Whitney Biennial 2026

Half of this year’s Whitney Biennial is very good. This is a signal achievement, given the show’s near-impossible curatorial mandate—to survey American art with an emphasis on early-career artists—and the mediocre execution that has characterized its recent history. Considered as a whole, the sixth-floor galleries were articulate and organized according to legible connections without feeling heavy-handed, and nearly every piece of work was a privilege to encounter. And while the formal and thematic connections between the pieces were clear—Agosto Machado’s altars and shrines, for example, were well served by their proximity to the updated form of memorial considered by Cooper Jacoby—nothing felt crowded or dependent on its surroundings. 

By contrast, the fifth floor presented works of variable quality with no apparent thematic or formal relationship to one another. This was what I expected both from the examples of previous editions and from a press release emphasizing “transition,” “mood and texture,” “tenderness,” and other words that are not ideas. This conceptual evasion mirrors the moral evasion required by an institution that recently shut down a uniquely democratic program of arts education, the Whitney Independent Study Program, rather than allow performances that acknowledged the genocide in Gaza.1

This is not to say that the artists on this floor have nothing to offer; much of the work is strong. But the expectation that I attend to the delicate craft of Jasmin Sian’s lacemaking when a massive inflatable head by Pat Oleszko (Blowhard, 1995) has colonized my peripheral vision is unrealistic at best. The haphazard arrangement of work on this floor means that everything is free-floating and without context, yet never left to signify on its own terms. This problem becomes urgent and explicitly political when we consider Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s Until we became fire and fire us (2023–ongoing). A more thoughtful arrangement might have allowed American viewers to see it in conversation with other works of art and, by extension, to see the artists as equal partners in a global community and conversation. Conversely, a solo show would have encouraged the appropriate amount of time and space to consider the complexity of the installation. Here, it is a dark room with images evoking destruction that visitors pass through on the way from one unrelated object to another. Without some effort to integrate the work and in the absence of other Palestinian artists (bar Samia Halaby), its inclusion feels instrumental: allowing the museum to appear open-minded and visitors to confirm their impression of Palestine as a wasteland populated by inspiring survivors and to feel better because they’ve done some witnessing. 

More on the political failures of the museum and the art-jargon slop that results later, because the curatorial success of the sixth floor really deserves your attention. Michelle Lopez’s digital video Pandemonium (2025) meets visitors at the elevator. Made for a planetarium but here projected on a round screen hanging from the ceiling, its imagery of a crumbling brick structure and torn newspapers swirling in a storm (the artist built a tornado machine to achieve this effect) is mesmerizing and ominous. Much like the organization of the rest of the sixth floor, it strikes a balance between legibility and subtlety; it requires interpretation, but doesn’t tip into the arcane. In the exhibition catalogue, Lopez notes that while they are “still deeply committed to formalism, it doesn’t seem entirely appropriate for this moment.” The piece’s cinematic size and production values are inviting; it is a good entry point for a biennial that aspires to attract a more diverse audience than previous years.   

In their installation Continuous Fractures Generating New Yields (2025), the Brooklyn-based collective CFGNY (Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, Kirsten Kilponen, and Tin Nguyen) cite construction sites and urban ruin using plastic-wrapped two-by-fours and porcelain sculptures made from sutured fragments. Their display in front of mirrors is a challenge to the self-regard of those “connoisseurs” of gritty urban environments. The day-to-day fascism that is necessary to render grit unthreatening is the subject of David L. Johnson’s Rule (2024-ongoing). Johnson has stolen many signs bearing codes of conduct from public-private spaces such as Zuccotti Park. This project—which reminds us how much control property owners have over the behavior of a city’s population—occupies the same room as diminutive photographs of staple-covered telephone poles by Mo Costello, attesting to more absent messages, and beautiful sculptures by Kainoa Gruspe made from objects and materials typically found at (and possibly stolen from) building sites. 

If these works allude to the codes, physical structures, and forms of communication that shape urban communities, Aki Onda’s sound installation invokes the imagined community of the nation. Onda restaged a piece of music that was composed by the Filipino ethnomusicologist José Maceda to be played through the streets of Manila (Ugnayan, 1974/2026). The twenty radio stations through which the composition’s twenty tracks were originally broadcast are here replaced by as many tape decks on a multilevel platform. This piece—the emotional register of which is so at odds with the conditions of US imperialism and repressive dictatorship in which it was first produced and heard—reminds those of us guiltily skulking around the metropole that countries subjected to domination do not cease culturally to exist or collapse into mute trauma. It also directly confronts the networks of patronage and state power often needed to make large-scale projects, raises the possibility that the “Filipino” music on display here is radically different from what it would have been in the absence of imperialism, and offers another example of good art being inseparable from power and politics. 

This work, and the show’s (partly) intelligent installation, are not matched by the exhibition literature. It may be fair to ask why a press release matters if the exhibition it announces pulls its conceptual weight. But it is also fair to demand that institutions charged with representing the creative output of the United States at a given moment in history have something to say about that moment. The artists included in this show clearly do not think they are making art in a vacuum; the curators’ selection and organization of their work strongly suggests the same. Yet the official line on the biennial was that it was concerned with relationality, feelings, cuteness, moods, how we relate at intimate and macro levels, intergenerational connections, and affect. 

The wall text at the entrance describes the included artists, whose countries of origin range from Afghanistan to Vietnam, as being “marked by the broad reach of US power,” which is fine. I’m glad that US art institutions have begun to shed their provincialism. But the nature and operation of US power cannot adequately be addressed by appeals to “togetherness through difference—avoiding clear ideological declarations in favor of the unusual alliances, improvised provocations and irreverent associations that are required to thrive in the present moment.” I suspect that this obfuscatory language is enforced by the institution, and that, contrary to repeated claims that ambiguity makes good art, its repression of political realities is responsible for the incoherence of large parts of the show. 

The idea that vague “transitions” are more aesthetically legitimate and complex than decisive breaks and clear declarations is a shabby disguise for the moral cowardice of institutions in thrall to their board members. Of course, it is not the job of artists to take strident and unambiguous positions—although they certainly have in the past, and continue to do so. Art does us a disservice when it is pegged to headlines and narrow definitions of what counts as political. Not because art is better off without politics, but because it imaginatively expands our sense of the political: its location, its scale, its function. It reminds us that political life is not reducible to military conflicts and elections. Insisting that the only options are either aesthetic complexity or clear ideological positions is itself a political position. Furthermore, families, intimacies, and feelings are no less “political” than topics classed as geopolitical, historical, and social realities. Feelings, families, generations…. All of these things are historically contingent, political formations necessitated by social relations of production. “Moods” are not ontologically stable extra-political states.

The art included in this notably untitled biennial provides ample proof that work concerned with reality can still be beautiful, ambivalent, nuanced, and generative. The retreat to what amounts to a slightly updated version of conservative formalism at this historic moment, in this country, by an institution that so recently denied both genocide and the legitimacy of open discussion and artistic exploration of political violence, isn’t inspiring, but it is clarifying. Leaving politics at the door for the sake of other values—objectivity, complexity, beauty, peace—is an unavoidably political move. We need to stop pretending otherwise. 

Editors' note: this text was amended on March 9 to note the inclusion in the exhibition of work by Samia Halaby.