The Whitney Museum’s Move Downtown

By Bridget Moriarity

This May, Sotheby’s New York hosts its Contemporary Evening and Day sales, during which several works by the likes of Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and Glenn Ligon will be auctioned to benefit the Whitney Museum of American Art’s relocation to New York’s Meatpacking District in 2015.

The featured artists, who personally donated the pieces, have strong ties to the institution – Johns and Kelly, for instance, both appeared for the first time at the museum in the Whitney Biennial, Kelly in 1957 and Johns in 1959, while Ligon was the focus of a major retrospective in 2011. The sale includes works by other notable figures, such as Tauba Auerbach, who was spotlighted in the 2010 Biennial and was commissioned to create a project on the construction site of the new building; Alex Katz, who made his Whitney debut in 1960; and Mark Bradford, the subject of a 2007 show and recipient of the Museum’s Bucksbaum Award in 2006.
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Bridget Moriarity is based in New York. She writes on art and culture.