Around Day’s End: Downtown New York, 1970–1986 is a new exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art that presents artworks that relate to sites around Lower Manhattan.
As the show’s name suggests, the exhibit is meant to connect to Day’s End, a new monumental public artwork by artist David Hammons, which will be finished later this fall in the Hudson River next to the Whitney Museum, stretching up from the water like a ghostly pier.
The art in the show evokes a bygone era of the city when downtown areas like the Bowery or the West Side piers weren’t settings for multimillion-dollar condos but were areas where artists and queer people explored lifestyles not possible elsewhere. Ironically, the Whitney Museum’s Highline-adjacent home is an embodiment of the area’s transformation from creative hotbed to playground for the nation’s wealthiest people.
Around Day’s End is now open and will remain up through October 25.