The Grey Art Gallery is New York University’s fine art museum, located on historic Washington Square Park, in New York City’s Greenwich Village. As a university art museum, the Grey Art Gallery functions to collect, preserve, study, document, interpret, and exhibit the evidence of human culture. While these goals are common to all museums, the Grey distinguishes itself by emphasizing art’s historical, cultural, and social contexts, with experimentation and interpretation as integral parts of programmatic planning. Thus, in addition to being a place to view the objects of material culture, the Gallery serves as a museum-laboratory in which a broader view of an object’s environment enriches our understanding of its contribution to civilization.Founded in 1958 with the acquisition of Francis Picabia’s Resonateur (1922), and Fritz Glarner’s Relational Painting (1949–50), The Grey Art Gallery oversees the art collection of New York University; approximately 6,000 works, mainly dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Pablo Picasso’s Bust of Sylvette (1967) installed in University Village (Manhattan), and Joseph Cornell’s Chocolat Menier (1952), and works by Henri Matisse, Joan Mirò, Ilya Bolotowsky, as well as works by Romare Bearden, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Kenneth Noland, Jane Freilicher, Ad Reinhardt, and Alex Katz, among many others.
