Discover the Standout Works at This Year’s Whitney Biennial
The 82nd edition runs March 8 through August 23 and features sound-based works, monumental sculptures, blown glass, and more
If the Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art isn’t a little bit chaotic and confrontational, we’d be surprised and maybe disappointed—the world’s signature state-of-contemporary art event is famous for giving us what critic Robert Hughes called (in a different context) “the shock of the new.”
I still remember my first Whitney Biennial, the famously fractious 1993 edition, during which some visitors were given a button reading I Can’t Ever Imagine Wanting to Be White, a work by Daniel J. Martinez. That meant we were off to the races.
The latest edition, running March 8 through August 23, was organized by Whitney curators Marcel Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, and the mood is closer to low-key unease, with occasional flare-ups. There are several sound-based works, which help set an atmosphere and a moody echo throughout the show.
As Sawyer tells me, one of the many themes is artists who enjoy complicating “the idea of cuteness.” Pat Oleszko’s giant inflatable Blowhard, (1995), a jester blowing into a horn of fire, should be amusing but is actually sinister; there’s something awkward about how it takes over the room and doesn’t quite fit. “A lot of artists are playing with that to various degrees—something that at first appears non-threatening but is smuggling in a critique or darker idea,” says Sawyer.
Precious Okoyomon’s Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid, (2026), is a great example, given the tension between the title and the stuffed animals and taxidermied birds hanging from ropes that comprise the sculpture.
Not at all cute, but sure to be Instagrammed, is Anna Tsouhlarakis’s monumental, all-white equestrian piece in fiberglass, SHE MUST BE A MATRIARCH, (2023), an indigenous riff on classical sculpture. The horse doesn’t have a human rider exactly, it has spear-like shapes that turn into pointing hands at the end, and the bubble-like forms of the base turn out to be made of puffy condoms.
Among sculptures, I responded especially to the totemic Sun Twins, (2023), by Raven Halfmoon, a beautifully glazed stoneware piece featuring two figures with somewhat mysterious expressions—they look like they are thinking critically.
The craft that went into Malcolm Peacock’s Five of them were hers and she carved shelters with windows into the backs of their skulls, (2024), is wildly impressive. It’s a huge tree trunk, but made with 3,500 hand-braided strands of synthetic hair that took Peacock 10 months to weave. An exploration of Black communal knowledge, it has pages from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and The Autobiography of Malcolm X tacked to it, plus an audio accompaniment.
I was intrigued by the six wall works from Sula Bermudez-Silverman, made of blown glass and steel. The amethyst color of the glass brings you in, but the metal is rusted and takes the form of animal traps. The idea of beauty and violence intertwined is age-old, but it works well, and would be great in a show someday, with the wall works of veteran sculptor Melvin Edwards. It jibes with what Sawyer tells me about one of the currents he sees running through the show: “Rather than telling people about things, how do you make them feel something intangible?”
Surveillance has been a huge theme in the art world over the past decade, and several works take a shot at addressing it. Erin Jane Nelson shows a fleet of works that are functional pinhole cameras, but made of ceramic. Aziz Hazara gets a large wall for Moon Sightings, (2024), which look like moody abstractions but turn out to be taken from U.S. military night-vision goggles left over in Afghanistan, where he is from. Cooper Jacoby’s highly elaborate installation Estate (January 21, 2016) mixes surveillance, A.I. models, and interactive cues from viewers (and some other inputs, too), all in the form of door intercoms.
Sometimes art tells us something about society elliptically, but bluntness has its place, too. I really responded to David L. Johnson’s Rule, for which he simply assembled a long line of rule-laden signs from New York’s semi-public plazas, the kind that developers get a tax break for providing. Usually cramped, stuck into the armpit between an office building and a condo, the plazas have restrictions that make them not really public at all (no rollerblading!). Merely by accumulating and presenting them, he’s made a point that doesn’t come across when you come upon one in the wild.
Although not a painting-heavy Biennial, it’s hard to resist Carmen de Monteflores’s color-blocked paintings of people, reduced to simple and powerful shapes, especially when paired with the pale bodily sculptures by her daughter, Andrea Fraser, a family affair of figurality.
Kamrooz Aram, the subject of a great show at Alexander Gray Associates right now, shows four of his elegant abstract paintings, one of which also features a cabinet incorporating a couple of ceramic pieces. Another of Aram’s works has a folding screen, not a canvas, for a base, a move that is part of his interrogation of what kind of art is considered “decorative,” and who gets to decide that. Regardless of the meta art narrative, he knows how to use curve and color brilliantly. Eli Eyal’s amusingly cartoonish and also touching painting Look Where I Took You, (2026), has a touch of Philip Guston in its squishy figures. It depicts a scene from his childhood at the Baghdad amusement park where Eyal’s mother took him in 2003, before they left Iraq.
Ultimately, it may be Michelle Lopez’s video Pandemonium, projected on the ceiling, that crystallizes at least one undeniable truth about the show’s themes and the way we live now. It gives us whirling, spiraling mayhem—things are falling apart, but beautifully. That feels like it captures the idea of making art in an unsettled world.