Eliana Willis

Of all the art exhibitions in the world, our beloved surveys of contemporary art—the biennials, triennials, and sometimes even quinquennials—often feel like they’re designed to overwhelm. 
To better understand how to navigate these massive shows, we asked a few curators who’ve organized them to provide tips on how to make sense of the experience.
Let’s start with the practical advice. 
Work by Angelica Mesiti in the Australian pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. (Photo by Luca Zanon/Awakening/Getty Images)
Treat It Like a Treasure Hunt
Diana Nawi, the co-artistic director with Naima Keith of last year’s Prospect New Orleans, stressed the importance of having “on-the-ground guidance,” particularly in the form of a map. 
“You can almost have a scavenger hunt, and take the map and cross off things venue by venue,” she said.
Keith also encourages viewers to take “a little bit of time, if you have it, to get a slightly better understanding of that local community,” adding that it could go some ways in better understanding “why that work was put up in that area.”
Prem Krishnamurthy, director of the forthcoming Front Triennial in Cleveland, Ohio, uses a similar metaphor.
“Because [Front has] 25 venues across the three cities that you have to drive between, leave yourself time to treat it like a treasure hunt,” he said. “Or treat it like you’re looking for rainbows. You’re out wandering around and if the light is right, you’ll catch something amazing.”
Front has even dedicated part of its website to tools—including a detailed list of events and a map with venues organized by hub location—to help visitors make their plan of attack. 
But at some point, the practical stuff gives way to conversations about what visitors should go into these events expecting. 
Take your time and enjoy one thing at a time. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Focus on Singular Experiences
People tend to begin with “the impression that there is actually a way to navigate it all,” said Francesco Bonami, who directed the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and the 2010 Whitney Biennial. “And I don’t think there is a way to navigate it.”
“By virtue of their structure, [shows like these are] overwhelming,” Nawi said, adding that Prospect is “the kind of exhibition that is much larger than the two days people usually have for it.”
That means you probably won’t get to see everything.
“Every time you go to the Venice Biennale, you will inevitably meet someone who asks you: ‘Have you seen this thing, or seen this piece?’” Bonami said. “And you will have not seen it.”
This is particularly true, he added, for openings, which he describes as “basically a very self-celebratory moment. At the end of the day, you just feel a sense of exclusion, like you missed a work of art, or you missed a party or something.”
“The beauty of art is that you are the one in charge of your own experience,” Bonami added. So another solution is to organize your time around pre-selected highlights.
When Krishnamurthy does the circuit, he typically “hones in on a handful of key things that I want to make sure that I see, and then I really try to see those and spend time with them.”
Nawi said she had a friend who missed most of a biennial because they spent four hours at a single artist’s performance.
“I feel like that was this really beautiful thing, for them to just stay with it,” she said. “They experienced the entirety of the biennial in front of that performance versus having seen every object.”
The British pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. It was madness. (Photo by Awakening/Getty Images)
Embrace the Madness
Not that you’re guaranteed to miss a lot: not all major art  events are spread out over multiple venues.
Since the Whitney Biennial, for example, is housed in one building, “it is more human in scale,” Bonami said. “I think people, maybe, absorb it in a better way than the Venice Biennale.”
Even so, Bonami only expects people to remember a handful of artworks in the end. 
So perhaps the very best thing to do is not to devise strategies, but simply to accept the undertaking for what it is.
“The absurdity of the endeavor is so much part of it,” Massimiliano Gioni, who organized the 2013 Venice Biennale, explained. “The fact that people are still congregating periodically to look at art made in 80-plus countries in the world, there is a kind of madness to it. So, I say, embrace the madness.”
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As the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death approaches in 2023, news has poured in about conservation research into three Blue Period works. 
In 2014, researchers announced a “hidden” portrait beneath The Blue Room (1901) and, four years later, revealed a dozen layers beneath The Soup (1903), plus a landscape below Crouching Beggarwoman (1902). 
The fruits of this research are now being shared with the public in “Picasso: Painting the Blue Period” (until June 12), an exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.
