Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as it’s Kept

Every two years, the Whitney Museum holds an exhibition that is regarded as one of the most important and influential events in contemporary art. Some version of this exhibition, the Whitney Biennial, has been in existence since 1932, making it the longest-running survey of American art. Delayed for a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s biennial is a “startlingly coherent and bold” forum for artists’ musings on the events, changes, and trials of last three years. There is a wide variety of perspectives and mediums, from more traditional painting, sculpture, and photography to experimentations with performance, video, light, chemicals, makeup and prosthetics, textiles, and technology. The artworks tackle a wide range of themes, including racial justice, class discrepancy, capitalism, corporatism, imperialism and the effects of colonialist action, the American prison system, indigenous issues, and the widespread grief of a global pandemic. An exhibition this far-reaching and ambitious could easily feel disjointed and chaotic, but instead it encourages the viewer to understand that the issues and conditions addressed by the art “are not new, their overlap, their intensity, and their sheer ubiquity created a context in which past, present, and future folded into one another.” The curators “organized this Biennial to reflect these precarious and improvised times.”

"Here" by Santi Flores

The city of New York, home to people from hundreds of different countries and cultures, takes great pride in its diversity. The Garment District, a neighborhood in midtown Manhattan, is currently home to an art installation celebrating the unique “unity, diversity, and individuality” of “New Yorkers and visitors passing through” the city. Called “Here,” the installation consists of fourteen figures standing in the pedestrian plaza with hands raised high in the air, “as if to say ‘Here we are. We are moving forward together.’” The installation is by Spanish artist Santi Flores, who created each figure out of steel and painted them with unique designs and patterns on their “skin.” The larger-than life figures are a whimsical tribute to New York and the people who live in and visit the city.

Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Rooms

Yayoi Kusama is one of the most well-known contemporary artists in the world. She is best known for her conceptual and sculpture and installations, which blend elements of surrealism, pop art, abstract expressionism, and minimalism. Two of her Infinity Mirrored Room installations are currently on view at the Tate Modern in London. Both rooms strategically use lights and mirrors to create the illusion of infinite space. Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life is the artist’s largest mirrored room. Pinpricks of colored light shift rhythmically between hues, reflected off the mirrored walls, floors, and ceiling, as well as the still water filling pools on the floor. The effect is dizzying and beautiful. The other room, titled Chandelier of Grief, consists of a flickering baroque-style chandelier inside a smaller, hexagonal mirrored room. This meditative installation is meant to provoke thoughtful exploration of the viewer’s place in their environment. The current exhibition has been exceedingly popular, and it is easy to see why. These mesmerizing rooms are unique and transportive.

Brier Patch by Hugh Hayden

An unsettling assembly of school desks with branches growing from the surfaces is an unexpected sight in Madison Square Park. The installation by artist Hugh Hayden evokes in turn nostalgia, optimism, and foreboding. The desks, organized in neat rows like in a classroom, are disrupted by the twisting mass of branches that emerge from the seats of the chairs and the tops of the desks. Evocative of folklore stories like Br’er Rabbit and Sleeping Beauty, the canopy that forms could offer a safe place to hide, or prove to be dangerously prickly.