The Whitney Museum of American Art was founded by sculptor and collector Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who opened it in 1931 after the Metropolitan Museum of Art declined her offer to donate her collection of American art. Built around roughly 600 works from her personal holdings, the museum was the first in New York dedicated exclusively to American artists, appointing Juliana Force as its founding director. Since 2015 it has occupied a Renzo Piano-designed building in the Meatpacking District, between the High Line and the Hudson River. The museum's collection has grown to more than 25,000 works by upwards of 3,600 artists, and it was the first New York museum to mount a major video-art exhibition, devoted to Nam June Paik in 1982.