The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American art organized by 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. It is considered the longest-running and most important survey of contemporary art in the United States. The Biennial helped bring artists like Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and Jeff Koons, among others, to prominence.
Jens Hoffmann Mesén is a writer, editor, educator, and exhibition maker. His work has attempted to expand the definition and context of exhibition making. From 2003 to 2007 Hoffmann was director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London. He is the former director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art from 2007 to 2016 and deputy director for exhibitions and programs at The Jewish Museum from 2012 to 2017, a role from which he was terminated following an investigation into sexual harassment allegations brought forth by staff members. Hoffmann has held several teaching positions including California College of the Arts, the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti and Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as others.
Mary Lucier is an American visual artist and pioneer in video art. Concentrating primarily on video and installation since 1973, she has produced numerous multiple- and single-channel pieces that have had a significant impact on the medium.
Joshua Neustein is a contemporary visual artist who lives and works in New York City. He is known for his Conceptual Art, environmental installations, Land Art, Postminimalist torn paper works, epistemic abstraction, deconstructed canvas works, and large-scale map paintings.
Michelle Grabner is an artist, curator, and critic based in Wisconsin. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. She has curated several important exhibitions, including the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art along with Anthony Elms and Stuart Comer, and FRONT International, the 2016 Portland Biennial at the Oregon Contemporary, a triennial exhibition in Cleveland, Ohio in 2018. In 2014, Grabner was named one of the 100 most powerful women in art and in 2019, she was named a 2019 National Academy of Design's Academician, a lifetime honor. In 2021, Grabner was named a Guggenheim Fellow by The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Peter Sarkisian is an American new media artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He combines video projection and sculpture to create hybrid-format, multi-media installations.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is an American conceptual artist known for multidisciplinary, socially oriented sculpture, video and installations and urban community-based projects of the 1990s. His work often explores a dialectical relationships involving minimalist aesthetics, the utopian ambitions of modernism and science, and the resulting—often negative—social, geopolitical and ecological consequences of such ideologies. New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote that Manglano-Ovalle was adept in "distilling complex ideas into inviting visual metaphors," while Jody Zellen described his work as "infused with a formal elegance and sociopolitical content." Manglano-Ovalle has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, MASS MoCA, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), and participated in Documenta 12, the Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, and Bienal de São Paulo. He has been recognized with MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and his work belongs to the collections of forty major institutions. He has been a professor at Northwestern University since 2012 and lives and works in Chicago.
Leslie Hewitt is an American contemporary visual artist.
Ellen Harvey is an American-British conceptual artist known for her painting-based practice and site-specific works in installation, video, engraved mirrors, mosaic and glass. She frequently pairs traditional representational vocabularies and genres with seemingly antithetical postmodern strategies, such as institutional critique, appropriation, mapping and pastiche. Her work examines such themes as art as a mirror, interactions between built environment and landscape, ruins and the Picturesque aesthetic, and cultural and economic relationships between museums, artists and publics. Curator Henriette Huldisch writes of her work, "haunted as it is by the notion of art's ultimate futility, her paradoxical stake is in persistently testing art's possibility to do something in the world after all."
Mary Miss is an American artist and designer. Her work has crossed boundaries between architecture, landscape architecture, engineering and urban design. Her installations are collaborative in nature: she has worked with scientists, historians, designers, and public administrators. She is primarily interested in how to engage the public in decoding their surrounding environment.
Lisa Lapinski is an American visual artist who creates dense, formally complex sculptures which utilize both the language of traditional craft and advanced semiotics. Her uncanny objects interrogate the production of desire and the exchange of meaning in an image-based society. Discussing a group show in 2007, New York Times Art Writer Holland Cotter noted, "An installation by Lisa Lapinski carries a hefty theory- studies title: 'Christmas Tea-Meeting, Presented by Dialogue and Humanism, Formerly Dialectics and Humanism.' But the piece itself just looks breezily enigmatic." It is often remarked that viewers of Lapinski's sculptures are enticed into an elaborate set of ritualistic decodings. In a review of her work published in ArtForum, Michael Ned Holte noted, "At such moments, it becomes clear that Lapinski's entire systemic logic is less circular than accumulative: What at first seems hermetically sealed is often surprisingly generous upon sustained investigation." Lapinski's work has been exhibited widely in the US and Europe, and she was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.
Barbara Vanderlinden is a Belgian art historian, curator, and director.
Judith Barry is an American multimedia artist, writer and educator. Art critics regard her as a pioneer in performance art, video, electronic media and installation art who has contributed significantly to feminist theories of subjectivity and the exploration of public constructions of gender and identity. Her work draws on a diverse background, which includes studies in critical theory and cinema, dance, and training in architecture, design and computer graphics. Rather than employ a signature style, Barry combines multiple disciplines and mediums in immersive, research-based works whose common methodology calls into question technologies of representation and the spatial languages of film, urbanism and the art experience. Critic Kate Linker wrote, "Barry has examined the effects and ideological functions of images in and on society. Her installations and writings … have charted the transformation of representation by different 'machines' of image production, from the spatial ensembles of theater to computer and electronic technologies."
Carole Ann Klonarides is an American curator, video artist, writer and art consultant that has been based in New York and Los Angeles. She has worked in curatorial positions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (1997–2000) and Long Beach Museum of Art (1991–95), curated exhibitions and projects for PS1 and Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Laforet Museum (Tokyo), and Video Data Bank, among others, and been a consultant at the Getty Research Institute. Klonarides emerged as an artist among the loosely defined Pictures Generation group circa 1980; her video work has been presented in numerous museum exhibitions, including "Video and Language: Video As Language", "documenta 8," "New Works for New Spaces: Into the Nineties,", and "The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984", and at institutions such as MoMA, the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, Contemporary Arts Center, the New Museum, The Kitchen, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016). Her work belongs to the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Getty Museum, Centre Pompidou, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Museu-Fundacão Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), and National Gallery of Canada, and is distributed by the Video Data Bank and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI).
Claire Tancons is a curator, critic, and historian of art. She was born in Guadeloupe and is currently based in Paris, after living for nearly two decades between the Caribbean, primarily in Trinidad & Tobago, and the United States, mostly in New York and New Orleans.
Joseph Grigely is an American visual artist and scholar. His work is primarily conceptual and engages a variety of media forms including sculpture, video, and installations. Grigely was included in two Whitney Biennials, and is also a Guggenheim Fellow. He lives and works in Chicago, where he is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Mia Locks is a contemporary art curator and museum leader.
Carissa Rodriguez is an American artist who lives and works in New York City.
Adrienne Edwards is a New York–based art curator, scholar, and writer. Edwards is currently the Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Chrissie Iles is a British-American art curator, critic, and art historian. She is the Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
