit:

We can meet at N.Y. Penn by Dunkin on the side of th station that's blue. Once everyone is together, we can walk to the Whitney together along the Highline. It's about a 30 minute minute walk, but we can enjoy the Highline sights along the way and/or stop for a quick drink and/or snack. Please call or text me when you get to Penn Station if you are taking a different train and need help locating the group.

Drivers or NYC Subway Riders:

Those of us walking from N.Y. Penn will arrive at the Whitney no later than 1:50. We can call meet at the front of the museum and head in together. If your ticket is for an earlier time, dont worry about it bc I reserved extra 2:00 pm tickets under my name. If you are taking the subway and would like to join the N.J. transit riders for the walk, please follow the directions above (Penn Station meeting spot at 12:40).

If I think of anything else, I will message again in the morning. If you have any questions, please text or call at the number mentioned above.

See you soon,

Amelia

The Whitney Museum has some amazing exhibits, especially the Amy Sherald's exhibit (more info below). After visiting the museum, we'll have dinner at nearby restaurant (TBD).

Please let me know if you are available to dinner once you rsvp so that I have an accurate headcount for dinner reservations.

Thank you,

Amelia

Current Main Exhibit:

Amy Sherald is a storyteller. She creates precisely crafted narratives of American life, selecting, styling, and photographing her sitters as the foundation for her nuanced paintings. Thus, while Sherald (b. 1973; Columbus, Georgia) bases her works on specific people, they are more than traditional portraits. They center everyday Black Americans, compelling in their individuality and extraordinary in their ordinariness, inviting viewers to step into Sherald’s imagined worlds. In this exhibition, paintings of such ordinary Americans join her iconic portraits of First Lady Michelle Obama and, heartbreakingly, Breonna Taylor, to produce a resonant ode to the multiplicity and complexity of American identity.

Sherald also makes the images she wants to see in the world. Although she considers herself an inheritor of the American Realist tradition of artists such as Edward Hopper—a genre that was central to the Whitney’s origins nearly a century ago—those artists focused on the lives of everyday white Americans. Instead, Sherald privileges a population that has historically been omitted from art history and wider visual representation. By doing so, she challenges us to think more broadly about American Realism, suggesting an additional lineage for it: one born from the art departments and galleries of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), where she first trained as an artist, and one that includes such underrecognized figures as William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, and Laura Wheeler Waring, among others.
Across Amy Sherald: American Sublime, Sherald’s contemplative subjects appear most concerned with their own interiority, prioritizing their own peace and self-realization over how others might perceive them and the shackles of history, though they are inevitably impacted by both. Her audacious project highlights what she has called the “wonder of what it is to be a Black American,” rendering a rich and unconstrained Black world in vibrant Technicolor.