Since the 2018 announcement, researchers at the Phillips, which owns The Blue Room, have honed their analysis with the aid of colleagues in other institutions. National Gallery of Art imaging scientist John Delaney, for example, scanned The Blue Room four times (most recently in 2019) with increasingly refined and sensitive instruments, according to Phillips curator Susan Behrends Frank, to peel back the history of the work.
Each scan “brought forward additional information about elemental materials and clarity of detail in the portrait of the man beneath the surface image,” she said.
“We want people to see this well-known artist in a fresh light—to see him at the very beginning of his career internationally,” Behrends Frank added. “We want people to see how rich this very early moment is in his career, and the conservation science in this exhibition gives you another window into thinking about the creative process of an artist that seems to be so well known.”
An infrared reflectance image of The Blue Room showing the portrait of an unknown man. The canvas is rotated 90 degrees clockwise. Image: John Delaney and Kathryn Dooley, National Gallery of Art.
The Blue Room, which is the first of the three major Blue Period canvases that exhibition visitors encounter, was originally titled The Toilette when Duncan Phillips purchased it in 1927 as his first Picasso acquisition.
It was just the third to enter a U.S. museum after the Art Institute of Chicago acquired The Old Guitarist (1903-4) and Albright-Knox Art Gallery acquired La Toilette (1906) the prior year.
For decades, conservators knew something lay hidden beneath, because some brushstrokes went the wrong way, and underlying forms peeked through. The surface depicts a nude woman, head bowed, washing herself over a basin in a room into which light streams from a window on the left. A bureau and chest flank the window, and a colorful rug, table with flowers, and bed round out the interior.
The bather’s pose, which evokes the works of Edgar Degas and Auguste Rodin, plus Picasso’s addition of two pictures into the scene, reveal his broader artistic mission. 
The artist used ultramarine blue, which was costlier than his typical Blue Period Prussian blue paint, to include an image on the bedroom wall of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster “May Milton,” as a way of associating himself with one of his idols. Researchers now believe that the underpainting of the man was done in mid-summer 1901, giving the final version of The Blue Room an early- to mid-November 1901 date, rather than the prior scholarly consensus of summer 1901.
This means Picasso painted the final work shortly after he turned 20, which is significant for an artist who told biographer Pierre Daix that his friend Carles Casagemas’s suicide at that age “got me started painting in blue.” (Casagemas worked in the same studio as Picasso and died in a cafe just down the street that February.)
Notedly, the new dating also means that Picasso memorialized Lautrec with The Blue Room, as Lautrec died in September 1901 at age 36. (Prior dating would have meant that Picasso painted the work while Lautrec was still alive.) 
Picasso may have done the underpainting to curry favor with someone, or it may have been an archetype of someone he saw at Montmartre, Behrends Frank said. She added that conservators’ new understanding of how thinly and quickly Picasso painted The Blue Room supports artist Jaume Sabartés’s recollection, in his memoir of 1901, that Picasso worked seemingly with tunnel vision, focusing all his energy on creating. 
“Our painting really confirms that entire manner of his concentration and process,” Behrends Frank said.
Research into two more Blue Period pictures from the Art Gallery of Ontario, Crouching Beggarwoman and The Soup, also chart new understandings of Picasso’s process.
Pablo Picasso, Crouching Beggarwoman (1902). © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In the former, Picasso first drew the woman holding bread (or a bowl) in her hand. But he later changed his mind, and enshrouded both hands in the woman’s cloak. 
“By covering that up and enclosing the figure completely, so all we see is her face, it gave her a totally different presentation and meaning,” Behrends Frank said. 
Scans of the work showed a landscape beneath. It is unknown if Picasso painted that work, which was also initially a mystery.
“We thought this was a fantasy [scene] inspired by [painter Pierre] Puvis de Chavannes,” Behrends Frank said.
But when she and her colleagues showed the under-image to Josep Laplana, director of the Museum of Montserrat, he said he knew what it depicted.
“Immediately, he recognized that it’s this private park now owned by the city of Barcelona,” Behrends Frank said. (There is no record of Picasso having visited the park, which would have been closed to the public in the early 20th century.)
