Whitney Biennial 2019
This year at its seventy-ninth edition, the Whitney Biennial – the foremost US survey of contemporary American art – opens at the Whitney Museum in New York on May 17. Co-curated by Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley, the exhibition presents works by 75 artists, mostly under 40 and never included in a previous edition of the biennial – Lucas Blalock, Nicole Eisenman, Forensic Architecture, Iman Issa, Josh Kline, Calvin Marcus, and Martine Syms, among the others. L’Officiel Art asked curator Jane Panetta a few questions on this 2019 iteration.
L’OFFICIEL ART: You have made more than 300 studio visits all over the country to select the artists for this year’s Whitney Biennial. Could you tell us more about this selection process?
JANE PANETTA: Our studio visits were an opportunity to meet many new artists but also many that we knew already, allowing us to see new work from a familiar figure. Our visits were a critical opportunity to get a general feel for what artists were doing and making across the United States in 2018 and 2019, something that felt essential to us as part of our overall process. In terms of selecting artists for the show, we were consistently interested in work that felt strong and resonant, but also felt committed to including a broad range of artists in this exhibition who had not been part of previous Whitney Biennials, understanding what a difficult moment it is for emerging artists and what an important opportunity and platform the Biennial provides.
In each of its editions, the Whitney Biennial has mapped the state of contemporary art in the US, every two years since 1932. How will this 2019 edition respond to the cultural and political landscape of the contemporary United States?
Generally speaking, the work in this exhibition contains a strong undercurrent of social and political content, understandable in this intensely polarized moment. Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of the show is one that we feel is open-ended and even hopeful. During our visits to studios across the country, the heightened emotional state we might have expected to find in the work seemed sublimated: undeniably present but directed toward thoughtful and productive experimentation, and re-envisioning new ways forward.
This 2019 edition will feature a strong program of performances as well, including projects by Madeline Hollander, Morgan Bassichis and Las Nietas de Nonó.
Yes, the 2019 Whitney Biennial will have a robust performance program including a total of eight artists working in different spaces throughout the building: in the galleries, in the theater, outdoors, and in various interstitial spaces throughout the museum. There is a broad range of projects and artists, some more directly engaged with dance (and the history of the medium), others working in the space of social engagement and critique. It felt particularly important to us to include an extensive performance and film program in the exhibition, given the fact that artists in those areas often struggle even more than their peers with object-based practices.
Whitney Biennial 2019. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. May 17 – September 22.