NEW YORK, NY.- The Whitney Museum of American Art opened two focused gallery presentations, Collection View: Louise Nevelson and Mary Heilmann: Long Line. These exhibitions feature renowned holdings from the Whitney’s collection and a new site-specific installation inspired by the architecture of the Museum and New York City.

Collection View: Louise Nevelson highlights select works spanning four decades by one of the most celebrated American sculptors of the twentieth century. Louise Nevelson had a long and deep relationship with the Whitney, which organized her first retrospective in 1967 and today is one of the largest repositories of her work. This focused exhibition offers an opportunity for visitors to view a selection of Nevelson’s bold monochrome assemblages juxtaposed against the skyline of lower Manhattan. Mary Heilmann: Long Line marks the 10th anniversary of the Whitney Museum opening downtown at 99 Gansevoort Street. This reexamination of Mary Heilmann’s beloved terrace installation Sunset (2015) features a hand-painted mural and the artist’s signature Monochrome Chairs, along with new April Chairs, overlooking the Hudson River. Visitors can connect with others and the city in this immersive environment and unique space. Both presentations are displayed in light-filled galleries with sweeping city views and are part of a suite of exhibitions on the Museum’s fifth floor that highlight the work of four prominent women, including Amy Sherald: American Sublime, Hyundai Terrace Commission: Marina Zurkow, and Marina Zurkow: Parting Worlds.

“This spring, we’re thrilled to open up our fifth floor galleries with new presentations of works by Louise Nevelson and Mary Heilmann sited in relation to our downtown landscape,” said Kim Conaty, the Whitney’s Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator. “These installations, bookending our exhibitions featuring Amy Sherald and Marina Zurkow, offer fresh encounters with a dynamic range of artworks from the 1940s through today, all set within the Whitney’s unique spaces.”

“Mary Heilmann: Long Line creates space for connection, an important aspect of not only the Whitney’s ethos but also of the way that Heilmann thinks about and makes art,” said Laura Phipps, Associate Curator at the Whitney. “Bringing together these different aspects of Heilmann’s art—ten years after her incredible terrace installation—feels like an exciting way to reflect on our time in this building and neighborhood.”

Collection View: Louise Nevelson
April 9–August 10, 2025

This presentation brings together over fifteen sculptures by Louise Nevelson drawn from the Whitney’s collection and sets them against the backdrop of New York City, a place that long inspired Nevelson in her sculptural assemblages. Born in Pereiaslav, Ukraine, Nevelson (1899–1988) lived and worked in Manhattan from the 1920s through the 1980s. Known for her bold monochrome assemblages of stacked and composed found objects, Nevelson was captivated by the city's ever-changing skyline and saw creative potential in discarded materials that she scavenged throughout its streets at night. “I see New York City as a great big sculpture,” she once remarked. By painting these sculptures black, she cloaked the specific, identifying details of disparate objects such as duck decoys, lettuce crates, and pieces of rebar, transforming them into abstract shapes. Collection View: Louise Nevelson reimagines the relationship between Nevelson’s work and New York, highlighting the dynamic interplay she sought to suggest in her work between motion and stillness, light and shadow, dawn and dusk.

Collection View: Louise Nevelson is organized by Kim Conaty, Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, with Roxanne Smith, Senior Curatorial Assistant, and Antonia Pocock, Curatorial Assistant.

Mary Heilmann: Long Line
April 9, 2025–January 19, 2026

Inspired by Mary Heilmann’s expansive practice and ethos of social connection, this new site-specific project celebrates the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Whitney Museum’s downtown building, for which Heilmann (b.1940, San Francisco, CA) created Sunset (2015) on the fifth-floor terrace. That project, which included a large-scale reproduction of a vibrant painting, a film, and Heilmann’s signature Monochrome Chairs, inaugurated the Museum’s largest outdoor gallery and transformed it into a site of reverie, memory, and leisure.

Mary Heilmann: Long Line further considers the relationship between the Museum's architecture and the city. Heilmann's immersive environment includes a hand-painted enlargement of her 2020 painting Long Line, as well as a variety of chairs related to furniture she has displayed in homes and exhibitions. Serving as elements in her larger composition, this furniture also encourages visitors to recharge and interact with one another and the environment outside the Museum.

Mary Heilmann: Long Line is organized by Laura Phipps, Associate Curator.