The Whitney Biennial is both the most important recurring art exhibition in the US and, often, the most polarizing one. During a year when notions about what does and doesn’t constitute Americanness are the subject of everyday discourse, this survey of American art has now returned for its 82nd edition at the Whitney Museum in New York. Curated by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, it is bound to spur on yet more debate.Some 56 artists are included in this biennial, and they hail from countries ranging from Palestine to the Philippines to Japan. Working in mediums such as performance, sculpture, and painting, and even utilizing AI and other emergent technologies, these artists appear to be concerned with a concise set of themes: the relationship between humans and nonhumans, the influence of American empire on foreign nations, how infrastructure can either support or hurt those who rely upon it, and the meaning of horror imagery during fearsome times.With the biennial having officially opened to the press ahead of its public inauguration on March 8, ARTnews senior editors Maximilíano Durón and Alex Greenberger opened a Google Doc to discuss their initial thoughts.Alex Greenberger: This Whitney Biennial is a horror show, filled with creepy crawlies, sharp-toothed creatures, and sentient beings. Just look at the fifth floor: on one end, looking out toward apartment buildings in the Meatpacking District, there are Isabelle Frances McGuire’s sculptures of witches conspiring to set a hex; on the other, facing the Hudson River, there are Sarah M. Rodriguez’s aluminum sculptures resembling assortments of silvery spines, ribcages, and femurs—the remainders of a monster’s lunch, perhaps. Smack in the middle of the two, there’s a monumental Gabriela Ruiz sculpture, titled Homo Machina (2026), that features a screaming face and a spinning humanoid eating its own tail.There are even actual ghosts on hand—ghosts in the machine, that is. On the floor above, there are Cooper Jacoby’s sculptures made of reused intercoms, each paying homage to a real person who died. Remade so that they appear to be composed of mottled flesh, the intercoms mark the time that’s elapsed since each passing. Occasionally, the intercoms even speak, thanks to AI that is working from actual social media posts by the sculptures’ subjects. These works are totally fucked up. I approve.Isabelle Frances McGuire’s sculptures of witches and other creatures draw on the horror genre.Christopher Garcia Valle for ARTnewsMaximilíano Durón: The work that appeared most nightmarish to me was the first one I encountered during my tour of the Biennial: Ali Eyal’s painting Look Where I Took You (2026). Eyal, who showed at last year’s Made in L.A. biennial at the Hammer Museum, makes paintings that look a little garish to me, though this is almost certainly the point. The story behind Look Where I Took You is itself fascinating. Knowing that the forthcoming US invasion of Iraq would forever change the Iraq his family knew, Eyal’s mother took him to an amusement park one last time. Eyal’s painting is not some twee tableau waxing poetic about a society forever altered. The nightmare is already here: the ferris wheel comes apart, people fly out of their chairs, the carousel’s horses have been shot through with arrows, the grim reaper looks on wearing a Ghostface mask. Bodily disturbances don’t have to be so scary. I’m thinking here of Young Joon Kwak’s 2024 sculpture Divine Dance of Soft Revolt (Anna, Travis, Me), which is set off in its chartreuse-painted room and dramatically lit. For this work (and several others like it that aren’t in the show), Kwak created casts of their body, as well as the bodies of members of their chosen family, and embedded them with mirror fragments that catch the light like a disco ball. The casts are installed in a spiral that cascades heavenward. They are paralleled by Sula Bermudez-Silverman’s sculptures, in which delicate hand-blown glass is precariously juxtaposed with rusted iron animal traps—something I didn’t even clock when I saw them in person because I was so drawn in by their beauty. I’m not repulsed by the sense of fragmentation found in both Kwak and Bermudez-Silverman’s works. I liked being seduced by these works, only to realize what was going on beneath their surface. By the way, I read Ruiz’s Homo Machina and Jacoby’s “Estate” series differently. To me, they aren’t so much body horror as they are statements about surveillance. If you get close enough to Homo Machina, you’ll see that in the mouth of the disembodied head is a camera that is projecting a feed of you—rightside up and upside down—within the sculpture. Jacoby’s “Estate” sculptures brought to mind a recent Ring commercial that involves trying to create a neighborhood-style panopticon via doorbell systems. (I do hope the artist consulted the estates of the people he’s memorializing for permission, otherwise he’s no better than Ring and other corporations like it.) These artists are trying to get us to think about how our bodies are used by the surveillance state. This isn’t necessarily anything new, but I find the artists’ approaches new and refreshing. Sarah M. Ruiz’s aluminum sculptures invoke horror imagery.Christopher Garcia Valle for ARTnewsGreenberger: I loved being rattled by Jacoby, McGuire, Rodriguez, and Ruiz’s contributions, which question whether those who are demonized really are so evil. But I found the exhibition needlessly evasive when it