Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer Are the Next Whitney Biennial Curators

The 2024 Whitney Biennial may still be up through this weekend, but New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art is already looking ahead to 2026. The institution just named Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer as the curators of the influential show’s next edition.

“As the 2024 Biennial draws to a close, we’re delighted to pass the baton to another superb team of Whitney curators in anticipation of the 2026 edition,” Whitney director Scott Rothkopf said in a statement. “As much as the biennial is a showcase of current artistic talents, it is also a platform for visionary curators like Marcela and Drew. The biennial may open every two years, but it is ‘always on’ at the Whitney, helping to shape how we think about our broader artistic program, our collection, our ways of working with artists, and role in our community and beyond.”

Guerrero joined the Whitney in 2017 as an assistant curator, after a stint at the Hammer Museum at UCLA. She was responsible for organizing “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria,” a critically acclaimed 2022 exhibition that was the first major museum survey of Puerto Rican art in 50 years. When David Breslin decamped uptown to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in late 2022, the Whitney promoted Guerrero to a senior curator role, the first Latino in such a role at the institution.

Sawyer, the Whitney’s photography curator, came to the museum last May from the Brooklyn Museum. (The role had long been held by Elisabeth Sussman, the biennial’s 2012 co-curator, who is still on staff as a curator.)

“Marcela and Drew have established themselves as leading curatorial voices in the field, innovative and rigorous exhibition-makers, and dedicated collaborators with artists. Each is a renowned scholar who possesses the rare ability to bridge past and future in their work by bringing great curiosity, care, and imagination to the space of artistic practice today,” Whitney chief curator Kim Conaty said. “We can’t wait to see what they create together.”

The two will helm the 82nd edition of the Whitney’s survey of contemporary art across the U.S. The show launched as the “Whitney Annual” in 1932 before shifting to a biennial model in 1973.

The show is both tastemaking and controversial. Its over 3,600 alumni include Alexander Calder, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Roy Lichtenstein, Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Nan Goldin, Mark Bradford, Jeffrey Gibson, Kara Walker, and Pope. L, to name just few.

The 2024 Whitney Biennial curators are Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, with Min Sun Jeon and Beatriz Cifuentes.