Culture / Exhibition and planning
The Whitney looks at Lichtenstein again, and then again
A career spanning exhibition turns repetition, copying and handmade precision into a reason to slow down.
Roy Lichtenstein: Like New opened Sunday, Oct. 11, at the Whitney Museum of American Art and continues through May 10, 2027. Installed on the fifth floor at 99 Gansevoort St., the exhibition offers a career spanning view of an artist whose crisp surfaces can make a slow and visibly handmade process look immediate.
The Whitney brings together roughly 130 works made from the early 1940s through the 1990s across painting, drawing, collage, prints, sculpture and film. The official press material says the exhibition reunites, for the first time, the works from Lichtenstein’s first show of Pop style work at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1962. It also recreates three murals, including a version of the Greene Street Mural that extends nearly 96 feet.
That scale is one reason not to reduce the visit to a checklist of famous pictures. The exhibition frames copying, translation and circulation as central questions. Lichtenstein borrowed from comics, advertising and newspapers, then changed composition, scale and method. A familiar image could become strange through the very act of making it look familiar again.
The photograph above comes from the museum’s opening material and shows one wall of the exhibition. Several works share a dark ground while two visitors sit before them. Use that arrangement as a cue: compare how a single visual language changes from one object to the next before moving to another room.
A useful visit can begin with one work you recognize and one you do not. Look first for the source language, then for the labor that interrupts it. Painted dots, sharp outlines and commercial color may suggest mechanical production, but the hand remains present. That tension is more interesting than simply confirming that the famous images are famous.
The museum lists regular hours of 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Thursday; 10:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday; and 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. It is closed Tuesday. Adult admission is $30, seniors and students pay $24, and visitors 25 and younger enter free. Advance tickets are recommended.
Friday admission is free from 5 to 10 p.m., with a ticket still required and capacity limited. That can make the exhibition part of an evening rather than an all day museum campaign. Reserve the entry, choose one additional gallery at most and leave time afterward to talk about what repetition changed.
Like New is a title with more than one edge. It can mean restored, freshly available or copied so precisely that the copy begins to alter the original. The strongest plan is to let the exhibition keep that question open. Give the pictures enough time to look less obvious than they did from across the room.
Planning questions
When is Roy Lichtenstein: Like New at the Whitney?
The exhibition opened Oct. 11, 2026, and is scheduled through May 10, 2027.
Where is the exhibition?
It is on the fifth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art at 99 Gansevoort St. in Manhattan.
Can I see the exhibition for free on Friday night?
The Whitney lists free admission for everyone from 5 to 10 p.m. on Fridays. A ticket is still required, capacity is limited and advance booking is recommended.