NEW YORK, NY.- Last night, before an audience of supporters at the Whitney Museum’s annual fall gala, Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown Director, announced that the Museum’s new home in the Meatpacking District, located at 99 Gansevoort Street between Washington and West Streets, will open to the public on Friday, May 1, 2015.

Designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Renzo Piano, the building affirms the Whitney’s role as the leading museum of modern and contemporary art of the United States. The new building will approximately double the Whitney’s exhibition space and provide extraordinary possibilities for artists, curators, and audiences.

For the first time, the Whitney will be able to present all of its exhibitions in the context of its unsurpassed collection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American art. The building includes an education center with dedicated space for state-of-the-art classrooms; a theater; a black box gallery for film, video, and performance; and a Works on Paper Study Center, Conservation Lab, and Library Reading Room. The classrooms, theater, and study center are all firsts for the Whitney.

“We are creating an environment in which visitors will be encouraged to connect deeply with art through an irreplaceable first-hand experience,” stated Mr. Weinberg. “This building will be a place of focused engagement, a site for discovery and risk-taking. Here the most important, challenging, and courageous artists of our time will have a constant presence. I am thrilled to announce that we are now so close to realizing this long-held dream for the Whitney.”

Ticketing information for the new building will be announced in the upcoming months.