The Whitney Biennial is a biennial 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.
Deb Sokolow is an American visual artist who lives and works in Chicago. Sokolow's work uses both image and text to conjure connections among historical events, celebrities, politicians, and her own personal history in order to spur new consideration of alternate possible realities. Her work has been exhibited widely and is part of a number of permanent collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Spertus Museum.
Nathaniel Mellors is an English contemporary artist and musician.
Jean Shin is an American artist living in Brooklyn, NY. She is known for creating elaborate sculptures and site-specific installations using accumulated cast-off materials.
Chad Person is an American contemporary artist primarily known for his sculptural and collage works.
Leslie Hewitt is an American contemporary visual artist.
Heather T. Hart is an American visual artist who works in a variety of media including interactive and participatory Installation art, drawing, collage, and painting. She is a co-founder of the Black Lunch Table Project, which includes a Wikipedia initiative focused on addressing diversity representation in the arts on Wikipedia.
Ah Xian is a Chinese-born artist based in Sydney, Australia.
Nicole Eisenman is a French-born American artist known for her oil paintings and sculptures. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), the Carnegie Prize (2013), and has thrice been included in the Whitney Biennial. On September 29, 2015, she won a MacArthur Fellowship award for "restoring the representation of the human form a cultural significance that had waned during the ascendancy of abstraction in the 20th century."
Katrín Sigurdardóttir is a New York-based artist who works in installation and sculpture. Katrin studied at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts, Reykjavík and received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She creates complex structures built to be viewed in exhibition settings but not used as functional architecture. Conceptually, her work reflects issues of intimacy and memory in built spaces, historical recreations, and disorienting shifts in scale. Her work has appeared at the 2013 Icelandic Pavilion of the 55th Venice Biennale, the 33rd São Paulo Bienal, in 2018, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sculpture Center, and PS1 Contemporary Art Center.
Laleh Mehran is an Iranian-born American digital artist, and professor. She is the graduate director and a professor in emergent digital practices at the University of Denver. Mehran is known for her interactive digital installation art. She lives in Denver.
Jenny Kendler is an American interdisciplinary environmental artist, activist, naturalist & wild forager who lives and works in Chicago. For the past 15 years her work has attempted to "re-story" the relationship between humanity and the natural world through projects on climate change, the biodiversity crisis, and de-centering the human in order to re-enchant our relationship to the natural world. She often collaborates with scientists and, in her work, bridges the gap between art, activism and ecology. Since 2014, Kendler has been the first Artist-in-Residence with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Some notable projects include Music For Elephants, Tell it to the Birds', Sculpture---> Garden, One Hour of Birds and Milkweed Dispersal Balloons. In 2018, Kendler was part of a cross-disciplinary team that was awarded a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Humanities Without Walls initiative to present her public art and community-engagement project Garden for a Changing Climate. Kendler is a co-founder of the artist website platform OtherPeoplesPixels, has served as a board member for several grass roots art organizations in Chicago, and was named one of Chicago's Top 50 Artists by Newcity in their biennial list in 2018 and 2020. She is also a founding member of Artists Commit, a successful artist-led initiative to raise climate-consciousness in the artworld.
Nicole Awai is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York and Austin, Texas. Her work captures both Caribbean and American landscapes and experiences and engages in cultural critique. She works in many media including painting, photography, drawing, installations, ceramics, and sculpture as well as found objects.
Mel Tanner was an American light sculptor, painter, installation artist, and videographer. His wife, Dorothy Tanner, was an American light sculptor, installation artist, musician, videographer, and spoken word artist based in Denver, Colorado. The couple worked very closely for over 40 years. Their main project was the creation of Lumonics that consists of their light sculptures, live projection, video, electronics, and music as a total art installation. Author and art historian, Michael Betancourt, described this visual music performance work as a Gesamtkunstwerk in his book, The Lumonics Theater: The Art of Mel & Dorothy Tanner, published in 2004.
Torkwase Dyson is an interdisciplinary artist based in Beacon, New York, United States. Dyson describes the themes of her work as "architecture, infrastructure, environmental justice, and abstract drawing." Her work is informed by her own theory of Black Compositional Thought. This working term considers how spatial networks—paths, throughways, water, architecture, and geographies—are composed by Black bodies as a means of exploring potential networks for Black liberation. She is represented by Pace Gallery and Richard Gray Gallery.
Mika Tajima is a New York-based artist who employs sculpture, painting, media installation, and performance in her conceptual practice.
Sally Heller is an American artist. She uses everyday materials to make large installations that are often site-specific.
Mary Obering was an American painter focusing mainly on geometric abstraction.
Laura Phelps Rogers is a sculptor who works with bronze, iron, and other metal fabrication techniques, as well as photography and site-specific installations.
Daisy Quezada Ureña is an American visual artist and educator. She was born in California and is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Informed through her Mexican-American cultural background, Quezada addresses social issues including immigration, gender inequality, labor, and class issues. She creates ceramic and fabric works and installations that speak on themes of identity and place in relation to social structures and imposed borders.
