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\n\tLast night, the Whitney Museum of American Art hosted its annual gala, honoring artist Julie Mehretu\u2014who in 2024 donated $2.25 million to the museum to ensure that visitors aged 25 and younger can visit the museum for free\u2014alongside Whitney Board Chair Fern Kaye Tessler, and former Whitney Museum director Adam D. Weinberg.<\/p>\n
Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1970, Mehretu\u2019s painting, drawing, and printmaking practice examines the nature of contemporary existence through the relationships between geometric abstraction, figuration, and scale. She rose to acclaim in the late 1990s and early 2000s with spare paintings of fragmented shapes featuring architectural images of buildings or plans. But, as seen in her mid-career survey at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2019, and later as the exhibition traveled to the Whitney Museum in 2021, her work came to grapple with legacies of displacement, protest, capitalism, and climate change.<\/p>\n
\n\tIntroducing Mehretu, Scott Rothkopf, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, recalled how the artist pulled him aside soon after he became director: \u201cShe said, \u2018You gotta do something, Scott, about this financial access, it\u2019s too expensive.\u2019\u201d Rothkopf then mentioned the museum\u2019s \u201cpay what you wish\u201d policy, only for Mehretu to quickly contend that \u201cpay what you wish sucks. Nobody knows what it means.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe told me a story about her own family,\u201d Rothkopf continued. \u201cHer father was very distinguished professor and immigrant, and would never have done \u2018pay what you wish\u2019 anything, because he would have wanted to pay his fair share, and so why would we welcome people who needed or wanted assistance at the box office by making them already feel second-class, and that isn\u2019t something that we were going to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tMehretu\u2019s gift has allowed the museum to triple the number of visitors aged under 25. Now, more than 1 in 3 visitors come to the Whitney as part of their free programming.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cFree admission for young people is a statement of values,\u201d Mehretu\u2019s acceptance speech began. \u201cIt says that engagement with art is not a privilege to be purchased, but a right and a necessity. That the evolution of culture depends on who gets to walk through the door in the first place and what can be made in the future. That commitment to access is the culture. Without it, you are not a museum of American art; we are a museum of American art for some Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThis museum has at its finest moments been willing to reopen that argument to hang work on the walls that has forced a reckoning with what American art actually is,\u201d Mehretu continued, \u201cnot what the market decided, not what power certified, but what artists in all their radical particularity, were actually making. That is not a small thing, that is everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tAccording to Whitney Board President Anne-Cecilie Engell Speyer, the gala raised $6.3 million. In attendance were notable artists Rashid Johnson, Glenn Ligon, Anicka Yi, and Fred Wilson, alongside numerous collectors, including ARTnews<\/em> Top 200 Collector Beth Rudin DeWoody.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/whitney-honors-julie-mehretu-benefactor-of-free-under-25-1234786341\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/BFA_54428_7944892.jpg?w=1024″] Last night, the Whitney Museum of American Art hosted its annual gala, honoring artist Julie Mehretu\u2014who in 2024 donated $2.25 million to the museum to ensure that visitors aged 25 and younger can visit the museum for free\u2014alongside Whitney Board Chair Fern Kaye Tessler, and former Whitney Museum director Adam D. Weinberg. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1946214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1946214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1946214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1946214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1946214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1946214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1946214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}