Morgan Stanley helped the Whitney raise capital to build its new home in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district, where new generations of visitors can experience American art.
When the Whitney Museum of American Art wanted to expand and renew itself for the next generation of art lovers and museum goers, it turned to Morgan Stanley for help. For its day-to-day needs, the museum relies largely on visitors, public funding and the generosity of donors. Those traditional sources, however, wouldn’t be enough to cover the cost of constructing a new building in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district. The facility would anchor the southern end of the High Line Park, which in recent years has sparked an urban renaissance in the once gritty, industrial neighborhood.
The Whitney called on the Higher Education and Not-for-Profit Financing Group, a boutique arm of Morgan Stanley’s institutional Fixed-Income Division that specializes in helping cultural institutions tap capital markets. In 2011, Morgan Stanley helped the Whitney issue more than $125 million in tax exempt bonds—funding that was critical to the museum’s reopening on May 1, 2015, in an iconic new structure that overlooks the Hudson River in the heart of a vibrant, renewed urban enclave.
The new building has helped bring the Whitney's mission to a larger audience eager to contribute new voices to the continual rediscovery and redefinition of American art for generations to come.
Like the Whitney and many of its other clients, Morgan Stanley understands the value of making art open to the public and its transformative power for communities, artists, aficionados—and every pair of fresh eyes encountering radical ways of looking at the world.
