As she delivered the inaugural address for the Whitney museum’s new building in downtown Manhattan on Thursday, Michelle Obama praised the museum for its outreach work to children and underserved communities, and challenged other cultural institutions to do the same.
“There are so many kids in this country who look at museums and concert halls and think to themselves: ‘That’s not a place for me,’” she said. The first lady added that as a young girl growing up on the South Side of Chicago, she felt the same way.
Obama praised the museum for its commitment to reaching out to underserved communities and children through educational programming. “Every cultural institution should be doing this kind of work,” she said. “Who knows how you might expand a child’s imagination?
“Maybe you can discover the next Carmen Herrera, or Archibald Motley, or Edward Hopper, or maybe even the next Barack Obama. That is the power of institutions like the Whitney. They open their doors as wide as possible both to the artists they embrace and to the young people they seek to uplift … I truly cannot wait to see the impact this extraordinary museum will have in the years ahead.”
In front of a crowd of museum trustees and art world VIPs, New York City mayor Bill De Blasio and architect Renzo Piano joined Obama in officially opening the new Whitney for business. At 200,000 sq ft, the new building is nearly double the size of its former home on the Upper East Side, which was no longer large enough to house both the museum’s staff and its 22,000-strong art collection.
The first exhibition, America Is Hard to See, shows some 600 works from the Whitney’s collection. Obama praised the show and the meaning behind the title, saying that art enabled the viewers to see America “in all its glory and complexity”.
“We already knew we were the mecca of the art world but just in case we needed to make it clearer, this museum does it,” De Blasio said at the ribbon cutting.
Despite the building’s considerable presence in the Meatpacking District – the building weighs 28,000 tons, including 4,000 tons of steel – Piano said it was his mission to create a feeling of community and freedom in the museum’s design. “I think public buildings are the essence of cities,” he said. “They are places where people share values. Where they meet and speak to each other. Where they join the city.”
The architect concluded: “Especially among public buildings I love to make buildings for art and beauty. The reason is very simple – because art and beauty make people better people ... I’m pretty sure that beauty will save the world. It will save one person at a time. It will do it.”
Piano’s building was nine years in the making; the Whitney raised $760m in order to build it. The city of New York was the second largest donor, contributing $35m. The museum opens to the public on Friday.
