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.
Hans Ulrich Obrist is a Swiss art curator, critic and historian of art. He is artistic director at the Serpentine Galleries, London. Obrist is the author of The Interview Project, an extensive ongoing project of interviews. He is also co-editor of the Cahiers d'Art review.
David Robbins is an artist and writer who was one of the first to investigate the art world's entrance into the culture industry.
Philippe Parreno is a French artist who lives and works in Paris, France. His work includes various media, such as film, installations, performance, drawing, and text. Parreno focuses on expanding ideas of time and duration through his artworks and distinctive conception of exhibitions as a medium. Preferring projects to objects, he began examining unique approaches to narration and representation in the 1990s and has been exhibiting internationally ever since.
Rirkrit Tiravanija is a Thai contemporary artist residing in New York City, Berlin, and Chiangmai, Thailand. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961. His installations often take the form of stages or rooms for sharing meals, cooking, reading or playing music; architecture or structures for living and socializing are a core element in his work.
Travis Jeppesen is an American novelist, poet, artist, and art critic. He is known, among other works, for his novel The Suiciders; a non-fiction novel about North Korea, See You Again in Pyongyang; and for his object-oriented writing work, 16 Sculptures.
Michelle Grabner is an artist, writer, and curator 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, 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.
Katy Schimert is an American artist known for exhibitions and installations that meld disparate media into cohesive formal and conceptual visual statements arising out of personal experience, myth and empirical knowledge. She interweaves elements of fine and decorative arts, figuration and abstraction in densely layered drawings and sculpture that together suggest elliptical narratives or unfolding, cosmic events. Curator Heidi Zuckerman wrote that Schimert is inspired by "the places where the organized and the chaotic intersect—the scientific and the mythic, the known and the unknown, and the real and the imagined … she creates work that exists where, through fantasy, truth and beauty meet."
Paul Sietsema is a Los Angeles-based American artist who works primarily in film, painting and drawing. His work addresses the production, consumption, and proliferation of cultural objects, reflecting his interest in the possibility of an artwork to mediate information or meaning in a way that engages with the aesthetics of a specific time period. In the words of Sarah Robayo Sheridan, “Paul Sietsema compounds organic and artificial detritus in all his artwork, scavenging in history’s wake to identify specific tools of cultural production and foraging for concepts of art promulgated in the words of artists and attitudes of critics. He mines film as a vestige, the medium of the mechanical age, pressing and squeezing its very obsolescence through a contemporary sieve. In so doing, the artist hovers in the switchover between a bodily inscription in the image and a fundamental reconstitution of sight and representation in the matrix of the virtual. Where body stops and image starts is a divide collapsing through a series of innovations and accidents that go back as far as the people of Pompeii trapped in an emulsion that marked their death, but which paradoxically carried forward their image into eternity.”
Yongwoo Lee is an art historian and curator based in Shanghai and Seoul. He is artistic director of the Shanghai International Art City Research Institute, and professor at the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts of Shanghai University.
Jordan Wolfson is an American artist living and working in Los Angeles. His enigmatic, and at times provocative, work investigates the darker side of the human condition. He explores such topics as violence, sexism, antisemitism, and racism in popular culture, using video and film, sculptural installation, and virtual reality.
Aaron Flint Jamison is an American conceptual artist and associate professor in the University of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design. He works with various media including sculpture, publication, video, and performance.
Füsun Onur is a Turkish artist, based in Istanbul. She uses everyday materials in her painting and sculpture to reflect on space, time, rhythm and form.
Barbara Vanderlinden is an art critic, editor, and independent curator. She began her career in the mid-1990s as co-curator of the contemporary art program of Antwerp '93, European Capital of Culture, under its auspices, co-organized the exhibitions New Sculptures for Middelheim (1992), Middelheimmuseum, Middelheim; On Taking a Normal Situation... (1993), MuHKA Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp; and The Sublime Void: On the Memory of the Imagination (1993), Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, Antwerp. She has gone on to be the founding director of Roomade, Brussels (1996–2005) where she initiated and produced projects in collaboration with artists such as Mullican Matt Mullican under Hypnosis (1996), Carsten Höller, Boudewijn Experiment, Deliberate Experiment in Doubt (2000), and Andreas Slominski (1997), and produced a series of artist's films and exhibitions such as Laboratorium (1999) co-curated. In 2005, she founded the Brussels Biennial, and was the artistic director of it first edition Brussels Biennial I, “Re-used Modernity” (2008–09).
Ian Cheng is an American artist known for his live simulations that explore the capacity of living agents to deal with change. His simulations, commonly understood as "virtual ecosystems" are "less about the wonders of new technologies than about the potential for these tools to realize ways of relating to a chaotic existence." His work has been widely exhibited internationally, including MoMA PS1, Serpentine Galleries, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Migros Museum, and other institutions.
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.
Andrea Bellini is an Italian and Swiss curator and contemporary art critic based in Geneva, Switzerland. Since 2012, he is director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, and artistic director of the Biennial of Moving Images.
Asad Raza is an American artist who lives and works in New York, NY.
Mia Locks is a contemporary art curator.
The Suiciders is a 2013 novel by Travis Jeppesen. Jeppesen's experimental, non-linear narrative novel is about a group of queer squatters who declare war against their own minds and embark upon a road trip to the end of the world. The work was described by the publisher as a "post-punk nouveau roman." In his review of the book, the novelist Blake Butler described the novel as such: "There are 10,000 plots per page. It is in the accumulation of the plots, and the fantastic charging of Jeppesen's total mish-mash of syntax, physics, framing, voice, and possibility, that keeps you reading." Another critic assessed the novel as "shocking, funny, and thought-provoking...a piece of abstract visual art, but constructed with words."