came to the true boogeymen afflicting this country: militarized police forces; a racist, xenophobic President; untamed forces of nature that are being worsened by climate change. Instead of confronting those subjects with specificity, the show often paints in broad strokes. I’ll confess I let out a groan when I encountered Michelle Lopez’s contribution, a video featuring a roaring mass of people holding up their iPhones, a cyclone of computer-generated debris, and an American flag that’s blown free from its mast, all set to a terrifying din that can be heard halfway across an entire floor. Even the work’s title, Pandemonium (2025), feels like it’s laying it on thick. We’re living in scary, chaotic times, Lopez suggests—but who really needs art to learn that? Isn’t reading the news enough? In placing this work so centrally on one of the Biennial’s floors, the curators successfully channel an anxiety that is omnipresent in the US today, but they choke when it comes to nailing down what it is that we’re all so afraid of.Gabriela Ruiz’s Homo Machina (2026) includes cameras that play back feeds captured in the gallery.Christopher Garcia Valle for ARTnewsDurón: You know, I actually don’t mind the Lopez work. Sure, it’s a bit on the nose, but sometimes that is necessary, and I think even warranted: it clarifies other works that are a bit harder to read and interpret, even if they are talking about the same things. I read Lopez’s Pandemonium exactly as you did. Every day—this past week, in particular—feels like a swirl of headlines, and it’s hard to keep track of what exactly is going on. At the center of it all is an insidious flag that is a sterling symbol of patriotism for some in this country and a harbinger of unspeakable horrors to come for others, both here and abroad. For what it’s worth, McGuire’s witch sculptures are titled Satan in America and Other Invisible Evils. That’s a pretty direct condemnation. I was actually pleased that there were no outrageous, instantly polarizing works in this Biennial, as there have been in past editions. We are currently living under a fascist regime that will take even the smallest form of critique as heresy—and not only disparage that critique via the right-wing press and on social media, but also actively call for censorship. We’ve seen it happen again and again during both Trump administrations, as well as under Biden. That’s not to say artists shouldn’t call out these boogeymen, but I think artists have begun to find ways of doing it more slyly. I do think those strategies are evident here. Some three and half decades later, Édouard Glissant’s theory of the “right to opacity” is back on the rise. This is evident here in an installation by CFGNY. The collective uses plastic sheeting to obscure part of the installation, which houses sculptures made from the negative space of objects that are not present. A CFGNY installation features casts of objects that cannot themselves be seen in the work.Christopher Garcia Valle for ARTnewsGreenberger: This tendency was actually even more pronounced in the last Whitney Biennial, in 2024. I was in the minority for loving that show, which drew out a new strain of minimalist art that was intentionally obfuscatory. The artists in that Biennial were utilizing an aesthetic of refusal as a form of protest, and I agree that that’s happening here, but I think this show is a new variation on an old theme. The artists contending with opacity are now doing it in ways that are colorful, at times even buoyant.You can see this in Aziz Hazara’s photographs shot with the aid of digital sensors found in night-vision goggles—gear that was used by US forces during strikes against the Taliban in the artist’s home country of Afghanistan. None of this is relayed in the images themselves, which look mainly like smears of black, green, and purple. In the Whitney Biennial catalog, Hazara says that these photographs deal with “plausible deniability,” or the sense that it’s possible to disavow what you cannot see. He’s also denying his audience easy viewing. Aziz Hazara’s photographs were made with the help of technology derived from night vision goggles.Christopher Garcia Valle for ARTnewsDurón: This is also something done by Jonathan González, a dancer who’s showing similar photographs in the galleries that act as studies for a performance he’ll realize during the Biennial’s run. Shot on Super 8, these photographs are hazy, purplish views of the Whitney. The building is hard to make out, and yet it’s never looked so beautiful. The performance will take place not in the third floor theater or the galleries, but instead on one of the museum’s terraces that isn’t accessible to the public. A staff member pointed that space out to me during a walkthrough, and I admitted that I had never looked out of the window long enough to realize there was a balcony there. From that vantage point, viewers will be able to catch a sliver of González’s performance; from outside the museum, people may get another view. But either way, the performance will never be fully visible to a museum-going audience. This is fascinating.Greenberger: I’m interested in the curators’ choice to put Hazara and González’s works in close proximity to computer-assisted abstractions from the 1980s by Samia Halaby, a Palestinian painter who has been one of the most outspoken advocates for Gazans’ right to survival amid Israel’s repeated assault on their livelihood. Halaby’s abstractions aren’t directly about that