Kim Conaty, Chief Curator @ Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City

Kim Conat named Chief Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Kim Conaty 

Photograph by Bryan Derballa

The Whitney Museum of American Art has named Kim Conaty the Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator. In this new role, effective April 8, Kim Conaty will serve on the Museum’s senior leadership team and participate in shaping its mission and vision. She will oversee the Museum’s curatorial, publications, and conservation departments and assume responsibility for the Museum’s scholarly and artistic program while managing the development of the Museum’s permanent collection and exhibitions.

Kim Conaty has worked at the Whitney since 2017 as the Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints and recently curated the landmark exhibition Edward Hopper’s New York (2022), one of the most popular and critically acclaimed exhibitions in the Museum’s history. Other Whitney exhibitions include Mary Corse: A Survey in Light (2018), Nothing Is So Humble: Prints from Everyday Objects (2020), and Ruth Asawa Through Line (2023), the first survey of Asawa’s drawing practice. Conaty’s latest exhibition Survival Piece #5: Portable Orchard featuring a major example of 1970s environmental art, opens June 29, 2024, at the Whitney.

In addition to developing leading exhibitions and best-selling catalogues, Conaty also co-directed the development of the Whitney’s Collection Strategic Plan (CSP), a multi-year research initiative to comprehensively assess the Museum’s collection of more than 26,000 works and set priorities for its future. In 2023, with the CSP in place, the Whitney acquired 286 works, including 57 new artists, with a focus on underrepresented areas. As Curator of Drawings and Prints, Conaty has stewarded the Whitney’s holdings of over 15,000 drawings and prints, led the programming of the Whitney’s Sondra Gilman Study Center for prints, drawings, and photographs, and steers the Museum’s Acquisition Committee on Drawings and Prints. She currently serves on the Board of Directors at the Print Council of America (PCA) and plays an active role on its DEAI Committee.

With this appointment following an international search, Kim Conaty joins the Museum’s senior leadership team, led by Alice Pratt Brown Director Scott Rothkopf. Other members include Deputy Director I.D. Aruede, Chief Operating Officer Amy Roth, and Chief Strategy Officer Andrew Cone.

“Kim brings to the role of Chief Curator an extraordinary range of talents. Her brilliance as an exhibition maker is matched by her deep scholarly expertise across the range of the Whitney’s program and collection from 1900 to the present,” said Scott Rothkopf, Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney. “Beyond the Whintey, Kim has contributed generously to the entire museum field as a colleague and mentor, while demonstrating great care for our staff, artists, and audiences. I am thrilled to partner with her—and the entire curatorial team—on the artistic vision for the Whitney’s future.”

“It’s a great honor to take on this leadership role at the Whitney, an institution that has long held a special place for me,” said Kim Conaty. “I’m excited to guide and empower our stellar curatorial team as we continue to shape the Whitney’s collection in meaningful ways and develop dynamic and rigorous exhibitions that tell stories, ask questions, and engage deeply with artists and audiences.”

Kim Conaty’s Whitney exhibitions have traveled nationally and internationally, including the 2019 presentation of Mary Corse: A Survey in Light at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the first-ever exhibition of Edward Hopper’s work in Korea, Edward Hopper: From City to Coast (2023), organized in conjunction with Seoul Museum of Art. Ruth Asawa Through Line was co-organized with the Menil Collection, where the exhibition is currently on view. Earlier in her career, Conaty also served as Biennial Coordinator for the 2008 Whitney Biennial and as a curatorial intern and researcher at the Whitney.

Prior to the Whitney, Kim Conaty was Curator at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, where she oversaw the museum’s renowned permanent collection of modern and contemporary art and led the curatorial program of special exhibitions, collection installations, and related programming. There, she organized several exhibitions, including Sharon Lockhart I Noa Eshkol (2016) and David Shrigley: Life Model II (2016); commissioned the major site-specific installation Tony Lewis: Plunder (2017); and served as coordinating curator for the first U.S. solo museum exhibition of Joe Bradley, Joe Bradley: A Survey (2017). While at the Rose, Conaty also curated an exhibition for Art + Practice, Los Angeles, Fred Eversley: Black, White, Gray (2016), a focused examination of the artist’s critically important monochromatic sculptures of the 1970s, which opened at A+P and traveled to the Rose.

