First Looks at the 2026 Whitney Biennial: Politics, Memory, and Unexpected Emotion

The 82nd Whitney Biennial opens this weekend at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, featuring 56 artists, duos, and collectives. Organized by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, this year’s edition arrives without a theme, but there were unifying threads.

The result is a sprawling exhibition that rewards slow looking—and likely repeat visits. A few things are immediately apparent: there’s a noticeable dearth of painting, a wide range of materials and formats, and an overtly political bent, with several notably brave curatorial choices.

The last biennial, cheekily titled “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” drew a mixed response. Our knee-jerk reaction this morning? This is better. Here are our quick takes from the preview.

A Broad View of America

Under the second administration of President Donald Trump, there has been a growing fear that museums are self-censoring. The White House has pressured the Smithsonian Institution to eliminate what it has dubbed “improper ideology”—basically anything that acknowledges this nation’s history of racism, sexism, or discrimination, or celebrates different identities.

The Whitney Biennial, at least, is not obeying in advance. Roughly 30 percent of participants identify as queer. Five are Indigenous. Three are Palestinian. Over a third were born outside the U.S. Five don’t currently live in the country.

This may be America’s big biennial, but, as Guerrero said during the press preview’s introductory remarks, the curators were “interested in thinking about places outside of the geopolitical borders of the United States, and thinking a little bit more broadly.”

Trump has worked to restrict the rights and recognition of the trans community, including through an executive order recognizing only the male and female sexes. The Whitney has given participating artists the opportunity to provide preferred pronouns, and 10 of them use they.

Agosto Machado has literally built shrines and altars to his friends from the drag queen scene, a body of work he began creating in the 1960s and continued during the AIDS epidemic. These deeply personal tributes to friends and loved ones incorporate keepsakes and ephemera, photographs, jewelry, and even artworks by artists including Peter Hujar.

There are also nods to the importance of environmentalism and dangers of climate change—some more overt than others.

Teresa Baker, of the Mandan/Hidatsa nation, incorporates foraged twigs and buffalo hide hunted by her father into her large-scale works on synthetic turf, imbuing each piece with a tension between the natural and artificial.

Jasmin Sian’s delicate paper cuttings look like antique lace doilies, but are actually made from littered paper bags the artist collects while biking to work. Her designs feature animals she encounters riding along the Manhattan Greenway, a tribute to nature’s uneasy coexistence with humankind.

Kelly Akashi is also working with lace, with embossed imprints of her grandmother’s doilies, and an enlargement cut from Corten steel. The originals were destroyed when the artist’s home burned down in last year’s Eaton Fire, which destroyed much of Los Angeles’s Altadena neighborhood.

All that remained from the blaze was the chimney, which Akashi recreated here on the museum’s fifth floor terrace in ghostly cast glass. Monument (Altadena) is a memorial, but also a warning, as fires fueled by climate change grow ever stronger and more destructive.

A Turn Toward Sincerity

The poster child of the 2024 Whitney Biennial was Matt Dryhurst and Holly Herndon’s xhairymutantx, a battle-hardened A.I.-generated warrior princess. This year, by contrast, the elevator doors open onto a sea of 100 hand-sculpted ceramic dog toys in a rainbow of colors. Emilie Louise Gossiaux’s may initially read as whimsical, but it is, in fact, an elegy.

The work is artist and disability activist Gossiaux’s memorial to their departed guide dog, London. As the wall text notes, they began creating the sculptures when London’s health started deteriorating in 2024. By producing multiples of their dog’s favorite chew toy, they imagined a pleasure-filled afterlife for London, who died in September 2025.

The installation is surrounded by drawings of the artist and London. In one, the dog offers Gossiaux a flower; in another, they roll together in a glade; in my favorite, they are both bipedal but have exchanged bodies. Gossiaux appears to be illustrating a psychic connection and interchangeability so complete it borders on the mythic. In these images, they resemble zoomorphic Egyptian deities—immortal. Altogether, Gossiaux makes the profound bond one feels toward a service animal visceral.

The heart is the point. An unabashed emotional current runs through this biennial. It is not armored in irony or buffered by theory. Even when artists deploy camp or exaggeration, it feels less like a wink than a way to intensify feeling rather than deflect it. More than once, I found myself holding back tears. In a world that often feels on fire, detachment feels untenable. Connection is the point.

Another moving selection comes from the 72-year-old Japanese photographer Mao Ishikawa, an Okinawa native born during the United States’s postwar occupation of the island. Selections from two series—“Red Flower (Akabanaa)” (1975–77) and “Life in Philly” (1986)—trace her engagement with lives shaped by American military power, from bar hostesses and Black G.I.s in Okinawa to the everyday world of a former soldier she later visited in Philadelphia. Across both bodies of work, she foregrounds intimacy and mutual recognition, drawing parallels between Okinawan and Black American experiences of discrimination.