Pablo Picasso The Soup (1903). © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In The Soup, Picasso had initially considered a male figure giving bread to a boy or a girl, until he changed it to a woman giving soup to a girl. The image was an “obsession” to Picasso, according to Behrends Frank.
“He was completely struggling with this idea of how to convey something about the universal charity that one associates with soup as a form of nourishment,” she said.
“We think of soup kitchens even today. In Picasso’s mind, he was trying to find a way to universalize this and not simply make it a genre picture, but to give it heft.”
Looking ahead, Behrends Frank thinks there is more work to be done, especially on the many Blue Period works that are in Russia, which have been x-rayed but not subjected to deeper kinds of scans. 
“I’m sure those curators and conservators would love to be able to take this next step that is being done in Europe and the U.S.,” she said.
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The Modernist painter Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902–1968) has long been a staple of German public collections, beloved for his saturated colors and dynamic compositions, which were inflected by Expressionism, Art Informel, and abstraction over the course of his career. Yet even in his home country, there are still dimensions of his work that remain to be discovered, and a retrospective now on view at the Hamburger Kunsthalle—of 120 paintings, watercolors, and drawings, the largest show of his oeuvre in 30 years—seeks to contextualize lesser-known works and introduce Nay’s practice to new audiences.
“The exhibition is the first comprehensive show in decades, and it is addressed to a new generation of viewers and people who might not be so aware” of the artist’s early career, explained Aurel Scheibler, chairman of the board of the Ernst Wilhelm Nay Foundation, which was created in 2005. “It shows a thread that connects all these different periods of his work.” (Scheibler, who is also an art dealer based in Berlin, is the step-grandson of Nay.)
Exhibition view of Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s retrospective at Hamburger Kunsthalle. Courtesy Ernst Wilhelm Nay Stiftung.
Nay, who studied under Karl Hofer at Berlin’s Akademie der Künste, began painting in the late 1910s and was an accomplished artist by the outbreak of World War II. His work was labeled as “degenerate art” and around ten of his works were confiscated from museum collections. The artist himself destroyed one of his own works for fear of reprisal.
In need of money, Nay joined the army in 1939 and was posted to the Eastern front, followed by France. He managed to continue to make art when he was off duty, painting for a time at the studio of an amateur artist he befriended in France. His studio in Berlin was bombed during air raids of the German capital. “He was more free to work [abroad] than in Berlin,” Scheibler said, but “it was hard to get canvases, so he made more so gouaches and works on paper.” Scheibler added that this period of work, as well as that from just before the war, is very rare and of great interest to collectors.
After the war, Nay’s international career took off when he participated in the Venice Biennale in 1948 and the first-ever Documenta in Kassel in 1955 (its curator, Arnold Bode, would also include him in the next two editions). In 1956, Nay represented Germany at the Venice Biennale. He caused a stir at the third Documenta when he presented his now-celebrated “Eye Paintings,” which were hung from the ceiling—a move that divided audiences at the time. He died in his studio in Cologne in 1968.
Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Couple with butterflies (1939). Alexeyev-Brandl Collection. © Ernst Wilhelm Nay Foundation. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022. Photo: Trevor Good.
Magdalene Claesges, scientific director and head of the Nay foundation’s archives in Cologne, said that scholarly and market focus has predominantly been on his famous “Disk Paintings,” and the retrospective—which was curated by Karin Schick—seeks to offer a more polyphonic perspective on his career, which went through many other phases.
Works from between 1954 and 1962 known as the “Scheibenbilder” have long been in demand: a painting from the period, titled Scheiben und Halbscheiben (1955),set a record for the artist at Ketterer Kunst in 2017, selling for €2.3 million ($2.6 million), well above its €250,000 ($412,007) estimate, according to the Artnet Price Database.
But other periods, including that of the “Fugale Bilder,” which preceded it from 1949 to 1951, have been overlooked and under-studied, Scheibler noted. “This period of his work marks a transition from the more figurative work he was making in the 1940s to his later works, which are more abstract. It is a period that is more flat and constructed,” he said.
