The Whitney Biennial is a biennale exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, United States. The event began as an annual exhibition in 1932, the first biennial was in 1973. The Whitney show is generally regarded as one of the leading shows in the art world, often setting or leading trends in contemporary art. It helped bring artists like Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock and Jeff Koons to prominence.
Sherrie Levine is an American photographer, painter, and conceptual artist. Some of her work consists of exact photographic reproductions of the work of other photographers such as Walker Evans, Eliot Porter and Edward Weston.
Kenny Scharf is an American painter who lives in Los Angeles, California. He was born in Los Angeles and moved to Manhattan, New York City to receive his B.F.A. in 1980 with a major in painting at the School of Visual Arts. He is known for his participation in the interdisciplinary East Village art scene during the 1980s alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. His do-it-yourself practice spanned painting, sculpture, fashion, video, performance art, and street art. Growing up in post-World War II Southern California, Scharf was fascinated by television and the futuristic promise of modern design. His works often consist of pop culture icons, such as the Flintstones and the Jetsons, or caricatures of middle-class Americans in an apocalyptic science fiction setting.
Ronnie Landfield is an American abstract painter. During his early career from the mid-1960s through the 1970s his paintings were associated with Lyrical Abstraction,, and he was represented by the David Whitney Gallery and the André Emmerich Gallery.
Rachel Harrison is an American visual artist who is primarily known for her assemblage work and sculpture, but she has also engaged in performance art and drawing, and photography. Her work often incorporates elements of photography and found objects, sometimes layering abstract forms with industrially manufactured elements. She lives and works in New York.
Joel Shapiro is an American sculptor renowned for his dynamic work composed of simple rectangular shapes. The artist is classified as a Minimalist as demonstrated in his works, which were mostly defined through the materials used, without allusions to subjects outside of the works. He lives and works in New York City. He is married to the artist Ellen Phelan.
Lorna Simpson is an African-American photographer and multimedia artist who made her name in the 1980s and 1990s with artworks such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal. Her works have been included in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally. She is best known for her photo-text installations, photocollages, and films.
Elizabeth "Betty" Woodman was an American ceramic artist.
Elizabeth Murray was an American painter, printmaker and draughtsman. Her works are in many major public collections, including those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Atheneum. Murray was known for her use of shaped canvases.
John Mason was an American artist known for his experimental work in ceramics that expanded the boundaries of the medium. From very early on, Mason's work focused on exploring the physical properties of clay and its "extreme plasticity." One of a group of artists who had studied under the pioneering ceramicist Peter Voulkos, he created wall reliefs and expressionistic sculptures, often on a monumental scale.
Dorothea Rockburne is an abstract painter, drawing inspiration primarily from her deep interest in mathematics and astronomy. Her work is geometric and abstract, seemingly simple but very precise to reflect the mathematical concepts she strives to concretize. "I wanted very much to see the equations I was studying, so I started making them in my studio," she has said. "I was visually solving equations." Rockburne's attraction to Mannerism has also influenced her work.
Omer Fast is an Israeli video artist. He is represented by James Cohan Gallery and lives in Berlin.
Roberta Smith is co-chief art critic of The New York Times and a lecturer on contemporary art. She is the first woman to hold that position.
Stephen Greene was an American artist known for his abstract paintings and in the 1940s his social realist figure paintings.
Laura Owens is an American painter, gallery owner and educator. She emerged in the late 1990s from the Los Angeles art scene. She is known for large-scale paintings that combine a variety of art historical references and painterly techniques. In 2013, she turned her studio work space into an exhibition space called 356 Mission, in collaboration with art dealer Gavin Brown and Wendy Yao. Soon after, she hosted a second location with the art bookstore Ooga Booga #2 in the front of the building. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Nicole Eisenman is an American artist who is known primarily for her paintings. Eisenman was a professor at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson from 2003 to 2009. She has been awarded the Guggenheim fellowship (1996), the Carnegie Prize (2013), and has twice been included in the Whitney Biennial. On September 29, 2015, she won the MacArthur "Genius Grant" award for "restoring the representation of the human form a cultural significance that had waned during the ascendancy of abstraction in the 20th century". Eisenman currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
Juliana R. Force was an American art museum administrator and director.
Allison Smith is an American artist who is based in Oakland, California. Smith's work draws from American history to create artworks which combine social practice, performance, and craft-based sculpture.
Kevin Beasley is an American artist working in sculpture, performance art, and sound installation. He lives and works in New York City. Beasley was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial in 2014 and MoMA PS1's Greater New York exhibition in 2015. He is represented by the Casey Kaplan gallery in New York City.
