Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1960

Apr 28, 2017–June 2, 2019

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From a site of retreat to a repository for the objects with which we identify, the home can serve as a window into the period when an artwork was made, a stand-in for its inhabitants, or a symbol of the class of its residents. Works that depict ordinary objects—for example, a stove in James Castle’s drawings or in a painting by Beauford Delaney—suggest that each of us sees our own home uniquely: even though our things might be in common, our experiences of them are not. These works call into question what a term like everyday life means. The home’s interior also can act as a metaphor for the space of fantasy. Edward Hopper’s A Woman in the Sun (1961) and Henry Koerner’s Mirror of Life (1946) use the domestic scene to stage the rich inner life of each painting’s protagonist. Hopper’s New York Interior (c. 1921) captures the privacy and intimacy that being at home can afford while other works in this gallery acknowledge that a traditional home is not a given. Depictions of the incarcerated and the displaced reveal the domestic lives of a large, if underrepresented, American population. The works on view here raise questions about what home looks like and how it makes us who we are.

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