A Surprising Dearth of A.I. Themes

Given the current concern and seemingly peak obsession with artificial intelligence and its implications, the biennial overall felt surprisingly light on A.I. exploration and themes. However, the artworks and projects that do focus on it go very big and seem quite ominous.

It starts with the first work on view (if you start in the dedicated lobby gallery): Zach Blas’s CULTUS (2023), a massive room-filling installation of high-definition video and surround sound, LED spheres and panels, and 3D-printed, vitrine-encased “Spanish Tickler” torture objects. focuses on religious beliefs related to A.I., including how the technology is sometimes seen as having god-like powers.

The installation is a spin on Elizabethan occultist John Dee’s Holy Table, complete with a giant orb at the center. It features text pumped out by A.I. models trained on everything ranging from tech company mission statements, to holy books, sadomasochistic erotica, political manifestoes, and much more. Machine learning was also used to create the audio, featuring prophetic voices that read out from the cryptic texts that are suspended from chains on each of the four walls.

Elsewhere, Cooper Jacoby’s Estate (January 21, 2016), from 2024, has sculptures that look like door intercoms and are fitted with cameras that surveil the surrounding environment. Jacoby installed “reactive A.I. models” that are trained on social media posts from people who formerly worked in creative industries but are no longer alive. The models respond to visual cues from the various viewers and also have LED screen counters that track the time since the death of the respective people, down to the minute.

Two Aesthetics of Colonial Resistance

In 2024, the Portland-based artist Demian Diné Yazhi made waves for secretly embedding “Free Palestine” in a neon sculpture. Last year, the museum canceled a pro-Palestinian performance scheduled as part of its Independent Study Program exhibition, citing concerns that elements of the piece violated its community guidelines. The decision sparked accusations of censorship from students and alumni, public protests, and ultimately the museum’s announcement that it would pause the ISP for the following academic year.

Against that backdrop, Brooklyn- and Palestine-based duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme present , a three-channel immersive video and sound installation that is as powerful as it is absorbing—and one of the strongest works in the exhibition. Its presence feels significant. There is no need for coded gestures or embedded slogans here; the politics are neither hidden nor softened.

English and Arabic text drifts across the screen: “On long drives from Jerusalem to Haifa my father would say if you see cactus know that a Palestinian village used to be there.” Later, another line appears: “The land will testify that where there is now a beach there was a village.” The work unfolds like a passage through memory and dream, where land itself becomes witness.

Ambient atmospherics give way to thundering drums; images of wind-blown plants and rocky terrain dissolve into color-saturated scenes of dancing bodies that feel at once joyous and ghostly. Archival drawings made by Abou-Rahme’s father in Jerusalem decades ago surface and recede. Traditional songs braid with contemporary sound. The cumulative effect is deeply moving—a return to places that no longer exist in fact, yet persist in memory, song, and image.

It is jarring, then, to step from this elegy for a fractured homeland directly into the kitschy workout-video universe of Hawaiian artist duo Kekahi Wahi—all hot leotards, leg-warmers, lacquered yellow fingernails, and animated hearts and dolphins that float across the screen. But Sancia Miala Shiba Nash and Drew K. Broderick are simply using a different tactic to deliver an anti-colonial critique.

Their aerobics squad performs in front of a monument to Captain James Cook, the British naval officer credited with “discovering” islands that were already populated—his voyages later associated with the spread of disease across the South Pacific.

Unlikely Materials 

There was a preponderance of the handmade and the found, and a real curiosity about material. Precious Okoyomon incorporated dolls, while the fashion collective CFGNY Frankenstein-ed stuffed animals together into a sculptural form. The Brooklyn-based artist Malcolm Peacock, meanwhile, interpreted a coastal redwood tree with 3,500 braids of synthetic hair (it took him 10 months to prep the strands).

Elsewhere, Nour Mobarak—a Cairo-born artist who lives in Greece and on Bainbridge Island in Washington—presented , a series of gorgeously graphic sculptures cast from her own body. In addition to resin, she used turkey tail, mycelium, dehydrated blood, breast milk, and semen. The results are startlingly beautiful given such inchoate ingredients.

Performance-based artist Nile Harris (who will stage live performances with Dyer Rhoads) promises to bring to life, according to the wall text—though one hopes this is simply performance-art parlance, since the listed materials read: “artist’s skin, thread, and hardware.”