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Art nerds can’t wait until the Whitney Biennial, which happens every two years. It’s always a gigantic showcase of some of the coolest, newest and most provocative art at a big New York City museum. It’s the Whitney Museum of American Art’s landmark exhibition series and the longest-running survey of American Art.
This year, the Biennial is themed “Even Better Than The Real Thing” and features the work of 71 artists and collectives. It does a lot in this iteration. According to the museum the survey examines rapidly advancing technologies and machine learning tools; the body and subjectivity as it pertains to queer identity, body sovereignty, motherhood, the aging body, and the trans body; material agency and the use of unstable media; the psychological implications of architectural spaces and the systems of power that they represent; larger histories of non-Western communities, and how myth, cosmologies, land, water, Earth, and geological ecosystems relate; the impact of war, dictatorships, colonialism, and the resurfacing of lost cultural histories.
Overarching is the focus on “the real,” an extremely present topic these days with the onslaught of incorrect ChatGPT answers, horrifying deep fakes and art made by AI.
“This examination of reality is highlighted through various rough lines and connections between artists, material, and ideas and acknowledges that today, society is at a critical inflection point,” the museum states.
During my sneak peek visit to the museum on Tuesday, I saw so many impressive works, and while they all deserve your attention, here are five of the coolest you need to see when you go.
1. “Ruins of Empire II or The Earth Swallows the Master’s House” by Kiyan Williams
This sculpture on the museum’s terrace stopped me in my tracks. It depicts the facade of the White House, which in this case is made of earth, leaning and sinking into the floor. On top, an American flag hangs upside down. The soil it is made with is meant to evoke instability in our political foundations. The Earth’s erosion and cracking, which you can see up close, serves as a look at our penchant for institutionality and the current moment when institutions are toppling. I recommend stepping on the soil and getting up closer to see its cracks and shadows.
Bonus: Statue of Freedom (Marsha P. Johnson)
Diagonal to the ruins is Williams’ second piece—an aluminum sculpture of Marsha P. Johnson, the celebrated trans activist, who holds a sign reading “Power to the People” and holding a burning cigarette in her hand. It’s no coincidence the two are positioned this way. Here, she stands as a witness to the “ruination of the White House” the museum writes.
2. “Once Again …. (Statues Never Die)” by Isaac Julien
Enter into a dark room and you’ll see this work play out across five screens showing different angles. The film depicts Alain Locke (1885-1954) a philosopher, educator and cultural critic of the Harlem Renaissance who encouraged Black people to embrace African art to reclaim their heritage. The artist describes it as a “form of poetic restitution” and a “diasporic dream-space” as it talks about the ways museums have collected African art. It raises the questions: Who gets to define Black modernism? Who has the authority to speak? How to men negotiate power, or queer desire? And it is incredibly gorgeous to look at.
3. “we must stop imagining apocalypse/genocide + we must imagine liberation” by Demian Diné Yazhi
This large-scale collection of neon signs is set in front of the western windows of the museum so that it can be seen from the street. The artist is clearly and directly calling on activists to avoid predicting futures rooted in the Euro-Western fascination with apocalypse. Instead, they suggest, finding other ways to work through oppressive moments together.
4. "Adonis River" by Dala Nasser
You can’t miss this cool, towering sculpture that mimics the columns of a Greek temple. Nasser has created her own temple with sculptures draped with paintings of charcoal rubbings of rocks by the Adonis Cave and Temple in Lebanon. The location has become a unifying site in that country and has been a source for mythology and mourning across time.
5. “Pollinator” by Tourmaline
My favorite work was a video by Tourmaline, a trans artist, writer and activist who used found footage and archival material of Marsha P. Johnson’s funeral and life celebration as well as moments from her own home videos interspersed with gorgeous footage of herself walking through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Edwardian period rooms at the Brooklyn Museum—acting as a sort of pollinator. It feels sorrowful and significant.
“It is a film that also uses auditory components to speak about and speak through space time and dimension about the unendingness of life,” she told me that day. “My hope is the people experiencing the work will calibrate to that feeling. I’m blending footage of Marsha’s funeral procession with a moment with my dad in Memphis in 2005, with me in zero gravity and in the gardens at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It’s really about using that meticulously selected archival with my own self-portraiture to really weave together this feeling of groundedness and aliveness.”
You can see the “Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better than the Real Thing” starting March 20. You can see it for free on Friday nights and Second Sundays, too!