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The Whitney Museum of American Art easily stands apart from its New York contemporaries due to its singular mission of acquiring and celebrating the works of great American artists, regardless of style. Through its annual and biennial exhibitions, the Whitney has continually maintained its reputation as a high-profile venue for relatively unknown artists to show their work alongside the works of established artists like Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky and Alexander Calder.

• The Whitney Museum was founded in order to collect, preserve, interpret and exhibit progressive American art, and support new artists and emerging art forms
• The Whitney provides a safe haven for young and emerging artists, art students, and theorists to study and develop their crafts

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was a prominent art collector, patron and sculptor. Born in 1875 to the Vanderbilt family, whose vast fortune in the shipping and railroad industries was built in the 1800s, Whitney received much of her education from the Brearley School in New York City.

At the age of 21, Gertrude married the businessman and thoroughbred horse breeder Harry Payne Whitney, whose own family had amassed great wealth throughout the 19th century, beginning with Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in 1839. Not long after marrying, Gertrude began studying the craft of sculpture at the Art Students League of New York, and in Paris with the eminent Auguste Rodin. Her love of the arts, along with her vast wealth and resources, allowed Gertude to become a major patron and collector, focusing much of her efforts in the downtown Greenwich Village scene of the early 1900s, where a new bohemia was emerging.