JORDAN STRAFER — TALK SHOW AT THE WHITNEY BIENNIAL

The eighty-second edition of the Whitney Biennial, like those before it, offers a space for contemplating the shifting currents of art in the United States, asking not only what is being made but also what it means to name something “American” at all. Attentive to the feelings that saturate contemporary life and bind people together, this Biennial is less a definitive answer than an invitation to tune in to the moods offered by an intergenerational and international group of fifty-six artists, duos, and collectives who sustain this ongoing conversation. Alongside artists from across the country, the exhibition features works by artists from places marked by the broad reach of US power, ranging from Afghanistan to Vietnam. Using a range of media and artistic strategies, they explore interspecies kinships, familial relations, geopolitical entanglements, technological affinities, infrastructural networks, precarious ecologies, and shared mythologies. As an ensemble, their works suggest togetherness through difference—avoiding clear ideological declarations in favor of the unusual alliances, improvised provocations, and irreverent associations that are required to thrive in the present moment.

Whitney Biennial 2026 is co-organized by Whitney curators Marcela Guerrero, the DeMartini Family Curator, and Drew Sawyer, the Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography with Beatriz Cifuentes, Biennial Curatorial Assistant, and Carina Martinez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow.