Featuring fifty-six artists from across the United States with global roots, the 2026 Whitney Biennial presents a robust selection of work that grapples with kinship, ecology, infrastructure, mythology, and the complexities of contemporary American life.
Artadia is thrilled to have seven of our Awardees included in this year’s Biennial: Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme (2021 New York City), Sula Bermudez-Silverman (2026 Los Angeles), Ali Eyal (2025 Los Angeles), Mariah Garnett (2016 Los Angeles), Nile Harris (2025 New York City), Young Joon Kwak (2024 Los Angeles), and Isabelle Frances McGuire (2025 Chicago). We sat down with six of these artists to discuss their work being shown at the Whitney and what this moment in history means to them.
Artadia: Can you tell us a bit about your piece(s) included in the Whitney Biennial?
Sula Bermudez-Silverman: I have six pieces in the show. They begin with found metal objects, mostly antique animal traps, along with sheep shears and a bull nose ring. These are all tools designed to control or restrain animals. The series began at a residency in Murano where I worked with a glassblower to blow colored glass through their apertures. I collected the antique objects at the flea markets in Paris and brought them back to Venice. The glass occupies and distorts the spaces where something would normally be caught, cut, or led. I think about the works as small negotiations between force and fragility.
Ali Eyal: The work comes from a very quiet, suspended moment just before a storm, a moment that would go on to change the Middle East forever. I remember my mother taking us to Al-Zawraa amusement park in Baghdad. We rode what felt like the largest Ferris wheel at the time, and it was the largest one in the Middle East, and from the top we saw the city stretched out before us, almost still. She said, “Look look at Baghdad, you won’t see it like this again.” My sisters and I kept looking, not fully understanding what she meant.
It’s only now that I understand. And it’s only now that I’ve been able to paint it.
In the work, even animals become part of that shared moment, as if they, too, witnessed and carried something from it.
Mariah Garnett: The work in the biennial is a 55min film which I worked on over the course of 5 years. My great-great aunt, Ruth Lynda Deyo was a composer, spiritualist and kink synesthete living in Cairo from 1924 until her death in 1960. With the help of a spirit lover believed to be Tutankhamun, referred to in her diaries as T.A.A., Deyo composed a grand opera, The Diadem of Stars, which was never produced, about the lives of Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamun and Ankhsenpaten (Akhenaten’s daughter + Tutankhamun’s wife). She believed that if this opera were ever to be performed, it would usher in a new era of world peace.
My film, Songbook, weaves together fragments from Ruth’s archive, with documentation of my own attempts to interpret her legacy, which is steeped in New Age Orientalist fantasy and rooted in colonial narratives of divine right. In my reconsideration of her materials, I’m asking: what resonates today in historical documents? How can relics of a past we mostly want to leave behind be useful to us in the present moment? Can we transform these archives through collective re-consideration? What does it mean to be an artist in a warmongering, fractious, apocalyptic time? How do we find the spiritual fortitude to continue? How am I like Ruth and how am I different? What does it mean to be an artist living in precarity today versus in the past? How do ancient technologies (spirit communication) and modern technologies (AI boyfriends) reflect one another? Is death the end? This publication expands on threads that are explored in the film by presenting a collection of varying source materials which touch on core themes of money, death, body, mind, and spirit.
Nile Harris: For the biennial, I made a piece in collaboration with Dyer Rhoads entitled Dark Brown Birkin Bag, which is a Birkin bag made out of my own skin. The sculpture takes the form of a green art shipping crate made to simulate the crates from the Whitney’s permanent collection. This act of speculation is paired with an LED sign and weekly performance, ‘End of Days.’ The title of the work is a riff on the David Hammons sculpture outside of the Whitney ‘Days End’. The performance features the uncrating of a second sculpture, a performer, on the exhibition floor and delivers of a piece of text performed in Russian (with English supertitles). The text explores the story of the ‘Dark Brown Birkin Bag’: the young black boy (that may or may not be me) who made himself into a Birkin bag for his older white male lover eventually dissolving into an associative rant, performed in a gallery overlooking the Hudson and Hammon’s sculpture, on devotion, subject/object relationships, and being collected.
