Whitney Biennial | |
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![]() The banner of the 2006 Whitney Biennial: Day For Night in front of the Whitney Museum | |
Frequency | Biennial |
Organised by | Whitney Museum of American Art |
The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American [1] 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. [2] [3] [4] The Biennial helped bring artists like Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and Jeff Koons, among others, to prominence. [5]
In 2010, for the first time a majority of the 55 artists included in that survey of contemporary American art were women. [6] The 2012 exhibition featured 51 artists, the smallest number in the event's history. [7]
The fifty-one artists for 2012 were selected by curator Elisabeth Sussman and freelance curator Jay Sanders. [8] It was open for three months up to 27 May 2012 and presented for the first time "heavy weight" on dance, music and theatre. Those performance art variations were open to spectators all day long in a separate floor. [9]
The Whitney Museum had a long history beginning in 1932 of having a large group exhibition of invited American artists every year called the 'Whitney Annual'. In the late sixties, it was decided to alternate between painting and sculpture, although by the 1970s the decision was to combine both together in a biennial. The first Biennial occurred in 1973. Since then, the biennials have pursued a different curatorial approach to include all media.
In the past the Whitney Museum has tried different ways to organize its biennial. It has used its own staff members and invited outside curators, including Europeans, to present the show. In 2010 it even asked a former art dealer, Jay Sanders, who would later become a Whitney curator, to help organize one. [10]
The Whitney Biennial often extends to sculpture exhibitions in Central Park. [11] The 2008 edition took over the Park Avenue Armory as a space for performance and installation art. The 2014 Whitney Biennial is the last one in the museum's Marcel Breuer building. The museum is leaving the Upper East Side for the meatpacking district, where it is scheduled to open its new building, designed by Renzo Piano, in 2015. [10]
In 1987, the show was protested by the Guerrilla Girls for its alleged sexism and racism.
Still referred to as the "political" biennial, the 1993 edition included works like Pepón Osorio's installation Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?) of a Hispanic family's living room and Daniel Joseph Martinez's metal buttons bearing the message "I can't imagine ever wanting to be white." [12] The 1993 Whitney Biennial was the most diverse exhibit by a major American museum up until that time. [13] In 1970 less than 1% of artists at the Whitney Museum were non-white. In 1991, only 10% of artists were non white. Vanessa Faye Johnson stated that despite intentions, the "lack of exchange and dialogue, the simplification of complex issues in the Biennial" effectively cast the artists largely as victims in the eyes of the public. Roberta Smith, an art critic for The New York Times , called it "pious, [and] often arid". [14] The art historian Robert Hughes vehemently criticized lack of painting, and the "wretched pictorial ineptitude" of the artists, dismissed the abundance of text as "useless, boring mock documentation", and mocked the focus on "exclusion and marginalization ... [in] a world made bad for blacks, Latinos, gays, lesbians and women in general. [15] " The largely shared sentiment was that the public felt alienated by the confrontational demands of the artwork. It was the first Whitney Biennial to treat video works with the same attention to space as sculpture, designating two entire galleries to them. Text-heavy Installations demanded attention and participation from the audience. The artists made it extremely difficult to take in the work as a passive viewer.
Since 2000, the Bucksbaum Award has been awarded to an artist exhibiting at the Biennial.
The 2014 Whitney Biennial was also somewhat controversial for its lack of diversity, 9 out of the 109 artists were black or African American, [16] including Donelle Woolford, a fictional character developed by 52-year-old white artist Joe Scanlan. She was the only black female artist included in curator Michelle Grabner's exhibition. Eunsong Kim and Maya Isabella Mackrandilal criticized the piece: "The insertion of people of color into white space doesn't make it less colonial or more radical—that's the rhetoric of imperialistic multiculturalism, a bullshit passé theory." and suggest this pieces treats "othered bodies [as] subcontractable. [17] "
Additionally, The YAMS Collective, or HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, a collective of 38 mostly black and queer artists, writers, composers, academics, filmmakers and performers participated and withdrew from the 2014 Biennial [18] as a protest of the Whitney Museum's policies. [19]
Yams Collective member and artist Sienna Shields said "Every Whitney Biennial I have ever been to, you can barely count the number of black artists in the show on one hand. I didn't want to be a part of that," Shields said. "There are so many amazing artists of color that I have known in the past 12 years in New York that are essentially overlooked. But I just felt it was time for an intervention." Poet Christa Bell explained: "[O]ur entire participation was a protest... Just because people don't know that doesn't mean it is any less of a protest. Withdrawal was the final act of protest. Black people en masse being inside of an institution like the Whitney, presenting art, is itself a form of protest. We just followed it through to its inevitable conclusion." [20]
The 2017 Whitney Biennial featured a controversial painting of Emmett Till, entitled Open Casket by Dana Schutz, which sparked protest and a highly circulated petition calling for the painting to be removed and destroyed. [21]
The 2019 Whitney Biennial was boycotted by a group of artists, in protest of the museum's vice chairman, Warren Kanders. Warren Kanders' companies sell military supplies (teargas and bullets) via Safariland. These bullets were used by Israeli forces and snipers during the 2018–2019 Gaza border protests. The United Nations released a report stating Israeli security forces may have committed war crimes and should be held individually and collectively accountable for the deaths of 189 Palestinian protesters in Gaza. As such, the 2019 Whitney Biennial was labelled "The Tear Gas Biennial" by Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett in an open letter on Artforum . [22] The artists who withdrew from include: Korakrit Arunanondchai, Meriem Bennani, Nicole Eisenman, Nicholas Galanin, Eddie Arroyo, Christine Sun Kim, Agustina Woodgate, and Forensic Architecture. The Forensic Architecture biennial submission, “Triple-Chaser” (2019), collected evidence, ammunition rounds, and eyewitness testimony that links Warren Kanders to the killings and maiming of Palestinians. It is a collaboration with documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. [23]
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a modern and contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. The institution was originally founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), a prominent American socialite, sculptor, and art patron after whom it is named.