Before joining the Rose, Kim Conaty served as the Sue and Eugene Mercy, Jr., Assistant Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. There, she curated Abstract Generation: Now in Print (2013) and served as curatorial assistant on the exhibition Print/Out (2012), both of which proposed a new range of approaches to contemporary print practice. At MoMA, she also collaborated on several exhibitions of postwar and contemporary art, such as Marcel Broodthaers: Retrospective (2016), Contemporary Art from the Collection (2010), Fluxus Preview (2009), and In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–1976 (2009), among others. In addition to growing the collection with works by artists including Daniel Joseph Martinez, Janice Kerbel, and Pope.L, Conaty led a project team dedicated to MoMA’s Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection and was an active member of the cross­ departmental research initiative C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives in a Global Context).

Kim Conaty has also held positions at the Clark Art Institute; the Grey Art Gallery, NYU; the Guggenheim Museum; and the Harvard Art Museums, where she organized an exhibition on Marcel Breuer's bent-plywood furniture from the 1930s (2002). A former instructor on modern and contemporary art for MoMA Courses and contributor to several publications, Conaty has authored texts for, among others, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, LACMA, MoMA, and the Whitney, and has published and lectured on a variety of topics, including Joe Bradley, Wade Guyton, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Stanley Whitney, and Avalanche magazine, the subject of her Ph.D. dissertation. A recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Germany in 2003 and a Clark Art Institute Summer Fellowship in 2014, Conaty earned her B.A. from Middlebury College, M.A. from Williams College, and Ph.D. from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts.

Whitney Museum of American Art

99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY 10014

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Exhibition Edward Hopper’s New York @ Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Edward Hopper’s New York 

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Through March 5, 2023

Edward Hopper’s New York, on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art offers an unprecedented examination of Hopper’s life and work in the city that he called home for nearly six decades (1908–67). The exhibition charts the artist’s enduring fascination with the city through more than 200 paintings, watercolors, prints, and drawings from the Whitney’s preeminent collection of Hopper’s work, loans from public and private collections, and archival materials including printed ephemera, correspondence, photographs, and notebooks. From early sketches to paintings from late in his career, Edward Hopper’s New York reveals a vision of the metropolis that is as much a manifestation of Hopper himself as it is a record of a changing city, whose perpetual and sometimes tense reinvention feels particularly relevant today.

Instantly recognizable paintings featured in the exhibition, such as Automat (1927), Early Sunday Morning (1930), Room in New York (1932), New York Movie (1939), and Morning Sun (1952), are joined by lesser-known yet critically important compositions including a series of watercolors of New York rooftops and bridges and the painting City Roofs (1932).

“Edward Hopper’s New York offers a remarkable opportunity to celebrate an ever-changing yet timeless city through the work of an American icon,” says Adam D. Weinberg, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum. “As New York bounces back after two challenging years of global pandemic, this exhibition reconsiders the life and work of Edward Hopper, serves as a barometer of our times, and introduces a new generation of audiences to Hopper’s work by a new generation of scholars. This exhibition offers fresh perspectives and radical new insights.”

Edward Hopper’s New York is organized by Kim Conaty, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints, with Melinda Lang, Senior Curatorial Assistant, at the Whitney.

