I am a little dizzied by how fast consensus has formed around the 2026 Whitney Biennial, even though I was one of its many early reviewers. Just a week out from its opening, and it feels like most of the various possible takes have been taken.
This is particularly disconcerting in that it’s a slow-burn show, in some ways trying not to be easily definable. So, in the spirit of not letting my first reaction define the whole thing, here are a few further thoughts now that I have been back to the biennial and spent more time thinking about how its various threads tie together.
A.I. Confusion
Installation view of works by Cooper Jacoby at the Whitney Biennial. Photo by Ben Davis.
I think it is probably significant that the best and worst works in this show are the ones about artificial intelligence: respectively, Zach Blas’s shrieking environment in the ground-floor gallery and Cooper Jacoby’s creepy little A.I.-powered gadgets.
Blas is a smart artist who is not served by this vein of digital creep-show maximalism. You cannot out-creep A.I. at this moment, and attempts to do so make the subject feel less, not more, threatening. Aesthetically the installation looks and feels like a tribute to the Jared Leto movie Tron: Ares (2025), which is not a complement.
Cooper’s oddball talking sculptures use A.I. to generate disjointed voice fragments, synthesized from the social media trail left by dead artists. Even though you have no idea whose life you are hearing about and whether or not the little biographical narratives connect to anything real, these ghostly voices provoke sparks of real emotion. And that makes you feel the question of what the technology means for art as self-expression in a much more insidious way.
Critical Doilies
Work by Jasmin Sian in the 2026 Whitney Biennial. Photo by Ben Davis.
There are definitely parts of the show that make me think of critic R.C. Peck‘s term “Mothball Contemporary:” a recent vogue for art objects “not literally from an antique store but clearly informed by visiting one,” whose themes are “nostalgia, warmth, unsexual femininity, flowers, estate sale pottery, and brown” (the spiritual opposite, Peck writes, of “weirdness, confrontation, contrast, and unfaded glamour.”)
It’s significant that there are two different pieces evoking doilies, right? Kelly Akashi has made enlarged recreations, in paper and steel, of her family’s lace doilies, which were lost in the L.A. fires, while Jasmin Sian has created delicate little lace-like compositions with shopping bags and other recycled paper that are tributes to the animal kingdom.
In both cases, the domestic-keepsake energy accompanies an elegiac ecological message. It’s hard to appreciate the premium on delicacy and intimacy here without understanding its mental background: a world that feels like it is accelerating out of control. In a way, you could think of the doilies as the negative images of the dehumanizing media-world conjured by Blas and Cooper.
Stumped
Malcolm Peacock, Five of them were hers and she carved shelters with windows into the backs of their skulls coalesces as a maybe tree (2024). Photo by Ben Davis.
The work that inspires the greatest conflict for me is Malcolm Peacock’s hulking sculpture of a red wood stump. On its own, it is the most impressive piece of pure craft in the show, constructed out of many, many tiny braids knotted by the artist. It’s an imposing but inscrutable presence in the galleries—and then you get up close to it and really see the labor that has gone into it and into recreating individual folds and gashes in the bark, and it’s great.
But I don’t know what to do with the pages of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and the Autobiography of Malcolm X pinned to it, or to the lengthy audio soundtrack in which Peacock is talking about his long-distance running and the philosophy of Octavia Butler. I mean, I sort of can pull together these elements, reading about it.
But literally tacking on documents or adding digressive audio diffuses interest rather than concentrating it. It feels like a loss of confidence in the materials to speak or in the audience to naturally connect, without an autobiographical hook. I still like the work, though.
Song of Something
Installation view of Mariah Garnett, Songbook (2024). Photo by Ben Davis.
An hour long, Mariah Garnett’s Songbook (2024) bears the burden of being the biggest time commitment in the whole show and therefore the natural symbol of its central ambitions—and it does not want that burden.
The film is a lot of threads of intriguing stuff, each relating to major contemporary art concerns: personal archives (it begins with the opening of a package containing notebooks from Garnett’s great, great aunt Ruth Deyo), music and theater (it is about restaging an opera that Deyo wrote), magic and the occult (Deyo thought that staging the opera would heal the world, and we hear about her communication with spirits), reckoning with colonialism (the aunt lived in Egypt and part of the film involves visiting the country and reflecting on its relationship to Western power), transgender identity (we hear one of the performers talk about the difficulties of being trans in the opera world), and more.
These all swirl together and yet also don’t resolve around a through-line—deliberately, I presume. It’s as if the point is not to stitch anything together, because committing to one thing over-defines it. You never see the whole opera performed. Sadly, current events point to the fact that the performance did not heal the world.
Reverse Nepo Babies
Works by Andrea Fraser in the 2026 Whitney Biennial. Photo by Ben Davis.
The truth is I find the Andrea Fraser babies a little creepy.
Made from a wax that never hardens, these sculptures are meant as statements about how the art market only loves and truly cares for objects. An infant is a primal image of something you nourish.
That tender message is underscored in the show by the inclusion of Fraser’s own artist mother, Carmen de Monteflores, whose paintings—shaped-canvas cut-outs of brightly colored bodies—are in the same gallery.
The backstory of how the mother’s failed painting career may have influenced the daughter’s turn to concept-based art about the power dynamics of the art world is a key beat in this show. As a curatorial juxtaposition, putting the infant sculptures next to the paintings is a bullseye.
But as objects, the oversized babies are gray like boiled meat, and evoke a science experiment more than love and care. You should not read them as nice and heart-warming. You should see them as about how even rare moments of true humanity get recast as calculated moves in the art industry.
Shifting Identities
Works by Isabelle Frances McGuire in the 2026 Whitney Biennial. Photo by Ben Davis.