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ × 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notably, the Artforum logo is a bold and condensed iteration of the Akzidenz-Grotesk font, a feat for an American publication to have considering how challenging it was to obtain fonts favored by the Swiss school via local European foundries in the 1960s. Artforum is published by Artforum Media, LLC, a subsidiary of Penske Media Corporation.
Dana Schutz is an American artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Schutz is known for her gestural, figurative paintings that often take on specific subjects or narrative situations as a point of departure.
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.
Rita Ackermann is a Hungarian-born American artist recognized for her abstract paintings that incorporate human forms, primarily focusing on themes of anthropomorphism and femininity. Her works, often depicting women and allusions to fairy tales, explore the nuances of adolescent disinterest using a unique and expressive style of brushwork. She lives in New York City.
James T. Nutt is an American artist who was a founding member of the Chicago surrealist art movement known as the Chicago Imagists, or the Hairy Who. Though his work is inspired by the same pop culture that inspired Pop Art, journalist Web Behrens says Nutt's "paintings, particularly his later works, are more accomplished than those of the more celebrated Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein." According to Museum of Contemporary Art curator Lynne Warren, Nutt is "the premier artist of his generation". Nutt attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in Chicago, Illinois. He is married to fellow-artist and Hairy Who member Gladys Nilsson.
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.
Thelma Golden is an American art curator, who is the Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City, United States. She is noted as one of the originators of the term post-blackness. From 2017 to 2020, ArtReview chose her annually as one of the 10 most influential people in the contemporary art world.
Russ Warren is an American figurative painter who has exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. and abroad, notably in the 1981 Whitney Biennial and the 1984 Venice Biennale. A painter in the neo-expressionist style, he has drawn inspiration from Spanish masters such as Velázquez, Goya and Picasso, as well as from Mexican folk art and the American southwest. Committed to his own Regionalist style during his formative years in Texas and New Mexico, he was picked up by Phyllis Kind in 1981. During those years he transitioned to a style characterized by "magical realism", and his work came to rely on symbol allegory, and unusual shifts in scale. Throughout his career, his paintings and prints have featured flat figures, jagged shadows, and semi-autobiographical content. His oil paintings layer paint, often incorporate collage, and usually contain either figures or horses juxtaposed in strange tableaux.
Adam D. Weinberg is an art museum curator. He was the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art for 20 years, from October 1, 2003 to October 31, 2023.
Hannah Black is a British visual artist, critic, and writer. Her work spans video, text and performance.
Open Casket is a 2016 painting by Dana Schutz. The subject is Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old boy who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955. It was one of the works included at the 2017 Whitney Biennial exhibition in New York curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks. The painting caused controversy, with protests and calls for the painting's destruction. Protests inside the museum lasted up to two days.
Sienna Shields is an American abstract artist specializing in large-format collage pieces. She was also the chief organizer of the HowDoYouSayYaminAfrican? artist collective and the director of its digital work, Good Stock on the Dimension Floor: An Opera which was accepted for the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
Decolonize This Place is an art collective based in New York City that organizes around Indigenous rights, black liberation, Palestinian nationalism, de-gentrification, and economic inequality. Their actions often take place at museums and cultural institutions and focus on claimed colonialist tendencies within the art world.
Jane Panetta is a New York–based curator and art historian. Panetta is currently an associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Rujeko Hockley is a New York–based US curator. Hockley is currently the Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
HowDoYouSayYamInAfrican? is a collective founded in 2013. The group, also called the YAMS Collective, was formed to bring a digital media piece titled Good Stock on the Dimension Floor: An Opera to the 2014 Whitney Biennial exhibition 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.
The 2024 Whitney Biennial, titled Even Better than the Real Thing, is the 81st edition of the Whitney Museum's art biennial, hosted between April and August 2024.
the most prestigious American contemporary exhibition
The most significant—and longest-running—survey of contemporary American art
As the Whitney Museum's signature event, the Biennial is a highly anticipated exhibition that often acts as a barometer of trends and ideas percolating in global art communities, as told through an American lens.
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