When the Whitney Biennial was last held in 2022, its production had been extended for another year by the Covid pandemic, and curators had to plan the exhibition and meet artists in virtual visits via Zoom.
In preparation for the 2024 Biennial—the latest edition of the landmark exhibition of American contemporary art, opening March 20—this edition's organizers, Whitney Museum curators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, hit the road. They conducted around 200 studio visits across the country and far beyond. They attended numerous exhibitions and art events from the German megashow Documenta 15 to the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.
So in some ways this cycle was more normal. But this is where normality ends. The drastic phase of the pandemic with its restrictions is likely to have subsided. But the landscape it leaves behind is a panorama of worsening crises – and for artists, as for everyone else, a time of great uncertainty and fear in the face of the looming US election.
As they moved, Iles and Onli said in a joint interview at the museum, they felt the ambient pressure everywhere, whether they smelled wildfire smoke wafting over highways in Los Angeles – a reflection of land overuse and climate change – or whether they heard firsthand from women and LGBTQ artists the impact of reversing Roe vs. Wade and spreading laws that undermine bodily autonomy.
“We understand that we are in a turbulent time leading to another turbulent time,” Onli said. To make an exhibition under these conditions, “the exhibition had to be politically charged,” she said.
On Thursday, the museum announced the names of the artists who will participate in the biennial, titled “Even Better Than the Real Thing.” It is relatively compact, with 69 artists and two collectives spread across the gallery exhibition, the accompanying film and performance programs – and the world map: 20 of the artists, many filmmakers, live or work outside the United States.
For Iles and Onli, the focus is less on the state of American art and more on America itself in a harsh, vulnerable time. They were drawn to artists who explored how people carried and processed society's wounds in their bodies and minds – and the creative renewal that sparked.
The title is a kind of multi-layered response to the culture wars over what is “real,” from the rise of artificial intelligence to efforts to enforce social and physical conformity. “There’s a kind of strange playfulness,” Onli said of the offerings – an ironic humor that emphasizes: “Of course we’re even better than the real ones!”
The group is diverse, as was the case at the last biennials. There are two deceased artists: Jamaican-born, architecturally inspired painter Mavis Pusey, who died in 2019 at the age of 90, and filmmaker Edward Owens, who died in 2010. There are five elders born between 1941 and 1944: pioneering feminist artists Mary Kelly and Harmony Hammond; famed black abstract painters Mary Lovelace O'Neal and Suzanne Jackson; and transsexual sculptor and performer Pippa Garner. Otherwise, the exhibition seems younger: 17 of the 42 artists in the main galleries were born in the 1980s, nine of them in the 1990s.
Not surprisingly, New York City is well represented: 13 artists in the galleries and seven in the film and performance programs are based here. A total of twelve artists are based in Los Angeles. As it turns out, four live in New Mexico: Hammond, who moved there in the 1980s; Indigenous artists Rose B. Simpson and Cannupa Hanska Luger; and Bosnian-born painter Maja Ruznic, who is influenced by mysticism and psychoanalysis.
The film and performance programs—organized by invited curators asinnajaq, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Zakary Drucker, Greg de Cuir, Jr., and Taja Cheek—include works by Southeast Asian filmmakers who engage with the broad cultural and political reach of the Americas, as well as indigenous ones Filmmakers Sámi, Inuit, Mongolian and Indian origins who strive for exchange beyond colonial borders.
Only a few artists are celebrities or market stars. Perhaps the most prominent is director Isaac Julien, whose lavish five-screen installation “Once Again… (Statues Never Die)” premiered at the Barnes Foundation in 2022, making his York debut at the Whitney.
In short telephone interviews, several artists described the works they will be presenting.
Los Angeles and London-based artist P. Staff has one of the more spectacular, harrowing works: “Afferent Nerves,” a large installation in which viewers walk beneath an electrified net, crackling out of reach but “somewhat audibly.” The area is bathed in yellow neon light. The intention, says the artist, is to create a sense of “choreographed danger” that heightens visitors' awareness of the art and perhaps their own sense of safety.
