NEW YORK, NY.- Demonstrating the dynamic and constantly evolving nature of the Museum’s collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art announced that the Museum acquired 417 works over the course of the past year.

In that period, and as a result of these acquisitions, sixty-two new artists and collectives have entered the collection for the first time. They include Derrick Adams, Yuji Agematsu, Harold Ancart, Sam Contis, Sari Dienes, Mary Beth Edelson, Ja'Tovia Gary, Gran Fury, Marcia Hafif, Harmony Hammond, Sky Hopinka, Adelita Husni-Bey, Sanya Kantarovsky, Marlon Mullen, Juan Antonio Olivares, Walter Price, Marlon Riggs, Suellen Rocca, Bunny Rogers, Ming Smith, Sable Elyse Smith, Kyle Thurman, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, among others. Many were featured in recent exhibitions, including An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940–2017, Bunny Rogers: Brig Und Ladder, Juan Antonio Olivares: Moléculas, and the 2017 Whitney Biennial.

In addition, the Whitney deepened its commitment to artists already represented in depth by adding works by Diane Arbus, Paul Chan, Robert Gober, Gordon Matta-Clark, Julie Mehretu, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Kara Walker, among others.

“The Whitney’s recent acquisitions—especially by those artists new to the collection—will allow future curators to present our current moment in all of its complexity, subtlety, and frequent beauty. We thank all of the patrons who have helped make these acquisitions possible and the artists for entrusting us with the future lives of their work,” noted David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Collection.

Nearly a dozen recent acquisitions will also be included in the forthcoming exhibition Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018, opening on September 28. Programmed establishes connections between works of art based on instructions, spanning over fifty years of conceptual, video, and computational art. The exhibition will include recently acquired works by Jim Campbell, Charles Csuri, Rafael Rozendaal, Joan Truckenbrod, and Siebren Versteeg. Programmed will also feature Lynn Hershman Leeson’s groundbreaking work Lorna (2004), also recently acquired by the Museum.

The Whitney’s collection includes nearly 25,000 works created by some 3,500 artists in the United States during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This focus on the contemporary, along with a deep respect for artists’ creative process and vision, has guided the Museum’s collecting ever since its founding in 1930. The collection begins with Ashcan School painting and follows the major movements of the twentieth century in America, with strengths in Modernism and Social Realism, Precisionism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Postminimalism, art centered on identity and politics that came to the fore in the 1980s and 1990s, and contemporary work.