Born in the Hudson River town of Nyack, New York, in 1882, Hopper first visited Manhattan on family day trips. After completing high school, he commuted to the city by ferry to attend the New York School of Illustration and the New York School of Art. In 1908 he moved to the city, and he spent the majority of his life, from 1913 until his death in 1967, living and working in a top-floor apartment at 3 Washington Square North in Greenwich Village. He was joined there by his wife, the artist Josephine (Jo) Verstille Nivison, following their marriage in 1924. Jo played a crucial supportive and collaborative role in Hopper’s practice, serving as his longstanding model and chief record-keeper. A selection of Jo’s watercolors, capturing their Washington Square home, are included in Edward Hopper’s New York.

“Hopper lived most of his life right here, only blocks from where the Whitney stands today,” says Conaty. “He experienced the same streets and witnessed the incessant cycles of demolition and construction that continue today, as New York reinvents itself again and again. Yet, as few others have done so poignantly, Hopper captured a city that was both changing and changeless, a particular place in time and one distinctly shaped by his imagination. Seeing his work through this lens opens new pathways for exploring even Hopper’s most iconic works.”

Over the course of his career, Hopper observed the city assiduously, honing his understanding of its built environment and the particularities of the modern urban experience. During this time, New York underwent tremendous development—skyscrapers reached record-breaking heights, construction sites roared across the five boroughs, and the increasingly diverse population boomed—yet Edward Hopper’s depictions remained human-scale and largely unpopulated. Deliberately avoiding the famous skyline and picturesque landmarks such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building, Edward Hopper instead turned his attention to unsung utilitarian structures and out-of-the-way corners, drawn to the collisions of new and old, civic and residential, public and private that captured the paradoxes of the changing city.

Organized in thematic chapters spanning Edward Hopper’s entire career, the installation comprises eight sections including four expansive gallery spaces showcasing many of Hopper’s most celebrated paintings and four pavilions that focus on key topics through dynamic groupings of paintings, works on paper, and archival materials, many of which have rarely been exhibited to the public. Edward Hopper’s New York begins with early sketches and paintings from the artist’s first years traveling into and around the city, from 1899 to 1915, as he grew from a commuting art student to a Greenwich Village resident. In Moving Train (c. 1900), Tugboat with Black Smokestack (1908), and El Station (1908) he observed the ways people occupied and moved through space within a dramatically developing urban environment.

Although Edward Hopper aspired to recognition as a painter, his first successes came in print through his illustrations and etchings, an important history featured in a section of the exhibition titled “The City in Print.” His artworks for illustrations and published commissions for magazines and advertisements often featured urban motifs inspired by New York—theaters, restaurants, offices, and city dwellers—that would become foundational to his art. During this early period, he also consolidated many of his impressions of New York through etchings like East Side Interior (1922) and The Open Window (c. 1918–19), which preview the dramatic use of light that has become synonymous with Hopper’s work.

“The Window,” the next section, focuses on this enduring motif for Hopper— one that he explored with great interest in his city scenes. While strolling New York’s streets and riding its elevated trains, Edward Hopper was particularly drawn to the fluid boundaries between public and private space in a city where all aspects of everyday life—from goods in a storefront display to unguarded moments in a café—are equally exposed. In paintings on view such as Automat (1927), Night Windows (1928), and Room in Brooklyn (1932), Hopper imagines the unlimited compositional and narrative possibilities of the city’s windowed facades, the potential for looking and being looked at, and the discomfiting awareness of being alone in a crowd.

Edward Hopper’s New York presents, for the first time together, the artist's panoramic cityscapes, installed as a group in a section of the exhibition titled “The Horizontal City.” Early Sunday Morning (1930), Manhattan Bridge Loop (1928), Blackwell’s Island (1928), Apartment Houses, East River (c. 1930), and Macomb’s Dam Bridge (1935), five paintings made between 1928 and 1935, all share nearly identical dimensions and format. Seen together, they offer invaluable insight into Hopper’s contrarian vision of the growing city at a time when New York was increasingly defined by its relentless skyward development.