Though interest in the artist in Germany has long been strong, more recently major institutions in Europe have made moves to collect his work. The Centre Pompidou in Paris, which acquired Inferno Hallelujah (1964), a moody canvas with his iconic eyes in deep crimsons and blues, in 2014, while the Musée National d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris acquired Blau—Orange und Gelb (1967) in 2016. Scheibler said, “People are rediscovering him as one of the major postwar painters of Europe.”
Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s retrospective is on view at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, March 25 through August 7, 2022.
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Elmgreen and Dragset have taken over the Fondazione Prada in Milan for a show titled”Useless Bodies?” that focuses on Big Tech and its impact on our lives.
The works, according to an exhibition statement, explore “present condition of the body in the post-industrial age, in which it seems that our physical presence is losing its centrality.”
The body, indeed, may even now be “completely superfluous.”
“One could claim our physical selves have even become more of an obstacle than an advantage,” the artists said in a statement. “Twenty years into the 21st century, the status of the body is now that of the product—with our data gathered and sold by Big Tech.”
Many of the figures in the works are in precarious positions: climbing walls, perched atop a ladder, stuffed into the backseat of a car, and—in one particularly unsettling case—rolled half inside a morgue’s cooling freezer.
See more works from the show below.
“Elmgreen & Dragset: Useless Bodies?” is on view through August 22, 2022.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Elmgreen & Dragset’s Watching (2021) in the exhibition “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Elmgreen & Dragset’s Piscina di Largo Iscaro (2021) in the exhibition “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Elmgreen & Dragset’s What’s Left? (2021) in the exhibition “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Elmgreen & Dragset, Bogdan (2020). Courtesy: KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, London, Seoul Photo by: Roman März.
Elmgreen & Dragset, The Touch (2011). Courtesy of Perrotin. Photo: Anders Sune Berg.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Elmgreen & Dragset, Statue of Liberty, Fig. 2 (2021). Installation view, 14th Robert Jacobsen Prize of the Würth Foundation, Museum Würth 2, Künzelsau, Germany, 2021. Photo: Studio Elmgreen & Dragset.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Elmgreen & Dragset, The Painter, Fig. 2 (2021). Photo: Elmar Vestner. Courtesy, Pace Gallery, New York.
Elmgreen & Dragset, The Outsiders (2020). Installation view, Art Basel. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano. Courtesy, Pace Gallery, New York.
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Much has transpired since 2019 when Whitney curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards were announced as the next organizers of the institution’s flagship biennial: a pandemic, a presidential election, a wave of protests. Even the date of the always-anticipated exhibition changed, moving from 2021 to April of this year. 
Tasked, as all Whitney Biennial curators are, with staging a show that reflects the times into which it’s born, Breslin and Edwards found themselves in a difficult position. They had to track down art that captured the spirit of those world-altering events without trivializing or exploiting them—and do a lot of that work over Zoom.
With that kind of brief, it’s unsurprising that the biennial almost always produces controversy. 
For their turn in the hot seat, Breslin and Edwards took an open-ended approach that may successfully turn down the collective temperature. They opted to ask questions instead of offering declarations, to create a space for contemplation, and to look beyond the borders of America for a portrait of the country.
Ahead of the opening of the exhibition, “Quiet as It’s Kept,” Breslin and Edwards spoke to Artnet News about the curatorial experience and what viewers can expect.
Alfredo Jaar, still from 06.01.2020 18.39 (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong & Co.
The idea of designing an exhibition to reflect the art of our times is daunting at the best of times, but the last three years have not been the best of times, and much has changed since 2019 when you two were announced as curators of the biennial. Does that distinguish this biennial from others in your mind?
David Breslin: Well one amazingly consistent thing was working together with Adrienne. Because I do think that in the best of times, these are hard shows to do and, as you say, these have not been the best of times. To have someone that you trust, respect, and admire, someone you have absolute faith in, is really important. 
