"Untitled" (America) at the Whitney Museum of American Art

This collection-based presentation has been on view on the seventh floor of the Whitney since July 5, 2025, with no closing date set. It pairs well-known works from the museum's holdings with recent acquisitions to chart the main ideas and approaches in American art from 1900 to the early 1980s. The starting point is the Whitney's deep holdings in figurative and realist painting. From there the show moves through responses to place and memory in the American landscape, the growth of popular culture and consumerism, the allure and illusion of mass media, and the spatial and cultural dynamics of abstraction.

The title comes from Felix Gonzalez-Torres's "Untitled" (America) of 1994, a work made of strings of light bulbs. In the galleries it hangs at a window, lighting a passage between the museum and the world outside. Gonzalez-Torres described America as a place of light and opportunity but also of risk, justice and racism, hunger and excess, pleasure and growth. The exhibition takes that complexity as its premise and asks how artists in different decades took stock of their moment and imagined other possibilities.

The checklist is broad. Edward Hopper is represented by Early Sunday Morning (1930), Seven A.M. (1948) and Second Story Sunlight (1960). Georgia O'Keeffe's The White Calico Flower (1931), Jasper Johns's Three Flags (1958), Andy Warhol's Ethel Scull 36 Times (1963) and Green Coca-Cola Bottles (1962), and Jean-Michel Basquiat's Hollywood Africans (1983) all appear. A group of Jacob Lawrence paintings from 1946–47, Alma Thomas's Mars Dust (1972), and works by Betye Saar, Barkley L. Hendricks, Kay WalkingStick, Alice Neel, Aaron Douglas, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg and Jeff Koons round out a dense run of galleries.

Japanese readers will want to look for Yayoi Kusama and Isamu Noguchi. Kusama's Air Mail Stickers (1962) sits among Pop-era works about packaging, advertising and everyday objects. Noguchi has a room of sculptures, including Humpty Dumpty (1946), The Gunas (1946) and Integral (1959). Nam June Paik's Magnet TV (1965), shown near Rauschenberg's Satellite, adds a media-art note.

The show was organized by Kim Conaty, the Whitney's Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, with Curatorial Assistant Antonia Pocock, and is dedicated to the memory of Leonard A. Lauder. The museum was founded in 1930 by the sculptor and patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney as a platform for living American artists, and Robert Henri's 1916 portrait of her hangs in the exhibition.