The Whitney Biennial is always a hard show to opine on, feelings often run high and hard.
In each Biennial, the museum endeavors to mix it up with new curators from across artistic disciplines, who in turn strive to fix the current state of American art in time. To critically pan it has become a past time or one of mixed emotions at best.
If you are one of the chosen curators of the Biennial you must know going into the game you will never receive the acclaim that equals the prestige in the moment of being asked. This year selected curators Anthony Elms, Michelle Grabner and Stuart Comer assembled the latest iteration of American art, which has its surprises and delights amidst an overwhelming amount of stuff.
As Patrica mentions at the end of this video (below), the Biennial is a representation of works we’ve already seen not an exhibition of the “new”. I imagine each curator looking over their own set of interests, experiences, relationships to art and artists in an effort to best incapuslate the moment. And so, we can only view this as interpretive of the American landscape and not a definitive account.
So that said, lets move on to the works of art that Patricia and I focused on this years show and by no means should you view this as a survey, we merely scratched the surface. There is a lot of “interactivity” and a dizzying amount of things to read from arts publications. A strong nod to the representation of queer artists distributed throughout the exhibition and equally important, a showing of women painters (thanks to Grabner herself a painter, who teaches painting at the Art institute of Chicago).