“Washington Square” highlights the importance of Edward Hopper’s neighborhood as his home and muse for nearly 55 years. Paintings like City Roofs (1932) and November, Washington Square (1932/1959) show Hopper’s fascination with the city views visible from his windows and his rooftop, and a rare series of watercolors—a practice he generally reserved for his travels to New England and elsewhere—reveals how attuned he was to the spatial dynamics and subtleties of the city’s built environment. As documented in the exhibited correspondence and notebooks, the Edward Hoppers were fierce advocates of Washington Square, and they argued tirelessly for the preservation of their neighborhood as a haven for artists and as one of the city’s cultural landmarks.

“Theater,” a particularly revealing gallery in the exhibition, explores Edward Hopper’s passion for the stage and the critical role it played as an active mode of spectatorship and source of visual inspiration. This section includes archival items like the Hoppers’ preserved ticket stubs and theatergoing notebooks and highlights the ways that theater spaces and set design influenced Hopper’s compositions through works like Two on the Aisle (1927) and The Sheridan Theatre (1937). Additionally, the presentation of New York Movie (1939) and a group of its preparatory studies along with figural sketches for other paintings reveal the Hoppers’ collaborative scene staging, in which Jo played an active part as model.

Throughout his career, Edward Hopper explored the city with sketchbook in hand, recording his observations through drawing, a practice highlighted in this section of the exhibition. A large selection of his sketches and preparatory studies on view in “Sketching New York” chart Hopper’s favored locations across the city, many of which the artist returned to again and again in order to capture different impressions that he could later explore on canvas.

Finally, in “Reality and Fantasy,” a group of ambitious late paintings, characterized by radically simplified geometry and uncanny, dreamlike settings, reveal how New York increasingly served as a stage set or backdrop for Edward Hopper’s evocative distillations of urban experience. In works such as Morning in a City (1944), Sunlight on Brownstones (1956), and Sunlight in a Cafeteria (1958), Edward Hopper created compositions that depart from specific sites while still tapping into urban sensations, reflecting his desire, as noted in his personal journal “Notes on Painting”, to create a “realistic art from which fantasy can grow.”

Edward Hopper’s career and work have been a touchstone for the Whitney since before the Museum was founded. In 1920, at the age of thirty-seven, Hopper had his first solo exhibition at the Whitney Studio Club. He was included in a number of exhibitions there before it closed in 1928 to make way for the Whitney Museum of American Art, which opened in 1931. Edward Hopper’s work appeared in the inaugural Whitney Biennial in 1932 and in twenty-nine subsequent Biennials and Annuals through 1965, as well as several group exhibitions. The Whitney was among the first museums to acquire a Hopper painting for its collection. In 1968, Hopper’s widow, the artist Josephine Nivison Hopper bequeathed the entirety of his artistic holdings–2,500 paintings, watercolors, prints, and drawings–and many of her own works from their Washington Square studio residence. Today the Whitney’s collection holds over 3,100 works by Hopper, more than any other museum in the world.

“Given Hopper’s status in the Whitney's history and within the ranks of American art history, this periodic reconsideration and regular reckoning is imperative and a critical obligation,” says Weinberg.

Edward Hopper’s New York

Exhibition Catalogue

Whitney Museum of American Art

An accompanying exhibition catalogue, Edward Hopper’s New York, published by the Whitney and distributed by Yale University Press, features essays by curator Kim Conaty, writer and critic Kirsty Bell, scholar Darby English, and artist David Hartt. Alongside these essays are four focused texts that draw upon the resources made newly available through the Museum’s Sanborn Hopper Archive. These contributions are authored by Whitney staff members who have been working closely with the archive, including Farris Wahbeh, Benjamin and Irma Weiss Director of Research Resources; Jennie Goldstein, Assistant Curator; Melinda Lang, Senior Curatorial Assistant; and David Crane, former Curatorial Fellow. The publication features more than three hundred illustrations and fresh insights from authoritative and emerging scholars. Copies are available for purchase online and in the Whitney Shop ($65.00).

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

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