would be able to enjoy and learn.”
DIA Director Salvador Salorts-Pons
says the museum chose Weinberg to lec-
ture because the Whitney is an impor-
tant piece of architecture designed by a
European — and it opened recently.
“It was built from scratch. It’s very
interactive and very interesting how all
the collection works with the architec-
ture and how the architecture works
with the actual neighborhood,” Salorts-
Pons says. “We’re very lucky to have the
director come to the DIA to explain the
new building.”
Weinberg, 61, is a Brandeis University
graduate who studied at SUNY Buffalo.
He grew up in Westchester, N.Y.
He became the Alice Pratt Brown
director of the Whitney in 2003, after
serving as director for the Addison
Gallery of American Art at Phillips
Academy and before that as senior
curator and curator of the Permanent
Collection at the Whitney. In the early
1980s, Weinberg served as director of
Education and assistant curator at the
Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
His lecture at the DIA will focus on
the museum as a living thing — and
how the new Whitney — which starts
at the High Line, a former elevated rail-
way that was transformed into a park
on Manhattan’s Lower West Side in one
of the city’s hippest neighborhoods —
expresses the museum’s mission and
aspirations.
“Buildings are not just buildings;
they mean things, they express things.
They encourage certain kinds of uses,”
Weinberg says. “They have histories.”
The 220,000-square-foot building,
which has been showered with acco-
lades, was designed with artists in mind,
Weinberg says, and reflects the soul of
American art. It faces both the open

“Buildings
are not just
buildings; they
mean things,
they express
things. They
encourage
certain kinds of
uses. They have
histories.”
— Adam
Weinberg

spaces of the west and the urban center,
it steps down onto the Highline, con-
necting it to the community and neigh-
borhood — all inspirations for American
artists.
Choosing an architect for the Whitney
wasn’t difficult. The board committee
considered American architects, teams
of architects that included Americans
and Europeans, and eventually selected
the Italian Piano, whose museum
portfolio includes the Modern Wing
of the Chicago Art Institute, the Broad
Contemporary Art Museum in Los
Angeles, the Centre Georges Pompidou
in Paris and the Menil Collection in
Houston, the latter two of which inter-
ested the selection team.
The Pompidou is a museum, but it’s
also a library and a community center,
a place that “organizes the energy” of
central Paris, Weinberg says. The Menil,
Piano’s first solo museum, is “very quiet,
self-effacing, modest and simple in its
design, which is about the contemplation
of art.
“We asked him for the best of both
institutions — a building connected to
the city with the energy of the city, and
at the same time provides for meditation
and contemplation of art,” he says. The
vision needed to conform to the needs of
the institution — and Piano’s does.
“It’s not simply just picking an archi-
tect who’s going to make you a beautiful
building,” Weinberg says.
His lecture will touch on the artist-
centric designs of the three previous
homes of the Whitney — on West
Eighth Street (now an art school), 54th
Street (the building is no more) and the
last one, the Marcel Breuer-designed
museum on 75th and Madison, which
belongs to the Metropolitan Museum.

*

In 1929, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney
offered an endowment plus 500 works
of art from her own collection to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. When
the offer was refused, she created her
own museum, which opened in 1931
on West Eighth Street. As the collection
grew, so did its need for larger homes.

March 31 • 2016

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