Whitney Biennial 2019
May 17–Sep 22
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May 14—16, 2019
The Whitney Museum of American Art announced the seventy-five artists selected to present their work in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. This will be the seventy-ninth in the long-running series of exhibitions launched by the Museum’s founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, in 1932. Considered the country’s foremost survey of contemporary American art, the Whitney Biennial delivers a frontline report on what’s happening in American art today. The 2019 edition will run from May 17 through September 22.
The Whitney Biennial is an unmissable event for anyone interested in finding out what’s happening in art today. Curators Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley have been visiting artists over the past year in search of the most important and relevant work. Featuring seventy-five artists working in painting, sculpture, installation, film and video, photography, performance, and sound, the 2019 Biennial takes the pulse of the contemporary artistic moment. Introduced by the Museum’s founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1932, the Biennial is the longest-running exhibition in the country to chart the latest developments in American art.
The artists selected for the 2019 Whitney Biennial, ranging from emerging to well-established individuals and collectives, are working in painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, film and video, photography, performance, and sound. Work will be presented throughout the Fifth and Sixth Floor exhibition galleries, as well as in numerous spaces both inside and outside the Museum. The curators traveled throughout the country and made more than 300 studio visits over the past year.
A broad range of performance projects and artists will be presented, with some artists directly engaged with dance (and the history of the medium), and others working in the space of social engagement and critique. Eight artists (including one collective) will be working in the galleries, in the theater, outdoors, and in various interstitial spaces throughout the Museum.
Among the artists in the performance program are Morgan Bassichis, who combines stand-up comedy, music, and mysticism into stories of queer alienation, love, and liberation; Brendan Fernandes, whose sculptural installation in the galleries will be activated by ballet dancers; Madeline Hollander, whose choreographic work questions the boundaries between our bodies and the environments we inhabit; Sahra Motalebi, who will present a new iteration of her opera Directory of Portrayals in the theater; and Las Nietas de Nonó, comprised of two sisters, Lydela and Michel Nonó, whose joint practice encompasses performance, theater, dance, and visual art, combined with activism and education, in work that focuses on their home neighborhood, Barrio San Antón in Carolina, Puerto Rico.
Making use of an augmented reality component, Lucas Blalock will create a mural-sized photographic work to be exhibited on the façade of 95 Horatio Street, located opposite the Museum and across from the southern entrance to the High Line, on the corner of Gansevoort and Washington Streets. Jeffrey Gibson will create a work for the Lobby using fabric and text, to be installed above the admissions desk; Diane Simpson will have a solo presentation with multiple sculptures in the Lobby Gallery; Marcus Fischer’s sound installation will be heard in the stairwell; the Fifth Floor terrace will be the site of a new sculptural installation with embedded videos by Meriem Bennani; and there will be a new large-scale, multi-part sculpture by Nicole Eisenman, a tableau of monumental figures, installed on the Museum’s Sixth Floor terrace.
Click here for the complete list of artists.