To the other point, I would say that, for every person who does a biennial, whether they’re at the Whitney or elsewhere, the sands are always shifting; the times and the ways in which artists are reacting to them are constantly changing. I think the degree of change in such a brief period of time is something that Adrienne and I had to reckon with in a way that felt really alive to the moment. But we also didn’t want to claim or sensationalize any particular part of it. We were thinking about how the exhibition can reflect the complicated layers of emotion that we’ve all felt.
Adrienne Edwards: One of the things that really rocked me was when we got on the museum floor before artwork started coming in. It was just this clearing; it was completely open and there was nothing there. In some ways it felt deeply metaphorical and emblematic of what we needed and had hoped for. David and I felt it was important to put together this show, wanted to contextualize artists in relationship—all the stuff you can read in the essay and the press release. But what was really moving was realizing what it meant to stand there and see all of these radical juxtapositions, all of these incredible things—and not just side to side, as we’re accustomed to seeing them, but how you could get a sidelong glance that takes you across 15,000 square feet and see a relationality there. That really opened things up in a way that reinforced that we were onto something when we set out to make a show that was about the conditions in which we were living.
Adam Pendleton, still from Ruby Nell Sales (2020–22). Courtesy of the artist.
How has your approach to the show evolved since 2019?
DB: From about November 2019 to mid-March, when we were told that the museum was shutting down for what was then thought to be a brief moment, we were on the road. It was a traveling moment. It was about going into studios, getting on planes, seeing people from afar, roaming around New York, seeing people that were closer by. But even before that, Adrienne and I had a lot of time to just sit together with artists names or images we wanted to share with each other or books or essays or articles that proved to be formative. Then, in mid-March, everything shifted and, like that, we were on Zoom.
Adrienne and I had to develop a different kind of relationship with each other too. When you’re in the same space, you take for granted that you can just meet up and have a chat. It suddenly had to be very deliberate. But I was surprised by how much more intimacy that allowed for. All the texts that we have, the photos that we’ve sent back and forth, even images of pages from books that we were reading—I still remember that as being a really grounding thing when we were pretty much by ourselves or with our families in that moment.
The phrase that forms the name of the show, “Quiet as It’s Kept,” opens Toni Morrison’s novel “The Bluest Eye.” It was also the name of an album by bebop drummer Max Roach and an exhibition curated by David Hammons. What does it mean to you?
AE: It’s a kind of vernacular that I would hear from my grandmother and women of her generation. It’s this very kind of tongue-in-cheek thing like, ‘I’m going to tell you something you already know, but you never talk about.’ [Laughs] It just worked for us. So did the fact that those sources are interdisciplinary references, because that’s such an important part of the show. Trying to speak to identity or a sense of belonging or history or social formation—those are all things that David and I were thinking about very deeply. So it just seemed to be the perfect title.
Coco Fusco, still from Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word (2021). Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Gray Associates.
You’ve used somewhat soft language to describe the show—language that suggests rather than states. You’ve called the exhibition “speculative” and an “experiment,” described the subthemes as “hunches,” and the group of artists as an “ensemble.” Fair or not, we tend to associate the Whitney Biennial as a kind of declarative, flag-in-the-ground kind of exhibition—and because of that, it almost always proves to be alienating to some people. I wonder, with this new language, are you trying to get away from that understanding and move toward something more nuanced and contemplative?
AE: I would say it’s necessarily contemplative, given the times in which it’s been made. How can you have any sense of certainty about anything really? It would seem absurd.
That clearing on the fifth floor that I mentioned before, it’s really about leveling and holding space, it’s about the importance of everyone being able to ask questions, to show up with our own experiences and have those brought to the fore.
This whole idea that any singular exhibition could be declarative is already deeply problematic and, at the Whitney, there’s a kind of institutional openness and clarity about that impossibility. Because institutions are changing too. These institutions are comprised of people, so every time you have a different cast of characters here, you’re going to get a different kind of show. What the Whitney Biennial was 20 years ago, what it was 30 years ago—it’s really different from what the Whitney Biennial is now. And you know what? That feels really right and honest and generative.