Young Joon Kwak: Divine Dance of Soft Revolt came out of a moment of fatigue for myself and others in my community—of ongoing political resistance around trans lives and Palestinian liberation. I wanted to make something that could hold more than the weight of that struggle and uplift my community during this time. The sculpture is made from invert-cast fragments of close friends and sisters in the struggle—capturing the negative space where their bodies once were. Together, they form a kind of rising collective body, even if that feels impossible. It’s paired with a looping audio score, Soft Revolt Jamz, made with Marvin Astorga, with sounds and voices from our community. I wanted the installation to feel invitational—an environment where sound, light, and reflection move between the impressions of our bodies and connect with viewers.
Isabelle McGuire: My installation includes five figures and a wall. On one side of the wall are three figures in black cloaks huddled together, facing each other with their backs to the audience. On the other side of the wall are two figures facing away from each other and toward the audience.
The wall is a fragment from my exhibition at the Renaissance Society, Year Zero. I had replicated a cabin that is housed in a memorial building in Kentucky. That cabin was once considered Abraham Lincoln’s birth cabin. After carbon dating, it was revealed to be a simulacrum of what his birth cabin may have looked like, which explains the use of “Symbolic” in the title. For the Biennial, I dismantled my replica and exhibited only the back wall, using it to separate witches and demons. The witches are created from medical scans, sick people, on the peripherals of life. The demons are created from zombie-like figures from the video game Doom, dead people on the periphery of death.
Every figure floats above the floor except for the wall.
Artadia: The Whitney Biennial has historically served as a snapshot of contemporary American art. What does it mean to you to be included in the exhibit at this moment in American history?
SBS: What feels distinct about this Biennial is how the curators are thinking about American art in relation to the broader reach of U.S. power, bringing together artists whose work is shaped by places touched by that reach. My pieces are already dealing with systems of control, extraction, and care, so it feels meaningful to have them in a context where those dynamics are being considered from many different angles at once. My practice has long been rooted in tracing systems of power, particularly within the Americas, so the framing of this exhibition feels especially resonant at this moment.
AE: To be included in the Whitney Biennial at this moment means a great deal to me. It’s something I’ve imagined for a long time, to be part of this space and this conversation. There’s a sense of pride in having my work recognized and trusted to exist within this context.
At the same time, it feels deeply personal. I found myself imagining my mother walking through the show during the opening, in her Baghdadi abaya, moving among the crowd. That image stayed with me, as if this moment connects not only to where I am now, but to where I come from.
MG: I am very happy to be included in this biennial, because of the care and vision of the curators, Drew Sawyer and Marcela Guererro. It is an insane moment in American history, where our own government is aggressively policing leftist views, detaining and harassing its own citizens and eroding our civil rights. Institutions are increasingly following suit or shying away from supporting artists who express dissenting views, either in our own work or in a public forum. This tends to put artists in a double bind – while we are unprotected, there tends to be an expectation that artists should make our work expressly, bluntly political, particularly in a show like this. I think the curation of the 2026 Whitney Biennial paints a more complex picture of how we form community and interpret the world around us, its pressures and our feelings through our work. It’s easy to forget that artists have always operated at the margins of society, in “good times” and in bad. If there is a vision of “America” that I walked away with after this show, which has always been an intangible idea, it is of a place and time where people are depressed, frightened and under a lot of pressure, but survive and find strength through forming connections with each other, our senses, the natural world and the people and animals we love. I am, of course, describing myself here, but I found it exciting to see that reflected in many of the works in the show. All that is to say, I’m not sure what it means to me to be included at this moment, but I’m happy that this is the one I’m in.
