When the Whitney Museum of American Art opened its new $422m building in downtown New York last May, its curators said they could not wait to let artists loose inside. Now, they are inviting five—the land artist Michael Heizer, the performance artist Andrea Fraser, the video artist Steve McQueen, the painter Lucy Dodd and the jazz musician Cecil Taylor—to take over the entire fifth floor, one at a time. All interior walls in the gallery will be removed to create the largest column-free museum space in New York. The first project (26 February-13 March) is a site-specific installation by Fraser, who plans to use audio recordings from a correctional facility to reflect on the parallel booms in museum and prison construction in the US since the 1970s.
