Whitney Museum

(Newser) - New York's Whitney Museum announced yesterday that its chairman, the cosmetics executive Leonard Lauder, would donate $131 million to boost the institution's endowment. The gift is a transformational sum for the museum, which is devoted to American modern art, and one of the largest donations ever made to a museum...

(Newser) - This weekend sees the opening in New York of the Whitney Biennial, the always controversial survey of contemporary American art. The theme this time around is lowered expectations, writes Holland Cutter for the New York Times, and the result is a modest, low-key, sparsely populated affair. "A biennial for...

(Newser) - Estée Lauder might be a massive, publicly owned company, but it’s also a family business, tightly controlled by the Lauder clan—until now. On Monday, it will welcome new president Fabrizio Freda, who will likely eventually replace CEO William Lauder—and become the first outsider to run the...

(Newser) - American artist Kara Walker stirs up “a toxic stew of race, sex, power and history” with her work—now enjoying a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York—exploding antebellum stereotypes about black bodies, Rosalind Cumming-Yeates writes in Ebony. The youngest artist ever to receive a Macarthur “...