Taína H. Cruz‘s billboard of a young Black girl with a toothy grin is literally the face of the 2026 Biennial. Yet the show as a whole contains many fewer Black female artists than the previous 2024 Whitney Biennial.
The show is, however, very diverse, focusing particularly on artists with backgrounds from regions affected by U.S. power, from Okinawa, Japan (Mao Ishikawa) to Vietnam (Sung Tieu) to Chile (Ignacio Gatica) to Iraq (Ali Eyal) to the Philippines (Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien).
Yet it’s interesting how un-significant it feels that the show asks “what it means to name something ‘American,'” as the show’s introductory text states. I mean, the last 2024 biennial contained Seba Calfuqueo, Isaac Julien, and multiple artists from Mongolia. In different ways, questioning the “American artist” identity has been a persistent theme of the Whitney Biennial, as the U.S. has gotten more and more shambolic.
At a moment of xenophobia and jingoism, awareness about U.S. imperial history is nothing to take for granted. At the same time, if we are not trying to make ourselves feel more righteous than we should, doesn’t it merely underscore that the Whitney is mainly oriented on hyper-mobile cosmopolitan art networks rather than the United States outside the art capitals?
This remains an enormously L.A.– and New York–centric show. There are four artists who live in Berlin, while Isabelle Frances McGuire, of Chicago, is the only one who lives anywhere in the Midwest.
A Placeholder
A wall label suggesting that the artist Joshua Citarella will do a podcast during the course of the show. Photo by Ben Davis.
I do not like thinking this way, reducing artists to their backgrounds. No show contains all kinds of people, however inclusive curators try to be, and artists aren’t just collections of demographic attributes. But audiences absolutely have been primed to view biennials as referenda on favored and disfavored identities.
As I wrote in an earlier piece, an implied project of this Whitney Biennial (and other biennials recent and upcoming) remains building “the counter-canon.” That is, the 20th-century canon was defined by straight white men, with women and minorities as rare exceptions. Here that logic is inverted.
My guess is that recent big shows have so committed to the counter-canonical way of thinking that no curator wants to be the one to have a sudden spike in “straightness,” “whiteness,” or “maleness.” To do so would be a flashing red light to critics in a moment of political assault on DEI and women. At the same time, there’s at least one sign here that the curators know that this is an unhealthy dynamic.
Joshua Citarella, who’s in the show, all but left art-making only to catch lightning in a bottle with a podcast called Doomscroll. In the process, he pretty much abandoned art as a subject, finding online political subculture to be the more vital arena. Last year, the New York Times dubbed Citarella (in a terrible headline) “The Joe Rogan of the Art World,” meaning someone who can speak to culturally alienated young men. His explicit theory is that you should not leave only the alt-right to speak to and for this group.
The 2026 Biennial’s most head-scratching curatorial beat comes in a hallway where a wall label is placed for Citarella, with no art object. It just floats there, stating that he will be recording episodes of Doomscoll at the museum. It’s as if the show really wants the audience to know it’s got Citarella, as a placeholder for this uneasy conversation.
Re-Risking?
Installation view of Jordan Strafer, TALK SHOW (2026) in the Whitney Biennial. Photo by Ben Davis.
The show has a lot of the kind of low-stakes critical art that critics love. The kind that needs explanation but takes only one sentence to explain, or that illustrates a political point uncontroversial to anyone to the left of Joe Biden.
Still, I believe it’s worth emphasizing that the show takes risks.
You’ve got Precious Okoyomon presenting a little sculpture affixed to the wall, right when you come into the fifth floor, splicing a racist blackface doll and a cute stuffed bunny. Until very recently, mobilizing directly bigoted imagery in this way, even critically, felt like it could provoke protest, unless heavily bracketed by trigger warnings. What’s more, Okoyomon seems to want to take the audience by surprise, to give a sense of how a legacy of hatred finds you even in spaces of comfort. (An even fuller version of the installation, featuring stuffed animals in nooses, will be installed next week.)
You’ve also got Jordan Strafer’s video Talk Show. It stages a demon version of an Oprah-style TV program, where military men are confronted by the women they sexually assaulted, and the host seems to excuse them with psychobabble. It’s clearly in some way about a sense of U.S. history as cursed, but it has a Mike Kelley-esque bad dream logic. There is no real neat lesson. In fact, it’s all pretty disturbing and unresolved, including a ghoulishly profane reenactment of the plane crash death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., whose mythos is relevant again thanks to the FX show. You could easily imagine the criticism that Strafer’s spooky video trivializes real tragedy and serious subject matter.
And you’ve got the duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s Until we became the fire and the fire us (2023–ongoing), the most intense work in the show. Plunging you into a mournfully seething landscape of imagery and sound, it’s more like an immersive poem than a definite statement of anything. But it’s going to be hard for anyone to miss that it is about the dispossession of Palestinians by Israel, historic and contemporary.
Maybe this subject is less a risk now. Maybe having the video here is a sign that Israel has become radioactive among the young people the museum wants to reach and the liberal audience it knows it has (even before Israel helped detonate the Iran War—a catastrophe that has opened a new era of chaos, and that we have only barely begun to feel the breadth of). But the Whitney’s own storied Independent Study Program recently imploded over the issue, and including Abbas and Abou-Rahme installation feels commendably like steering into criticism, not away from it.
I’m not comparing these three projects directly. They do very different things. I’m merely saying that if you stick around, the 2026 Biennial does show the curators wrestling—carefully but deliberately—with how to make the museum relevant in a very uncomfortable moment. And that does seem to involve risking making the audience uncomfortable.
“Whitney Biennial 2026” is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, New York, through August 23, 2026.