What mood will define art in the United States in 2026? What themes are bubbling up?
In the coming weeks and months, three major surveys will open: the soon-to-arrive Whitney Biennial (March 8–August 23), Greater New York at MoMA PS1 (April 16–August 17), and the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (May 2–January 3, 2027). The three address different geographic registers: New York, the United States, and the world. And yet, scanning the tea leaves of their artist lists for clues, some patterns emerge.
Here are some initial thoughts. (The year’s biggest international art event, the Venice Biennale, announced its own list today, which would make for even more interesting comparisons—but I am going to stick to these U.S.-based shows.)
Jonathan González, Spectral Dances (2024), performance, duration 4 hrs, American Academy of Arts & Letters, New York, 2024
Artists of the Moment
Most obviously, a handful of artists are shared across the events, suggesting shared curatorial thinking. Taína Cruz and Akira Ikezoe will be in both the Whitney Biennial and Greater New York. Cruz, a 2025 graduate of Yale’s star-making painting program, has said that she works with references to Tumblr, horror, and African American and Caribbean folklore.
Ikezoe, a veteran of last year’s Sharjah Biennial, hails originally from Japan, and is best known for paintings in which tiny figures and objects form patterns on flat colored backgrounds, with a style like a brainy children’s book. As a theme, Ikezoe is said to reach for the “melting point between human and natural boundaries.”
Jonathan González, meanwhile, has gotten the nod from both the Whitney and the Carnegie. González is the author of Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars (2025), and known for site-specific choreographic work based on research into Black history. For the Carnegie, expect a project called Strike Breakers, keyed to that museum’s Grand Staircase.
Non-Thematic Curating
“If the word we” is the title of the Carnegie International. It’s meant to suggest exploration of “the first-person plural as an open and evolving proposition.” To me, it feels very close to a deliberate non-theme for a group show—basically, defining a “we” that’s indefinite. In their statement, the Carnegie curators speak of “a world that cannot be fully understood from a single point of view,” and of trying to avoid “resolution.”
The Whitney is skipping titles this year, following two titled Biennials: 2024’s “Even Better Than The Real Thing” and 2022’s “Quiet as It’s Kept.” The press release explains, “Rather than offering a definitive answer to life today, this Whitney Biennial foregrounds mood and texture.” A real tentativeness and retreat from definition is in the air.
Greater New York never has a title. This time out, instead of promising too much, thematically, the curators accompanied the drop of their list with a little video, montaging clips sent by the artists of what they like about New York. I interpret this gesture as its own way of going even more fully in the direction of “mood and texture” over clear statements of affinity.
Anti-Disciplinary Art
Clicking around the web trying to get a clear picture of what the figures in these U.S. shows do, you get many, many formulations about how their work defies categorization. Not just transdisciplinary or multidisciplinary, but antidisciplinary—not wanting to be pinned down on principle—is the norm.
We might save time if we just assumed that all contemporary artists worked in all media, unless otherwise specified. At its most extreme, Jason Hirata’s bio offers a mini-manifesto on vagueness, saying he “performs an artistic ambiguity that parallels his personal comfort with indirectness, abstraction, and indeterminacy.”
It’s artists who state a definite preferred medium that seem like outliers: Piero Penizzotto in Greater New York, who makes “human-sized painted papier-mâché” (because of their unusual visual grabbiness, these have become the image associated with the show in the press), or Nani Chacon in the Whitney, who is known for colorful mural-making, or R.J. Messineo in the Carnegie, who works by “attaching thin wooden boards to the surfaces of their canvases with magnets.”
On a perhaps related note: The art-writing words of the moment, I find, are “expansive” and “spacious.” The Carnegie curators recount that “wherever artists create spaciousness, we have found inspiration and understanding of the geographies we traverse as vast, complex, and dynamic.” I don’t know this use of “spaciousness.” Yet it’s echoed in Torkwase Dyson‘s statement, also for the Carnegie, where she’s said to value “the spaciousness of freedom.” There is an overarching desire to suggest spilling over limits and not being boxed in.
Torkwase Dyson, I Belong to the Distance 3 (Force Multiplier) (2023), installation view of the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale THIS TOO, IS A MAP, Seoul Museum of Art, 2023. Courtesy of the Seoul Museum of Art. Photo: GLIMWORKERS.
Anti-Festivalism
Everyone knows that biennials tend to favor “biennial art.” Way back in 1999, the late Peter Schjeldahl defined a genre he called “Festival Art” or “festivalism.” What he meant was spectacular sculpture or installation work—art that “commands a particular space in a way that is instantly diverting but not too absorbing”—with a conceptual angle or documentary aspect and legibly virtuous political themes.
