Whitney Museum will break ground downtown

25 May 2010 - by ArtfixDaily Staff

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Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Flickr user Dom Dada

After a quarter century of quibble, the vote was unanimous for the Whitney Museum to expand with a new building in the meatpacking district of Manhattan.

On Tuesday afternoon the museum board finally agreed to build in the new downtown location with an expected completion date of 2015.

The museum's Marcel Breuer-designed building on Madison Avenue and East 75th Street has long been viewed as too small to showcase the scope and breadth of the museum's collections of modern and contemporary art.

The New York Times gives the details, including board member Leonard A. Lauder's quote, "Downtown is a new city, a new nation. Why shouldn’t the Whitney be the museum of record there?”

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