DB: I think we find that there’s real strength in speculation. Instead of leading with our own kind of declarations of what it should be, we wanted to situate the show as an encounter with different ways of imagining a world. Some exhibitions revolve around this question of, “Well what power does art have to change the world?” They have these very grandiose ideas. In no way are we thinking that it can’t, but we believe art has a way of impacting and changing people, how people think and respond. And then people have a way of changing the world or reacting to it. There’s never going to be any singular story that a show like this can narrate. So it became a question of how we might be able to create an ensemble where there are multiple narratives that can bleed in and out of each other. 
N. H. Pritchard, Red Abstract / fragment (1968–69).
Accompanying the exhibition’s wall texts and other materials is a symbol that comes from the avant-garde poet N. H. Pritchard. It’s a set of inverted parentheses: ) (.  What does that motif mean to you? 
AE: Pritchard is an artist that I’ve come to know in my relationship with [Whitney Biennial artist] Adam Pendleton, who also has reprinted some of his work. The symbol seemed so iconic to David and I, the profound openness it suggests. I think about it as an interval, a space between two marks. It’s so emblematic of where we are in this moment, this in-between space, ready to get on with it. Also, the fact that it was done in ’68, another troubling and complicated year, and still resonates across time is incredible.
Prichard as a figure was so interesting. He traversed these really different worlds and always seemed to be a little too eccentric for both of them in some ways. What we were able to see in the estate was his poetry, but with a visual lexicon added to it. There are these really dazzling, colorful drawings overlaying the language itself. Pritchard’s poetry is very compelling, but it’s not closed in terms of its symbolism or signification. It’s actually profoundly open. Those are all things that Dave and I had been saying we wanted to put into this exhibition.
DB: Adrienne, I still remember when you and I met with Ian Russell, Pritchard’s nephew. We were looking at some drawings and poems—I think it was in August of last year. There were so many times we just looked at each other and we didn’t have to say anything, we just kind of knew. It was one of those great moments that come with working with someone for a long time. When we saw that symbol, our eyes met and we thought, ‘All right, we’re going to do something with this one.’ [Laughs] You will see it on the side of the introductory texts. It’s incorporated there as a nod to this other way of looking and seeing.
Your biennial includes artists outside of the U.S.—specifically from Canada and Mexico—which is not new for the Whitney Biennial, but might nevertheless confuse some who are expecting a survey of American art.
DB: It was very important for us to think about “The Whitney Museum of American Art” and the fact that that can mean so much for so many different people. Obviously, people who visit aren’t just from the United States, and the work that people make within the United States has ramifications everywhere in the world. That’s something Adrienne and I took very seriously in putting on this exhibition, that there is a kind of push and pull relationship between the United States and the countries closest to us. The artists who are working on the border of Tijuana aren’t just being shown on their own. They’re incorporated within a flow of other artists and works that touch on similar themes about, say, how pop culture is defined or minimalism is thought about. We wanted to make an exhibition that looks like what America really looks like, which is a country of immigrants, a country of pressure along the border.
Denyse Thomasos, Displaced Burial / Burial at Gorée (1993). Courtesy of the Estate of Denyse Thomasos and Olga Korper Gallery.
There’s a tonal dichotomy between the show’s top floors—one light and open, the other dark and labyrinthine. What is the relationship between these two sections?
AE: The sixth floor is a labyrinth. There is, almost in a Borgesian kind of way, an unfolding of different kinds of spaces and rooms. Unlike the fifth floor, your experience is far more directed. You’re directed through this antechamber and then you can come out of that and you can go left or right, you can go forward. So there are these undulating, changing experiences there. That floor has a lot of moving image work, which is often presented out in the open because we have literally transformed the floor into a black box itself. It really feels like a void; it has a force to it. Then, on either end, there are these works that are deeply about light.
So as intense as I think it’s shaping up to be on the top floor, it’s actually optimistic. It tries to embody the possibility of something else. I think of that floor as characterizing both a sense of history and also this contemporary moment, the last two-plus years of life in the United States. Deeply encapsulated in that space are our issues, our hopes, our disappointments. But there’s a way out if we choose to take it.
“Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept” will be on view April 6 through September 5, 2022 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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