All posts tagged: Whitney Biennial

How Painter Akira Ikezoe Became the Spring’s Breakout Star in New York

How Painter Akira Ikezoe Became the Spring’s Breakout Star in New York

Published by José Betancourt

Akira Ikezoe has recently been thinking a lot about all that can be done with milk. It can be obtained from a cow, packaged, sold, and consumed, yes. But what if you could paint with it, or bathe in it, or even become resurrected by drinking it? These are all scenarios that appear in a new painting by Ikezoe that features an array of naked figures (and some skeletons) who are roped into a dairy-centric system that happens to involve a pit of fire and a large mural. In typical Ikezoe fashion, everything is depicted with the sobriety of a diagram in an instruction manual. It’s funny, bizarre, and more than a little terrifying. Related Articles Standing before the painting in his New York studio, Ikezoe pointed to the top of the canvas, where faceless people pull at the udders of two cows. “They are taking milk out of the cow, and they start using the milk as paint,” Ikezoe said, narrating the scene. “But someone kicked the can of paint and stepped on it, …

Precious Okoyomon’s Whitney Biennial Installation Is a True Shocker

Precious Okoyomon’s Whitney Biennial Installation Is a True Shocker

Published by José Betancourt

Earlier this month, the Whitney Biennial went on view to the usual amount of fanfare—but one work was notably missing from the show. That work, a room-filling installation by Precious Okoyomon featuring stuffed animals and racist dolls suspended from the ceiling by nooses, was initially meant to appear in the lobby. But shortly before the exhibition opened to the press, the artist and the show’s curators pulled the plug on that plan. The issue, Okoyomon told ARTnews this week, was not the piece’s disturbing subject matter but a more practical problem: they felt they needed more space to realize such an ambitious project. “It didn’t work,” they said of the initial lobby idea. The dolls and animals “needed to be lower. You have to engage with them in a place where you can look at them and be with them.” Related Articles We met on the Whitney Museum’s the eighth floor, where their installation, titled Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid (2026), finally went on view Wednesday. Cupping their poodle, Gravity, …

Whitney Biennial Artists Explore Boundaries Between Human and Machine

Whitney Biennial Artists Explore Boundaries Between Human and Machine

Published by Jenni Sidey

As I stood in the Whitney Museum’s sixth-floor gallery for the opening of this year’s Biennial, I found the eye of a surveillance camera, iridescent and round as a soap bubble, staring back at me. It was implanted in a rectangular body the color of aging plastic, decades-old desktop computers, and exposed bone. There was also a small embedded LED screen marking hours, months, days, and years, but since what was not clear. I was about to walk away, confused, when the voice of an elderly woman echoed out, full of warmth and experience. “It was a combination of too little sleep, too many chores, and a teeny tiny toddler,” she said cheerily. “Not to mention the supermoon!” I laughed, first in surprise, a wave of affection bubbling up that was quickly quashed by wariness. Related Articles The work, Estate (July 10, 2022), by Cooper Jacoby, surfaces an emergent genre of horror seeping through the mass consciousness: that of measurement and quantification. Jacoby made the work by scraping text from deceased creatives’ social media and …

75 Museum Exhibitions and Biennials to See in Spring 2026

75 Museum Exhibitions and Biennials to See in Spring 2026

Published by José Betancourt

All roads lead to Italy this season, and not only because the Venice Biennale, the greatest art exhibition of them all, opens there in May. Over in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is staging a Raphael retrospective—the first ever devoted to the Renaissance master in the US, shockingly. In Paris, at the Louvre, another titan of the Renaissance takes center stage: Michelangelo, whose sculptures will be shown alongside Rodin’s. In Vienna, the Kunsthistorisches Museum is giving a big show to Canaletto and his nephew, Bernardo Bellotto. But back to the Biennale. That exhibition is the most high-profile biennial in the world and the star of a year that marks an astonishing convergence of biennials taking place the world over. New York alone is getting two this spring: the Whitney Biennial and Greater New York, at the Whitney Museum and MoMA PS1, respectively. Then, in Pittsburgh, there’s the Carnegie International, and farther afield, in Australia, there’s the Biennale of Sydney. Big group shows like these are great, of course, but there’s nothing better than …

The 2026 Whitney Biennial Swaps Identity for Infrastructure.

The 2026 Whitney Biennial Swaps Identity for Infrastructure.

Published by José Betancourt

This year’s Whitney Biennial spotlights “the greater United States”—a term from historian Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire. It describes not only the country’s 50 states but also its occupied countries, annexes, military bases, and territories. Strategically, Immerwahr argues, words like “colony” and “empire” have been evaded by officials since World War II—but that’s just semantics. As the country turns 250, the 2026 Whitney Biennial—that storied finger on the pulse of American art—takes a deliberate look beyond the “logo map,” another of Immerwahr’s terms for the geographic shape most people picture when they think of “the United States.” Curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer included artists from US-occupied Okinawa, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; from Chile, where the US engaged in clandestine interventions; from current and former territories, like Puerto Rico and the Philippines; and from Palestine, where the US continues to fund a genocide. The move is both timeless and timely: while I was writing this review, my phone buzzed to inform me that Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, had been killed …