New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Shinya Suzuki/Flickr. May 19, 2021 at 5:21pm
Employees at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York are petitioning to join the United Auto Workers union. Some 180 staff, including conservators, curators, educators, editors, porters, and visitor-services workers, on May 17 filed for representation by Local 2110 branch of UAW, which currently represents staff at the Museum of Modern Art, the New-York Historical Society, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, among other institutions. The news was originally reported in the
“Many of us are looking for more job security within our roles at the Whitney,” Karissa Francis, a visitor services assistant at the museum, said in a statement. Like institutions across the world, the Whitney was forced to lay off employees in the past year owing to the continuing Covid-19 crisis, with roughly 20 percent of workers there losing their jobs.
Employees at the Whitney Museum and the Hispanic Society Join the Growing Ranks of U.S. Culture Workers Seeking to Unionize
Staffers from both institutions are trying to join the United Auto Workers.
The Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo courtesy the museum.
The Hispanic Society petition was filed with the National Labor Relations Board on May 7, and the Whitney’s followed suit on May 17, reports the
Workers at both museums are looking to join the Technical, Office, and Professional Union, Local 2110, part of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union, which has represented staff at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the New-York Historical Society since the 1970s and the Bronx Museum of the Arts since 2005.
From David Hammons, a Tribute to Pier 52 and Lastingness
Their artistic paths crossed like ships in the night. But at long last, two New York legends meet in “Day’s End,” an immortalizing homage by Hammons to Gordon Matta-Clark and art history.
“Day’s End,” David Hammons’s site-specific sculpture in Hudson River Park, reimagines the vanished Pier 52 as an open-air pavilion.Credit.Simbarashe Cha for The New York Times
May 13, 2021, 1:39 p.m. ET
In 2014, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Adam D. Weinberg, invited the artist David Hammons to tour the museum’s still empty new building. Weinberg remembers them standing together at the panoramic fifth-floor window overlooking the Hudson and talking about the history of the waterfront facing the museum, about what was there and what was gone.
Sanford Biggers, Oracle (2020) at Rockefeller Center Photo: Daniel Greer. Courtesy of Art Production Fund
A monumental bronze sculpture by the Harlem-based artist Sanford Biggers was unveiled this morning at Rockefeller Center. The work
Oracle (2020) continues the artist’s recent
Chimera series of sculptures, which combine elements of African and ancient Greco-Roman sculpture to reference historical revisionism and the “white washing” of Classical sculptures that were once polychromatic, and the ways in which European nationalism influenced the aesthetic standard of the 20th century.
According to Biggers, the imposing 25 ft-tall sculpture fuses elements from various mythologies, including the ancient Temple of Zeus, the Luba sculpture tradition and elements of the Maasai religion. “The entire installation is based on mythology, narrative and mystery,” Biggers says. “Rockefeller Center itself, as an architectural entity, is very much steeped in