NH: Though this moment is incredibly challenging, there has never been a moment in American history that has not been fraught with war, genocide, and predatory capitalism rooted in slavery. So in many ways, making work for this moment feels no different than the ongoing priorities of my practice to use criticality and humor to speak to the present moment. In the New York Times piece announcing the artist list for the show the curators are quoted saying that these artists will respond to these “weird times” and do xyz. “Weird times” has become a bit of a moniker for me and my understanding of the snapshot of this moment. It’s equal parts an insufficient descriptor and also incredibly apt. I use the phrase a lot inside of the script of my performance. It’s all very weird.
YJK: Being included in the Biennial feels meaningful because I’ve often felt both inside and outside of being American and Korean, and my work comes out of my queer and trans community, but not through traditional representation. It holds the impressions of our bodies and relationships—the trace of touch, and how we care for and sustain each other. To bring that into this space feels especially significant at a time when borders are being drawn and trans lives are still being debated, policed, and erased. It also allows the work to move across geographic, cultural, and national boundaries—to reach those in our extended community who may need to feel that care, support, and love, and to invite connection across difference.
IM: The context of the Whitney Biennial became material for me. I am interested in the way historical narratives are reductive of the real, how we use symbols to conjure the past and make it tangible, and how those symbols are mutated in the present. Much of my content is haunted by associations.
A few years back, there was discussion about art institutions being “dead spaces” or mausoleums. For me, this felt like a productive place to begin making work. In the context of the Whitney Biennial, I wanted to caricature my own practice, specifically the Americanness of the project, and push it further into the land of the dead. That led to the decision to create a bastardized version of the Salem Witch Trials within this framework. The installation barely holds a glow of Salem or of an America once past. It’s more invested in playful reenactment to care about being factual.
The installation’s central focus is an us versus them mentality, this sense of an inside group and an outside group that seeps into every network of American culture, including the persistent, violent othering of individuals and the kinds of games we play.
Artadia: Besides your work, can you share a few of your own ‘highlights’ from the Biennial? Are there works we shouldn’t miss? Or that warrant a second look?
SBS: Because I haven’t been able to spend much time at the Biennial yet, I would point to the catalog. I think it’s very interesting to see the conversations that the artists had with someone of their choosing. I particularly love the conversation that Andrea Fraser has with her mom, Carmen de Monteflores. The conversations give you a way into the work and practices that you don’t always get from wall text alone, and I found myself thinking about pieces differently after reading them.
AE: It’s difficult to choose, as there are so many strong artists in the Biennial. What stayed with me most was the diversity of voices and approaches
MG: I loved Pat Olezko’s work, particularly the film. I also was taken with Sarah Rodriguez’ apocalyptic sculptures, Young Joon Kwak’s gorgeous installation, Mo Costello’s work, Ali Eyal’s painting, Theresa Baker’s works, and Ozwaldo Maciá’s sensory installation. I haven’t seen any of the performances yet, but I’m looking forward to seeing Nile Harris and Dyer Rhoades’ work when I return this summer. This is, of course, merely an impression of the show, as I was not able to see everything in the whirlwind of install and opening.
NH: I am an advocate for all the performance and time based media work in the show that I think warrant a second look. It’s hard in a show like this for critics and viewers to slow down and watch things that take time. I am thinking about the video works of Jordan Strafer, Mariah Garnett, and Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme to name a few. I am also very excited for the forthcoming performance commissions of Maia Chao (with Lena Englestein) and Jonathan Gonzalez. I think it’s interesting that the three of us artists working with performance all chose to work outside of the theater space in the museum and each of our physical pieces in the show reference the institution in some way: my Whitney green crate, Jonathan’s photos of the exterior terraces of the building, and Maia’s Scores for the Museum Visitor.
YJK: Honestly, I’d say all of it. I’d encourage people to spend time and try to be a generous viewer—to slow down and really take in the different ways artists are thinking, feeling, and responding to the world right now. I think there’s a lot of power in how the work is being held together—not as a single perspective, but as something more layered and interconnected. For me, that’s hopeful.
