In 1987, at age 34, Salle was the youngest artist ever to be honored with a mid-career survey exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work is in numerous international public and private collections including the Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH; The Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT; Eli Broad Family Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; The Broad, Los Angeles, CA; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; The Glass House, New Canaan, CT; Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY; Hall Art Foundation, New York, NY; Hamburger Bahnhof, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Marieluise Hessel Collection, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebæk, Denmark; Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Museo Carlo Bilotti, Rome, Italy; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; The Saatchi Collection, London, United Kingdom; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Sansab Museum of Contemporary Art, Bangkok, Thailand; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Solomon R, Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KS; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.
Salle is also a prolific writer on art. His essays and reviews have been published in Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, and The Paris Review, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogs and anthologies. An acclaimed volume of Salle’s collected essays, How to See, was published by W.W. Norton in October 2016.