Yet, overall, this is not the energy given off in these three shows’ artist lists. Well, at least not the “instantly diverting” part.
Instead, looking at install shots of the many artists across the three shows, you get the impression of a flight from clarity. Lots of modified everyday objects arranged on the floor in improvised configurations. Lots of wall-based assemblages of melted-together image-objects, paintings that have woozy and turbid imagery, and sculptures that channel body fragments and ruins.
Wild Cards
The attempt to resist categorization is echoed in certain curatorial tics. Each show, for instance, has one or two “wild card” figures who are associated with a specific medium, just not one normally associated with the museum.
I’m thinking of Sophie Becker, a ventriloquist, in GNY; Sōfū Teshigahara, associated with Japanese ikebana, in the Carnegie; or Julio Torres, the comedian best known for his HBO show Los Espookys, in the Whitney.
Julio Torres, winner of the Outstanding Lead Performance in a Comedy Series award for “Fantasmas” attends the 2025 Gotham Television Awards at Cipriani Wall Street on June 2, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Arturo Holmes/WireImage)
The Counter-Canon
As has been the case for the last decade of biennials, all three exhibitions are not just inclusive or diverse, but function as active correctives and symbolic foils to a historical canon defined by straight white men and the Global North.
Indeed, groups that do advocacy for marginalized groups are a major presence: Metoac Indigenous Collective, a Long Island indigenous arts initiative, and Red Canary Song, a Flushing, Queens collective that organizes Asian diaspora sex workers, are in Greater New York; kekahi wahi, a documentary collective promoting Hawaiian voices, is in the Whitney; Dang A Dang Radio, a Philippines-based activist radio station inspired by “progressive songs written by marginalized groups,” is in the Carnegie, as is Silät, a recently founded collective of hundreds of weavers from the Wichí people in South America.
Indigenous artists are very present throughout. The Carnegie International’s picture of global art features no less than three artists from the tiny Sámi community from the extreme Arctic north of Europe: Elle Márjá Eira, Hans Ragnar Mathisen, and Joar Nango.
All three shows also include at least one Palestinian or Palestinian-American artist: the photographer Dean Majd in GNY; the West Bank-based Khalil Rabah in the Carnegie; and the engaging duo Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme and the octogenarian Samia Halaby in the Whitney. (Back in 2024, Halaby both had a show censored at Indiana’s Eskenazi Museum and won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale.)
Not-Yet-Digital or Anti-Digital?
Is the much-predicted turn of museums towards technology in evidence across these three 2026 shows?
The Whitney will have a video game designer, Leo Castañeda, as well as the hard-to-classify experimentalist Cooper Jacoby, who has worked with “A.I.-adapted thermostats,” among other things. In the Carnegie, Li Yi-Fan, charmingly, self-describes “as staging a death match between artist and software until a narrative work quietly unfolds from the decaying corpse of their confrontation.”
Veteran Greater New York curator Ruba Katrib has said that the 2026 edition will focus on the infrastructures of NYC against the backdrop of “the shift from the machine age to the digital era.” This seems more to point to the show’s focus on community and place than a particular opening to digital stuff, but it does promise artists such as Marc Kokopeli, whose sculptures of tech gadgets were recently at Reena Spaulings.
The inclusion of a couple of artists who tick the “technology box” has been pretty much the curatorial norm in recent U.S. biennials, against a broader focus on tradition, craft, community, personal archive, and historical reckoning. As far as I can tell, engaging with the flood tide of A.I. euphoria/anxiety gripping culture now is not a major concern of any of the shows.
Indeed, across the three, you notice instead a focus on sound and smell, on film technologies that are tactile, on fashion, dance, and guerrilla performance. In other words: Lots of interest in asserting embodied human experience and physicality—in “touching grass,” aesthetically.
Women’s History Museum. The Massive Disposal of Experience (still). (2022). Film. Courtesy the artists. Credit: Aidan Barringer
Waiting to See
You may be thinking: this outline sounds very familiar. In terms of what you can get about these shows in advance, they sound broadly similar in texture to many major biennials of the last 5 to 10 years.
Cultural critic Jessa Crispin recently carped that global biennial art was a lot like today’s manufactured corporate pop, representational diversity masking a basic and obvious formula. I have questions about the way Crispin draws the parallel—but on this first look at these shows, it doesn’t strike me that they are out to convince critics like her otherwise.
Having said that, art itself changes faster than the writing around it. You never know what’s going to actually come to the table, or how artists will seize the moment. And whatever is new always emerges against some kind of background, which logically is the background of dominant themes inherited from the recent past.
Starting with the opening of the Whitney Biennial next week, we’ll get a better idea.