Art world cognoscenti turned out in droves for The Whitney Museum of American Art’s first birthday party celebrating the one-year anniversary of the museum’s move downtown to the Meatpacking District.
There was a lot to raise a glass to: in the inaugural year, the Whitney has presented a slew of top exhibitions, among them America is Hard to See, the retrospective of Archibald Motley and Frank Stella, Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner, Laura Poitras: Astro Noise, and Open Plan, which featured work by Andrea Fraser, Lucy Dodd, Michael Heizer, Cecil Taylor, and Steve McQueen.
The Studio Party took place on the main floor of the Museum and was chaired by Man Repeller’s Leandra Medine, Ivy Getty, and Crystal Mose and was presented by Louis Vuitton.The event honored Robert J. Hurst, current chair of the executive committee of the Whitney’s Board of Trustees, who led the Board during the construction of the Museum’s new building as the chair of the capital campaign.
In the crowd were: Nina Chanel Abney, Sahm Adrangi, Tom Anderman, Stefan Bondell, Dylan Brant, Nathaniel Brown, Daisy Burnham, Liz Craft, Laura de Gunzburg, Tina Roth Eisenberg, Micaela Erlanger, Eva Fehren, Rhys Gaetano, Carlos Garciavelez, Rochelle Goldberg, Alexander Hankin, Sarah Hoover, Flora Irving, Elizabeth Jaeger, Colby Jordan, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Charlotte Kidd, Philae Knight, Molly Krause, Kate Krone, Lydia Kutko, Bernard Lagrange, Phyllis Lally and Leonard Seevers, Maggie Lee, Elliott Levenglick, Rachel Libeskind, Marjorie Mayrock, Win McCarthy, Patrick McGregor, Tracie Morris, My Barbarian, Mallory Neidich, Sophie Oakley, Andrew Oshrin and Michelle Smith, Zach Overton, Jessie Randall, Olga Rei and Valentine Uhovski, Jake B. Roberts, Maggy Frances Schultz, Sarah Stein-Sapir, Lucy Schwartz, Peter and Monica Tessler, Ben Watts, Emily Weiss and Lucrezia Buccellati Wildenstein.
While there was plenty of art to ogle, there was also cool new furniture from Roche Bobois to try out in two lounge spaces and temporary tattoos to sample, designed by artists Nina Chanel Abney, Mathew Cerletty and Jamian Juliano-Villani, whose work was in the recent Flatlands exhibition, and Liz Craft, Elizabeth Jaeger and Maggie Lee, whose pieces are included in the Whitney’s current Mirror Cells exhibition. DJ sets were provided by Zen Freeman and Chelsea Leyland.
