Last night, the Whitney Museum of American Art hosted its annual gala, honoring artist Julie Mehretu—who in 2024 donated $2.25 million to the museum to ensure that visitors aged 25 and younger can visit the museum for free—alongside Whitney Board Chair Fern Kaye Tessler, and former Whitney Museum director Adam D. Weinberg.
Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1970, Mehretu’s 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.
Introducing 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: “She said, ‘You gotta do something, Scott, about this financial access, it’s too expensive.’” Rothkopf then mentioned the museum’s “pay what you wish” policy, only for Mehretu to quickly contend that “pay what you wish sucks. Nobody knows what it means.”
“She told me a story about her own family,” Rothkopf continued. “Her father was very distinguished professor and immigrant, and would never have done ‘pay what you wish’ 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’t something that we were going to do.”
Mehretu’s 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.
“Free admission for young people is a statement of values,” Mehretu’s acceptance speech began. “It 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.”
“This 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,” Mehretu continued, “not 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.”
According 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 Top 200 Collector Beth Rudin DeWoody.
