Around Day's End:Downtown New york, 1970-1986

Anticipating the completion in late fall 2020 of David Hammons’s Day’s End, a major public artwork located in Hudson River Park, the Whitney will present a selection of works from the Museum’s collection that explore downtown New York as site, history, and memory.

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Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978), Days End Pier 52.3 (Documentation of the action Day's End made in 1975 in New York, United States), 1975, printed 1977. Gelatin silver print: sheet, 8 × 10 in. (20.3 × 25.4 cm); image, 7 × 9 3/4 in. (17.8 × 24.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Harold Berg 2017.134. © 2020 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

September 3–November 1, 2020

Anticipating the completion in late fall 2020 of David Hammons’s Day’s End, a major public artwork located in Hudson River Park, the Whitney will present a selection of works from the Museum’s collection that explore downtown New York as site, history, and memory. Central to this presentation is Gordon Matta Clark’s Day’s End, the innovative project that inspired Hammons’s sculpture.

In 1975, Matta-Clark cut several massive openings into the dilapidated building that existed on Pier 52 where Gansevoort Street meets the Hudson River. He described it as a “temple to sun and water.”

Matta-Clark’s attempt to extract beauty and create poetic experiences in unlikely places exemplifies the aims of many artists working at this earlier time of crisis and uncertainty in the city. The exhibition will include works by approximately fifteen artists who were active in overlapping downtown Manhattan scenes in the 1970s and early 1980s.