The Whitney Museum in New York said in a statement Wednesday that Adam Weinberg, who has been the director for 20 years, will be leaving his job. In the press release, Weinberg said that he would leave the museum when his contract ended on October 31. Scott Rothkopf, who is currently the senior deputy director and chief curator, will take over for Weinberg. Weinberg will take over as director emeritus of the Whitney. The museum's announcement didn't say what he was going to do next. He has worked at the Whitney since 1989, when he was hired as the director of a branch of the museum in the Equitable Center, a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper. He has mostly stayed with the museum, only briefly leaving to be the director of the American Center in Paris and the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. Weinberg was in charge when the Whitney moved from its longtime home on Madison Avenue, which was designed by Marcel Breuer, to its current home in the Meatpacking District in 2015. The museum's new building, which reportedly cost $422 million and was designed by Renzo Piano, was praised by many.
When Weinberg was hired by the board, one of his most important jobs was probably to finish that new building. His predecessor, Maxwell Anderson, quit as director of the museum in 2003 after the board canceled a $200 million plan by architect Rem Koolhaas to expand the museum's famous Breuer building on Madison Avenue. Since the museum reopened, its programming has also been praised for giving it a new lease on life. Since 2015, the museum has put on important shows about immersive video installations, Puerto Rican art after Hurricane Maria, and figurative painting, among other things. In the past few years, the Whitney Museum has put up a permanent installation by David Hammons and fixed up Roy Lichtenstein's studio, which will be used to house the Independent Study Program for the rest of time.
During Weinberg's time as director, the Whitney said, the number of visitors tripled, from 400,000 a year to 1.2 million in the years before the pandemic, and the endowment grew from $40 million to $400 million. Between 2003 and 2023, the museum held about 300 exhibitions and nine biennials, some of which caused trouble. Rothkopf became a curator at the Whitney in 2009, and she quickly made a name for herself by putting together important surveys of artists like Glenn Ligon, Wade Guyton, Jeff Koons, Mary Heilmann, and Laura Owens. He was also part of the team that put together "America Is Hard to See," the Whitney's first show in its new building in the Meatpacking District. This show opened in 2015. In the same year, Rothkopf was made chief curator, taking over from Donna De Salvo, who had been in charge of the museum's collections for a long time. Rothkopf also became the senior deputy director in 2018. During his time as chief curator, Rothkopf hired people like Rujeko Hockley, Marcela Guerrero, and Adrienne Edwards who were very important to the institution's curatorial team. Rothkopf was a senior editor at Artforum and a curator at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before he joined the Whitney.
Selena Mattei