OpenWhitney
Connect your AI assistant to the Whitney Museum of American Art's open collection data — 26,000+ works, artists, exhibitions, what's on view — with attribution built into every answer.
Connect one step
Add this MCP server to Claude (Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector), or any MCP-capable assistant:
https://mcp.openwhitney.org/
No key, no account. Read-only. First call after idle may take ~30 s while the free-tier server wakes — that's normal, it will tell you nothing false in the meantime.
Then ask things like
- “What's on view at the Whitney right now?”
- “Show me Katherine Bradford's paintings in the collection — and let me see one.”
- “Which works in the 2026 Biennial involve energy infrastructure?”
- “Give me the exact credit line I need to cite this photograph.”
The rules it lives by
Every result carries the artist, the credit line, the museum's own alt text, and a link back to whitney.org — attribution is a working address, not a courtesy. Images travel only inside that envelope; rights stay with artists and the museum. The test we build by: after the uptake, can the source still author? If the museum ever wants this project — code, name, and keys — it's theirs.
Under the hood
- Six tools over the museum's public API: overview, artwork search, batch fetch, what's-on-view, artist search, rights-atomic image delivery.
- Output formats adjudicated by the models that consume them (the 3X Review — verdicts in the repo's ADRs).
- Open decision record: github.com/jlumbroso/whitney-mcp