Whitney is very functional, but it's not elegant, and not too contemporary either.

I might base the choice of the text font on the shape of the "a" in Gotham. And I would strongly consider a serif (maybe a slab, or sheared wedge) although that does depend on how much text you have.

hhp

What is the artwork like? How much text is there? What kind of layout are you thinking of?

It is contemporary art quilts. The only thing that links all the images is that they are textile / fiber related. The layout, which I am stuck with, is a detail on the left page, a full image of the piece on the right. There is an artist's statement (One 2-5 sentence paragraph), and the heading is the artist's name and city/ state below it as a subhead. Historically that has been in Helvetica bold for the names and the rest of the copy in a basic serif - maybe Times. All the font sizes have been way too big, so it has had the look of an elementary school picture book. I think make the fonts all smaller will go a long way to creating a more contemporary and designed look, but that's as far as I have gotten.

I too would go with a serif, but if there's only 2–5 sentences you can get away with doing all sans. If you're going all sans, why not use Gotham for the text, too? Or maybe throw Archer in there. Or maybe play around with the Thesis family …

Thanks to its smallish x-height (=elegance) and round-bowl "a" Archer might work well. Is there something like it but narrower? That would ramp up the elegance a bit more.

hhp

Just been looking at the specimen for Storm's Andulka, could be worth a look.