NEW YORK, NY.- Barbara Kruger designed the third Whitney site-specific installation at 820 Washington Street on the corner of Washington and Gansevoort Streets. Kruger is producing a dramatic intervention that addresses the viewer with powerful and enigmatic textual statements and engages with the social history of the site. The artist has described her motivation for her installation as follows: "Because I've spent so many years in lower Manhattan, the streets are rife with remembrance. So I've tried to mark the site with a gathering of words about history, value, and the pleasures and pains of social life." The installation uses bold text to respond to the viewer's visual and temporal experience of the site and its surroundings. Some of the statements are drawn from Kruger's catalog of signature phrases like "YOU BELONG HERE" and "BELIEF + DOUBT = SANITY." Other statements respond to the neighborhood's shifting identity and address the changing industries that have inhabited it from meatpacking to fashion to art. Texts printed on vinyl will be attached to surfaces around the site and will be visible from the street and the High Line. Kruger’s installation elegantly and provocatively writes itself into the activity and history of the museum’s future downtown building.

A series of three large-scale, commissioned works on the site of the Whitney’s future downtown building at the corner of Gansevoort and Washington Streets, Whitney on Site: New Commissions Downtown heralds plans to bring a downtown Whitney to the Meatpacking neighborhood. To animate and reflect on the Museum’s downtown site and surroundings, the Whitney has invited three artists to participate in this initiative: the collaborative team of Guyton\Walker, comprising Wade Guyton (b. 1972) and Kelley Walker (b. 1969); Tauba Auerbach (b. 1981); and Barbara Kruger (b. 1945). The artists span several generations and are based across the country, from Los Angeles to New York, reflecting the museum’s commitment to supporting the work of living American artists. Each will have work shown on the site for six or seven weeks.
Curators: Scott Rothkopf, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Donna De Salvo.