As the preeminent institution devoted to the art of the United States, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents the full range of twentieth-century and contemporary American art, with a special focus on works by living artists. The Whitney is dedicated to collecting, preserving, interpreting, and exhibiting American art, and its collection—arguably the finest holdings of twentieth-century American art in the world—is the Museum's key resource.

The Whitney’s collection includes over 26,000 works created by more than 3,900 artists in the United States during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The datasets in this repository reflect those works and artists that have been catalogued and publicly released on the Museum’s website.

At this time, the datasets are available in CSV format, encoded in UTF-8. While UTF-8 is the standard for multilingual character encodings, it may not be correctly interpreted by Excel on a Mac. Users of Excel on a Mac can convert the UTF-8 to UTF-16 so the file can be imported correctly.

These datasets are placed in the public domain using a CC0 License.

Images are not included and are not part of the dataset. To license images of works in the Whitney’s collection, please refer to the images and permissions information on our website.

This data is provided “as is” and you use this data at your own risk. Documentation of the Museum’s collection is an ongoing process and parts of the datasets may be incomplete. The Whitney Museum of American Art makes no representations or warranties of any kind.

We plan to update the datasets with new and revised information on a regular basis. You are advised to regularly update your copy of the datasets to ensure you are using the best available information.

Because these datasets are generated from our internal database, we do not accept pull requests. If you have identified errors or have extra information to share, please email us at [email protected] and we will forward to the appropriate department for review.

Please consider attributing or citing the Whitney Museum of American Art’s CC0 datasets, especially with respect to research or publication. Attribution supports efforts to release other datasets in the future. It also reduces the amount of "orphaned data," helping to retain source links.

Do not mislead others or misrepresent the datasets or their source. You must not use the Whitney Museum of American Art’s trademarks or otherwise claim or imply that the Museum or any other third party endorses you or your use of the dataset.

Whenever you transform, translate or otherwise modify the dataset, you must make it clear that the resulting information has been modified. If you enrich or otherwise modify the dataset, consider publishing the derived dataset without reuse restrictions.

Thank you to Cooper-Hewitt, Europeana, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and others for providing models for these guidelines.

For more information about the Museum’s digital efforts, follow along on our blog.