New York
Whitney Museum of American Art
This year’s Whitney Biennial (on view through August 23, 2026) searches for that elusive sweet spot between relevance and consolation. Works by 56 artists spread over two floors and outdoor spaces ask what it means to be American and reimagine life in the United States while also probing the reach of American power.
Deciding against clear-cut themes, curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer have loosely organized the show around concepts of kinship and infrastructure. Kinship, as expressed in their selections, not only accents the interdependence and shared affinity of relationships, but also deconstructs notions of singularity, especially around the body and gender. Precious Okoyomon’s amalgams of handmade children’s toys with attached bird wings and rope (Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid, 2026) startle with their abject strangeness. Andrea Fraser’s installation of life-size napping babies made of microcrystalline wax, aluminum, and steel explores the gestational relationship of motherhood. Displayed in Plexiglas boxes like scientific specimens, these five sculptures (Untitled (Object I–V)) gain further emotional and psychological impact through their placement next to the colorful paintings of overlaid and embracing bodies by Carmen de Monteflores, Fraser’s mother. Raven Halfmoon’s larger-than-life-size stoneware sculptures refuse a fixed viewpoint. Instead, their surfaces, marked by expressive modeling of fingers and hands, combine multiple perspectives to accent mutuality, change, and metamorphosis.
Other artists investigate infrastructure and its all-pervasive influence on contemporary experience and systems of power. Rule (2024–ongoing), David L. Johnson’s installation composed of signs taken from city and private parks, comments on the narratives of authority that circulate in the public sphere. Placed high up on the wall as if along an imaginary fence line, these varyingly sized placards, each stamped with printed dictates of passive control and recommended behavior, spell out a humorous subtext of repeated prohibitions, the limits of rules, and the potential for resistance in public life. Nani Chacon’s Our Gods Walk Among Us, Our Gods Walk Above Us, and Our Gods Walk Below Us (all 2026) are equally subversive. Installed outside on a patio, the three tall structures made of steel beams might be mistaken for television or radio antenna towers. But these geometrically intricate constructions, with their attached bells resembling glyphs, do not transmit; instead, they mark sites of sovereignty and resistance, evoking ritual as well as Indigenous and Chicana modes of storytelling.
All of these works convey something of the discordant yet fruitful environment the curators hoped to present. More pointed critique continues in Zach Blas’s CULTUS (2023), an intimidating, immersive environment exploring the idolization of technology in Silicon Valley; a room-size video installation by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme on loss and displacement in Palestine and Gaza; and Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien’s double-sided papier-mâché triptychs, which engage the worker exploitation, landlessness, and social inequality that reflect a century of U.S. colonial interference in the Philippines.
While these artists imbue the Biennial with disruptive political and social narratives, others make their point through humor and satire. Pat Oleszko’s colorful inflatable sculptures deploy exaggeration and jest to challenge notions of gender and conformity. Her carnivalesque world, where nothing is proper and everything is over-the-top, invites us to reject convention and celebrate the liberating potential of excess. In SHE MUST BE A MATRIARCH (2023), Anna Tsouhlarakis offers a droll reinterpretation of the stereotypical monuments representing Native American warriors. Her riderless white horse, armed with arrows and shafts topped with pointing hands, charges through a field of egg- and breast-like forms (identified as inflated condoms) to proclaim the ascendance of matriarchy.
Other works celebrate remembrance and collective memory. In Five of them were hers and she carved shelters with windows into the backs of their skulls (2024), Malcolm Peacock uses approximately 3,500 braids of synthetic hair to fabricate the trunk of a sequoia tree that embodies endurance and connects the promise and loss of nature and civil rights (the attached texts come from the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Malcom X). Likewise, Agosto Machado’s shrines, with their accumulation of photos, drawings, and personal objects belonging to artists and friends lost to AIDS and discrimination, honor and memorialize while underscoring the importance of activism, reminding us that, in these repressive times, the personal is still political.
Perhaps the clearest statement of the deliberate dissonance at the core of this Biennial can be found in Michelle Lopez’s video installation Pandemonium (2025), which began as a performance staged inside a planetarium dome. A circular projection on the ceiling opens into a swirling maelstrom of newspapers, flags, clothing, and cast-off items. Jumbled, unsettling, and anarchic, Lopez’s destructive storm of an installation encompasses everything in the present state of America, engulfing us in the chaos.
