The institution was originally founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), a prominent American socialite, sculptor, and art patron after whom it is named.

Its permanent collection, spanning the late-19th century to the present, comprises more than 25,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, films, videos, and artifacts of new media by more than 3,500 artists.

[2][3] From 1966 to 2014, the Whitney was located at 945 Madison Avenue on Manhattan's Upper East Side in a building designed by Marcel Breuer and Hamilton P. Smith.

[4] The museum organizes the Whitney Biennial, a bi-annual exhibition showcasing the work of emerging American artists, considered the longest-running and most important survey of contemporary art in the United States.

[13][14] Whitney Library archives from 1928 reveal that during this time, the Studio Club used the gallery space of Wilhelmina Weber Furlong of the Art Students League to exhibit traveling shows featuring modernist work.

Among the paintings evacuated was A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which was on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago.

[21] The building, planned and built 1963–1966 by Marcel Breuer and Hamilton P. Smith in a distinctively modern style, is easily distinguished from the neighboring townhouses by its staircase façade made of granite stones and its trapezoidal windows.

[23] From 1973 to 1983, the Whitney operated a branch at 55 Water Street, a building owned by Harold Uris, who gave the museum a lease for $1 a year.

[24] In the late 1980s, the Whitney entered into arrangements with Park Tower Realty, IBM, and the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, setting up satellite museums with rotating exhibitions in their buildings' lobbies.

[30] The Whitney developed a new main building, designed by Renzo Piano, in the West Village and Meatpacking District in lower Manhattan.

The new museum, at the intersection of Gansevoort and Washington Streets, was built on a previously city-owned site and marks the southern entrance to the High Line park.

[32] The new structure spans 200,000 square feet (19,000 m2) and eight stories that include the city's largest column-free art gallery spaces, an education center, theater, a conservation laboratory, and a library and reading rooms.

[36] As one New York Times review described the building: The Whitney ... has a series of events spaces at its margins: a flexible auditorium and four large terraces, three of which are linked by an outdoor staircase.

After art they can retire to the eighth-floor cafe, the terraces or the lines of comfy leather couches facing glass walls overlooking the Hudson and Greenwich Village at either end of the fifth floor.

[39] The Board of Trustees has come under criticism since November 2018 by groups including Decolonize This Place, the Chinatown Art Brigade, and W.A.G.E., for vice chair Warren Kanders' ownership of the company Safariland, which manufactured tear gas used against the late-2018 migrant caravans;[40] 120 scholars and critics published an open letter to the Whitney Museum asking for the removal of Kanders from the museum board; additional signatories after the letter's initial posting included almost 50 artists who have been selected for the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

[42] On July 17, 2019, calls for Kanders's resignation were renewed following Artforum's publication of an essay, "The Tear Gas Biennial", by Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett.

[43] On July 19, four artists (Korakrit Arunanondchai, Meriem Bennani, Nicole Eisenman, and Nicholas Galanin) published a letter, also in Artforum, asking their work to be withdrawn from the exhibition.

A day later, a second wave of artists (Eddie Arroyo, Christine Sun Kim, Agustina Woodgate, and Forensic Architecture) also withdrew.

[46] Kanders cited no wish to play a role in the museum's demise and urged fellow trustees to step up and assume leadership of the Whitney.

[48] Artists represented include Josef Albers, Joe Andoe, Edmund Archer, Donald Baechler, Thomas Hart Benton, Lucile Blanch, Jonathan Borofsky, Louise Bourgeois, Frank Bowling, Sonia Gordon Brown, Charles Burchfield, Alexander Calder, Suzanne Caporael, Norman Carton, Carolina Caycedo, Ching Ho Cheng, Talia Chetrit, Ann Craven, Anna Craycroft, Dan Christensen, Greg Colson, Susan Crocker, Ronald Davis, Stuart Davis, Mira Dancy, Lindsey Decker, Martha Diamond, Richard Diebenkorn, Daniella Dooling, Arthur Dove, Loretta Dunkelman, William Eggleston, Helen Frankenthaler, Georgia O'Keeffe, Arshile Gorky, Keith Haring, Grace Hartigan, Marsden Hartley, Robert Henri, Carmen Herrera, Eva Hesse, Hans Hofmann, Edward Hopper, Richard Hunt, Jasper Johns, Corita Kent, Franz Kline, Terence Koh, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Ronnie Landfield, Roy Lichtenstein, John Marin, Knox Martin, John McCracken, John McLaughlin, Robert Motherwell, Bruce Nauman, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Paul Pfeiffer, Jackson Pollock, Larry Poons, Maurice Prendergast, Kenneth Price, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray, Mark Rothko, Morgan Russell, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Cindy Sherman, John Sloan, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, and hundreds of others.

[53] The Whitney ISP has helped start the careers of artists, critics, and curators including Jenny Holzer, Andrea Fraser, Julian Schnabel, Kathryn Bigelow, Roberta Smith, and Félix González-Torres, as well as many other well-known cultural producers.

[2] Former directors include Adam D. Weinberg (2003–2023), Maxwell L. Anderson (1998–2003), David A. Ross (1991–1997), Thomas Armstrong III (1974–1990), and Juliana Force (1931–1948).

[60] In 1961, the need for outside support finally forced the board to add outside trustees, including bankers Roy Neuberger and Arthur Altschul.