Anna Tsouhlarakis and Native Visibility at the Whitney Biennial
Anna Tsouhlarakis’s SHE MUST BE A MATRIARCH (2023), a blanched horse sculpture topped with pointed arms and spears mounted on a bed of inflated condoms, is a uniquely humorous and loaded intervention among the six Indigenous artists in the 2026 Whitney Biennial. The sextet—Tsouhlarakis, Raven Halfmoon, Teresa Baker, Nani Chacon, Kimowan Metchewais, Kekahi Wahi—hail from diffuse tribal nations and Hawai‘i, and their display at the biennial coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the U.S. reflects an acknowledgement of Indigenous artists as integral to the American art canon. At the Biennial’s members’ night, Tsouhlarakis’s work was an almost gravitational force—drawing in a tight circle of influential Native artists and cultural figures, including composer Raven Chacon, designer Brian Polymode and co-curator Rachel Martin from the Gochman Collection. Their presence isn’t fanfare but rather recognition, even as these artists navigate spaces where institutional caution and political pressures shape what can be shown.
Tsouhlarakis’s spiked fiberglass white horse sculpture stood apart in a show that otherwise tended toward conceptual restraint. The contrast was brought into sharp relief earlier that day during the press preview when an Instagram post from ARTnews framed the Biennial as ‘not polarizing,’ a characterization that quickly circulated among artists attending the preview. Among them was artist and past Whitney Biennial participant Demian DinéYazhi, who said the Biennial arrives during a moment when museums appear increasingly cautious about political expression. “A lot of institutional spaces are being very careful about the types of work and subject matter they present,” they told Observer, citing fears about funding pressures and political backlash. From the images circulating online, they said the show appears “very refined,” a quality that raised questions about how institutions are navigating political pressure in the current moment. The art world can sometimes “feel divorced from what’s happening in everyday life.”
Tsouhlarakis’s sculpture approaches intervention through a different register, one shaped more by humor and celebration than confrontation. “There’s a push and pull,” she said of the title. “Someone can say ‘she must be a matriarch’ in so many ways, sometimes as admiration, sometimes as teasing.” The sculpture’s diverse elements—arms reaching, spears pointed, a base of inflated condoms and the galloping horse itself—are intentionally eclectic. “How can I bring horses and condoms together and make something cohesive?” she said, laughing. “That’s how my mind works.”
Tsouhlarakis and Raven Halfmoon think similarly about monumentality. Halfmoon’s bronze figures, Too Ancient to Care (2025-26) and The Guardians (2024), tower at nine-by-four-feet. “Monumentality, for me, started with our nation’s earthworks—Cahokia Mounds, the great effigy Serpent Mound, the spiral mounds in Oklahoma,” she said. “These were works made not for individuals, but for the people to come together and celebrate.” Meanwhile, Tsouhlarakis’s twenty-two-by-nineteen-foot monument serves a dual purpose: laughter and defying expectations of Native art. SHE MUST BE A MATRIARCH’s disparate materials affirm self-determination, as each individually and collectively interacts with Native life. Simultaneously, Tsouhlarakis explained, the title plays with the honorific “matriarch,” which young Native women sometimes self-anoint even before childbirth. While she said titles were previously unimportant, Tsouhlarakis pointed to Native gifting culture: young Native women gifting themselves self-love and the sacredness society reserves for non-Natives. Tsouhlarakis reflects on how her own perspective has shifted: while titles were once inconsequential, she now recognizes how naming can shape experience and expectation—a playful nod to nominative determinism at work in life and art.
Together, the Biennial’s Indigenous cohort asserts a shared presence, each artist negotiating monumentality and abstraction in ways that honor heritage and contemporary life. The Harvest Melting On Our Tongue (2025) and To The Morning Light (2025) are Teresa Baker’s large astroturf and yarn-embellished works that gesture to monumentality through landscape and cosmology. Nani Chacon’s sixteen-foot-high divine triad of geometric metal figures, Our Gods Walk Above Us (2026), stands on a terrace and leaves the audience awestruck. Chacon’s abstracted and fey figures remind one of Native people’s ancient and underacknowledged mastery of abstraction, distilling life to its core gestures. The arresting figures affirm polytheism’s power and tie heaven to earth through a sacred weltanschauung that these artists recognize is shared by humans and gods.
The Native Hawaiian collective Kekahi Wahi, which includes Sancia Miala Shiba Nash and Drew K. Broderick, is the first of its kind recognized by the Whitney as American. Their work 20-minute workout [WIP] (2023/2026) adds a Hawaiian sensibility to the Indigenous cohort—but not without some constraints. The provocative, erotically charged film is interrupted by Whitney staff, inserting a mature content warning before showing its irreverent queer-feminist scene, where a Hawaiian man writhes against a decorative replica of the Washington Monument—a gesture that subverts static, androcentric colonial monumentality. This portion of the work was planned during the first Trump presidency when many colonial monuments were being toppled, defaced and archived at the same time that the Whitney, Met and MoMA issued statements of solidarity with Indigenous peoples. The work is also notably censored, with expletives removed from the phrase “fuck the American revolution,” which is central to the piece. Nearby, the late Kimowan Metchewais’s tamer and more intimate self-portraits ground the group in individual experience.
Beyond North America, the Biennial gestures toward global Indigeneity. The duo from Cyprus and Massachusetts, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, present the work Until we became fire and fire us, which combines soundscape and three-channel high-definition video to document Palestinians amid Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing. Their work partially addresses DinéYazhi’s concern about the schism between institutional display and lived reality. “The larger issues of systemic injustice… institutions continue to dictate the ways that we respond to moments of crisis, injustice and continued genocide,” they said. “And yet, Indigenous artists are asserting themselves, working within these spaces despite everything.”
In the end, while the Biennial spans continents and histories, it is Tsouhlarakis’s spiked horse that lingers in memory, a testament to how one artist can both anchor and animate a collective Indigenous presence—even as these works negotiate the limits and cautions of institutional display.
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