Art review: Whitney Biennial 2026
Though optimism “can feel out of reach right now,” said Holland Cotter in The New York Times, the art in the latest Whitney Biennial seems to want to keep the mindset alive. Breaking from the recent tradition of gathering works that address a single theme, this 82nd showcase of contemporary art is “something broader and looser.” The exhibition’s inventive curators focus on American artists but also on artists from countries that have been subject to U.S. intervention, and the result is a show “shaped by references to forces now ever-present in the cultural air: climate disaster, border policing, and technological dominance.” Even so, the strongest thread may be the idea of community, in all forms, as a source of shared respect and care.
That makes for an odd show, said Ben Davis in Artnet. “At a time when the political news is as alarming as it has been at any moment in my life, the consensus appears to be that ‘political art’ is washed.”
The Whitney’s curators have followed the direction of the wind and chosen work that’s light on message but big on feelings. The first piece viewers come upon on the exhibition’s main floors “signals a sincerity-first credo,” because it’s a tribute to a deceased seeing-eye dog featuring hand-molded dog-toy facsimiles arranged by artist Emilie Louise Gossiaux to invoke a canine heaven. With a few exceptions, much of the rest of the work is “defined by its small-scale-ness, by being little bits of things halfway between sculptural statement and personal talisman.” Too meek to demand change in the world or to even offer escape, the show is left summoning “whatever can be felt when you don’t believe in either.” For me, such bids for emotion succeeded brilliantly, said William Van Meter, also in Artnet. “More than once,” as I examined individual works, “I found myself holding back tears.”
“Mourning, shrines, grief—they run through both floors of the show,” said Aruna D’Souza in Hyperallergic. Kelly Akashi’s Monument (Altadena), is a “ghostly” glass-brick reconstruction of the chimney of the home she lost to Los Angeles’ 2025 wildfires. Oswaldo Maciá’s Requiem for the Insects is a chapel-like installation that calls attention to the bugs we share our planet with. On the museum’s sixth floor, visitors are drawn to Michelle Lopez’s Pandemonium, a tornado of discarded plastic, faded U.S. flags, and other detritus that’s projected on a circular screen overhead. “It’s not subtle, but it’s effective; the polycrisis sublime.” And for every piece that’s sorrowful, there’s another that’s “charming and joyful.” All in all, walking the galleries “felt like the world as I experience it these days: no clear path in front of me but enough moments of beauty and joy to convince me to put one foot in front of the other.”