New York-based sculptor Jes Fan does disturbing work in another respect: He had a CT scan of his body taken, then 3D printed various organs and carved and sanded the resulting shapes. The inspiration is a species of tree in Hong Kong, where Fan grew up, that is aggressively felled or infected with fungi to extract a valuable incense.
The sculptures are part of the “Sites of Wounding” series, in which Fan explores how organisms, while suffering trauma, “can produce something meaningful, a kind of regeneration that happens in the formation of the scar,” which he deals with in a more humane way Condition.
Philadelphia-based artist Karyn Olivier, known for works that respond to historical monuments and public art—most recently in Newark Airport's Terminal A—will show her “more intimate, quieter sculptures.” In one, “How Many Ways Can You Disappear,” she uses a tangle of fishing nets, ropes and buoys; Another is made from washed-up driftwood and discarded clothing fragments.
Olivier said she felt like she was processing the upheaval and loss of the pandemic. “They are almost a metaphorical attempt at a solution,” said the Trinidad-born artist – and rich in allusions to migration, displacement and her Caribbean origins.
Some messages are blunt. Luger, who was born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota and lives in New Mexico, is building a full-size teepee – upside down. “It’s a signal that our species’ path is reversing,” he said.
In “The Last Safe Abortion,” Columbus, Ohio, artist Carmen Winant—a self-described “expired photographer” who works in collage and installation—offers a perspective on the lives of Midwestern abortion workers drawn from thousands of images Snapshots, most of which come from clinics. The views relate to everyday work – meetings, desk work, answering machines. “It’s not about abortion at the 30,000-foot ideological level,” Winant said. “It’s about the people who make it.”
The post-Roe climate has raised the stakes for Winant, whose projects have also honored obstetricians and domestic violence caregivers. Some clinics where she took photographs have closed. “I have always been ambivalent about the political impact and effectiveness of art,” she said. “But as I worked on this project, I felt more and more that it was my commandment.”
For the older artists at the Biennale, it is certainly welcome if recognition comes late. “I didn’t expect this at my age,” said Jackson, who ran a well-known but short-lived space for black artists in Los Angeles in the late 1960s and now lives in Savannah, Georgia.
Included in the survey are her hanging abstract acrylic paintings without stretcher frames. “They are living structures that are pure color,” she said, inviting the viewer into a kind of dance.
Hammond, a figure in New York's 1970s feminist scene, was featured at the Whitney but was long overlooked by the Biennial. “I just kept working,” she said from her home in Galisteo, New Mexico
Her recent works include thick-layered paintings, sometimes with straps, eyelets or bed covers, with patches and slits, evoking women's bodies, labor pains and wounds. In the colors that penetrate the layers, Hammond evokes “voices that are buried beneath the surfaces and assert themselves.”
When organizing their exhibition, Onli and Iles brought in several artists as partners in the process, breaking with the secrecy that often surrounds preparations for the Biennale.
One of them was JJJJJerome Ellis, an artist and performer from Norfolk, Virginia, whose work (and name) deals with the disorder of stuttering. Working with four other stutterers, Ellis led the development of a text-driven billboard overlooking Gansevoort Street in Spanish, Mandarin and English that depicted the dysfluencies of stuttering—repetitions, prolonged sounds, blockages, or pauses—through typographic symbols.
Ellis will also produce a score for the biennial, the form of which will be determined after the exhibition is installed.
Berlin-based artist and choreographer Ligia Lewis presents a dance-based film installation in the galleries entitled “A Plot A Scandal,” whose themes include philosopher John Locke, Cuban anti-slavery revolutionary José Antonio Aponte and Lewis' own maternal ancestors include The Dominican Republic. It was Lewis who developed a metaphor that inspired the curators to describe their biennale: a “dissonant refrain.”
In installing the survey, the curators said they wanted to create an exhibition that breathes and flows while honoring this dissonance. “What does it mean as an audience member to be in the middle of the chorus,” Iles said, “both listening and seeing?”