Whitney Gala Honors Julie Mehretu, Benefactor Of“Free Under 25”

The Whitney Museum of American Art used its annual gala on May 20, 2026, to spotlight a question that has become increasingly central to museum life: who can afford to walk in the door? The evening honored Julie Mehretu, Whitney Board Chair Fern Kaye Tessler, and former Whitney Museum director Adam D. Weinberg, while also underscoring the impact of Mehretu's 2024 gift of $2.25 million to support free admission for visitors 25 and younger.

Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1970, Mehretu has built a practice in painting, drawing, and printmaking that moves between geometric abstraction, figuration, and scale. She first drew wide attention in the late 1990s and early 2000s for spare compositions of fractured forms and architectural references. Her work later took on broader political and social pressure, as seen in her 2019 mid-career survey at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and its 2021 presentation at the Whitney, where themes of displacement, protest, capitalism, and climate change came into sharper focus.

At the gala, Whitney director Scott Rothkopf recalled a conversation in which Mehretu pressed him on the cost of access and dismissed the museum's former“pay what you wish” policy as too vague to be useful. In her acceptance remarks, Mehretu argued that free admission for young people is not a gesture of generosity but a statement of values. She said engagement with art should be understood as a right and a necessity, and suggested that a museum of American art must be open to more than a narrow public.

The results have been tangible. The Whitney says Mehretu's gift has tripled the number of visitors under 25, and more than 1 in 3 visitors now come through free programming. Whitney Board President Anne-Cecilie Engell Speyer said the gala raised $6.3 million.

The evening drew a notable crowd, including artists Rashid Johnson, Glenn Ligon, Anicka Yi, and Fred Wilson, along with collector Beth Rudin DeWoody. But the larger significance lay in the museum's own framing of the night: not simply as a fundraiser, but as an argument about what public access to art should mean in the 21st century.

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