IM: I’d encourage people to go back and look slowly. So much of the work warrants time. There are so many pieces that I really enjoy, but maybe there are two moments that stung me. One being the scene in Jordan Strafer’s video where a talk show host interviews three rapists, and the other being Cooper Jacoby’s disembodied AI death intercom. Both of these moments remind me of the futility and limits of my understanding in the face of horror, and I generally appreciate when an artwork can crack the rigid shell that is my sense of self.
Also featured in this year’s Biennial are Awardees Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme (2021 New York City), whose collaborative work continues their ongoing exploration of Palestinian history and resistance.
The 2026 Whitney Biennial is open now through August 23, 2026. Click here to learn more about the eighty-second edition of the Whitney Biennial.
ABOUT THE AWARDEES
Sula Bermudez-Silverman works somewhere between the archive and the laboratory, following the obscure histories of commodities and objects. Her practice spans a wide range of materials, from uranium glass and animal traps to hair gel, chili flakes, honey bees and pearls. Through intensive research into trade routes and mythological narratives, she examines the imprint history leaves on objects and bodies, inviting viewers to reconsider their relationship with the material world they have inherited.
Sula is a 2026 Los Angeles Artadia Awardee. Click here to visit her Instagram or her Artadia Awardee registry page.
Ali Eyal is an artist based in Los Angeles whose practice explores memory, displacement, and collective storytelling through drawing, painting, and installation. Originally from Iraq, their work intricately weaves personal and historical narratives shaped by migration and conflict.
Eyal’s work examines the psychic and environmental toll of displacement, war, and the realities of living in a failed state. Recognized as pivotal in reshaping the narrative of our troubled times, it draws on latent ideas within a shared psychic imaginary and is rooted in the environment, particularly the essence of a small farm.
Ali is a 2025 Los Angeles Artadia Awardee. Click here to visit his website or his Artadia Awardee registry page.
Mariah Garnett mixes documentary, narrative, and experimental filmmaking practices to make work that accesses existing people and communities beyond her immediate experience. Using source material that ranges from found text to iconic gay porn stars, Garnett often inserts herself into the films, creating cinematic allegories that codify and locate identity.
Mariah is a 2016 Los Angeles Artadia Awardee. Click here to visit her website or her Artadia Awardee registry page.
Nile Harris is a performer and director of live art. He has done a few things and hopes to do a few more, God willing.
Nile creates collaborative experiences that blur the line between fiction and reality. Often critical and humorous, his work interrogates cultural histories and narratives that make up systems of power present inside of institutional and national frameworks.
Nile is a 2025 New York City Artadia Awardee. Click here to visit his Instagram or his Artadia Awardee registry page.
Young Joon Kwak‘s sculptures and performances use different forms of masking and camouflage to question conventional notions of representation and visibility while imagining new ways for racialized, trans, and nonnormative bodies to exist and thrive in spaces that surveil and police them. Shimmering cast-negative sculptures of bodies optically camouflage against their surroundings, offering viewers an alternative way of embodying the experience of social and spatial camouflage. Through their work, Kwak aims to foster a broader dialogue on visibility, surveillance, and violence against marginalized communities and generate new embodied ways of relating to bodies beyond gendered and raced taxonomies.
Young Joon is a 2024 Los Angeles Artadia Awardee. Click here to visit their website or their Artadia Awardee registry page.
Isabelle Frances McGuire uses open-source technologies, readymades, and popular media references to investigate contemporary shifts in American culture while taking steps to expand on questions traditionally explored through sculpture. With a focus on myths and cultural figures that persist and reappear over time, McGuire implements strategies from gaming culture (such as “kitbashing” and “modding”), prop making, open-source robotics, and art history to breathe new uncanny life into the familiar. McGuire navigates the mutability of the symbolic by engaging with culturally monumental signifiers in ways that feel humorous, unpredictable, and, at times, haunting—ultimately presenting a project intent on forging new possibilities and spiraling pathways.
Isabelle is a 2025 Chicago Artadia Awardee. Click here to visit her Instagram or her Artadia Awardee registry page.
Biographies are courtesy of the artists, and images are courtesy of the Whitney and the artists.