conflict—they don’t even really represent anything at all. But she says in the catalog that she considers her work, both her pro-Palestine activism and her paintings, as part of a broader quest to “add optimism” to the world. This, to me, explains why so many artists in this show are making lush, elegant art, seemingly as a rejoinder to all the grey, dour work of the last Biennial.A lot of people will read Halaby’s inclusion as a sign of internal dissent at the Whitney. Last year, the museum faced scrutiny after it canceled a pro-Palestine performance organized by its Independent Study Program that, in a prior iteration, involved asking anyone who believed in Israel’s existence to leave the room. In the catalog, Sawyer mentions the ISP debacle, which led to the program’s current pause; his essay features an image of the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which was decimated by the Israeli military in 2024. Guerrero writes of an “ongoing genocide,” without specifying who is committing it or where it’s taking place. That this all appears in a book that costs $50, and not in the exhibition itself, feels like a canny act of avoidance.Samia Halaby’s computer-assisted abstractions from the 1980s.Christopher Garcia Valle for ARTnewsDurón: Well, is it avoidance, or is it all the result of a chilling effect and a little bit of self-censorship? I’d venture that the “avoidance,” as you term it, is being ordered from above. It wasn’t the curators’ decision to cancel the ISP performance—Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney director who hired Sawyer and Guerrero while he was chief curator, made that call. And if you’ve been following Sawyer and Guerrero’s work over the past few years, you know where their politics land. I think people might come to this Biennial and expect to see a very pointed focus on Puerto Rico and its status as a colony of the United States, given that Guerrero is not only Puerto Rican but the organizer of the heart-wrenching, thought-provoking exhibition “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria” (2022–23). But Guerrero has already tackled that, in a way, and I think she and Sawyer are now expanding the purview. That’s why they include artists who are dealing with the US’s imperialistic ties with Hawai’i, the Philippines, and postwar Japan. The contributions by kekahi wahi and Kainoa Gruspe, an artist collective and artist, respectively, both based in Hawai’i, are among my favorites in this Biennial. Both are tackling the same issues in different ways. kekahi wahi’s satirical 20-minute workout [WIP] (2023/26) is a riot—but look at where part of it is filmed: in front of the Cook monument in Kealakekua Bay. This white stone monument, erected in 1874, reads: “In memory of the great circumnavigator, Captain James Cook, R.M., who discovered these islands.” (Emphasis mine.) Gruspe takes a poetic approach, creating tender sculptures from objects he has sourced from sites of extraction across Hawai’i, leveling this criticism equally at US military bases as well as the resorts and golf courses that now populate these lands. But the artist then transforms them—“rescues” them, per his own terminology—into something new. These works are hopeful.In going through the show, I couldn’t help but think back to the Bad Bunny song “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAII,” in which he sings about Puerto Rico not facing the same fate as Hawai’i. In the catalog, when asked about how his work can translate beyond Hawai’i, Gruspe replies, “I think it’s a part of the story of America’s tentacles. It’s a lens onto how this tentacle is interacting with a certain group of people in a certain place. I think that is relevant to anybody who is under one of these tentacles anywhere … which is maybe the entire world.” This is again a way of asking: how can we find ways to say something new about these times in new, and perhaps indirect, ways? I don’t see it as avoidance but a strategy of survival. An installation by Aki Onda features radios that play a score by composer José Maceda.Christopher Garcia Valle for ARTnewsGreenberger: I’d agree with you if this weren’t so clearly a curatorial choice. There are artists directly addressing thorny histories of land ownership, settler colonialism, and survival in spite of it. Those artists just aren’t here, for the most part. But at least one work in the show does deal with some of what I’m talking about: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s terrific video installation Until we became fire and fire us (2023–ongoing), in which inverted images of flowers and people dancing the dabke are thrown across a darkened room. At various points, text in both Arabic and English pops up, with a poignant phrase—“The land haunts us and we haunt them”—flashing across a wall in one moment. That’s a pretty explicit statement from two Palestinian artists. But it’s also one of the rare moments of lucidity in this show.Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s installation Until we became fire and fire us (2023–ongoing) is one of the most explicit works about Palestinian liberation in this show.Christopher Garcia Valle for ARTnewsDurón: I was also moved by this installation. I’d point out that in the artists’ catalog interview, when Abou-Rahme discusses connecting the genocide in Palestine to other “communities that are dispossessed and to look at a global system of eco-fascism and racial capitalism,” she mentions “Sudan, Congo, and right here in America.” Abbas completes that thought by adding in “Haiti, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i.” That, to me, is no coincidence. I left that work with an overall impression of loss and devastation, but also a feeling of determination and resilience. I jotted down some of the English phrases seen in this work. One that has stuck with me is, “When I recall her face, it is the land that answers.” In the works that are dealing with US colonialism and imperialism in this Biennial, that notion recurs. The land will never forget. The stewards of this land, the indigenous people, will not forget and will not be forgotten.Greenberger: I liked this show best when it was dealing with a different but related aspect of the land: the natural environment and the beings that tend it. You can see this in Ash Arder’s sculpture Broadcast #4 (2024), in which a bed of dirt is host to seeds that are being redistributed by low-frequency sound. After the exhibition, Arder will plant those seeds back into the ground. You can also see this fascination with flora and fauna in Akira Ikezoe’s paintings, which were some of my favorite works in the show. In one, a group of platypi look after penned-in cattle while others dump oil in a vat and dine out on the fruit of their labor. Piping and electrical cables run throughout this painting. Ikezoe’s message is simple, but it bears repeating: everything is connected. It seems notable, too, that there are no humans present in these works.Kainoa Gruspe “rescues” material from resorts and golf courses in Hawai‘i.Christopher Garcia Valle for ARTnewsDurón: I didn’t connect with Ikezoe’s paintings initially. It took a second viewing for me to see exactly what they were communicating: the unseen infrastructure that dominates our contemporary world. The most dead-on work by Ikezoe, in this context, is Robot Stories Around Solar Panels, which depicts all the various forms of labor needed to create a painting, a robot version of Boticelli’s The Birth of Venus. We see robots growing cotton (for the canvas) and bamboo (for the painting’s armature and the false wall from which the painting will one day hang). Robots work a loom and various other machines to create that canvas, while others dive for scallop shells, both for the robot model to pose in and to be used to make solar panels, which illuminate the finished works on a gallery wall and perhaps also help the cotton and bamboo grow. It’s a never-ending cycle. That Ikezoe has swapped humans for robots in this instance is telling. The art world has become so automated these days, everything feels like one stop in a never-ending assembly line. Infrastructure is a major theme in this Biennial. We already discussed Cooper Jacoby’s works in terms of surveillance, but the artist also has another series on view, “Mutual Life,” which he made after a health insurance company offered him a discounted rate if he took a test to determine his true “biological age.” The resulting sculptures are clocks that map an individual’s biological age to their own rhythm, with human teeth acting as the hour and minute hands. There’s something so insidious about the health insurance company’s true motivations behind wanting to determine “biological age,” which recalls how corporations previously used to deny coverage based on preexisting conditions. I see a correlation between that work and pieces by David L. Johnson and Emilio Martinez Poppe, which are paired together in an adjacent gallery. Along two walls, Johnson has installed signs taken from parks across New York City. These parks are technically public plazas that private developers created in order to get tax breaks for the construction of high-rises. The amount of rules that delineate what exactly can be done in this “public” space is mind-boggling. Martinez Poppe presents an elegant installation that includes interviews with workers for the City of Philadelphia. Some of them are feelgood quotes about how a city is just a bunch of people trying to make it all work together. But the friction inherent in a city as large as Philadelphia is revealed in one interview with a Black woman, who says, “I work in a building where we have police officers at our entrance. They’re always very polite, and I have banter with some of them but I struggle with it because of natural distrust.” The fabric of this infrastructure is as tenuous as the people who hold it together. Greenberger: Other artists focus on the tenuousness of life by homing in on the relationship between humans and nonhumans. One is Emilie Louise Gossiaux, who, in a sculptural installation and a series of drawings, memorializes their deceased guide dog, a Labrador Retriever named London. In one of those drawings, Gossiaux can be seen floating amid the stars with London, the two bound together by a thick white umbilical cord. I’ve been hard on this show, but I’m not made of stone: Gossiaux’s drawings made me tear up. These works moved me to think about how enjoined I am to my own dog, whom my wife and I often consider more than just another animal in our home. These works also spurred me to reconsider my relationship to animals more generally—and to want to be a better companion to them.Durón: I was more drawn to works dealing with familial connections in a different way. Recent editions of the Whitney Biennial, Made in L.A., and the Venice Biennale have included deceased artists and under-recognized living artists of a certain age. I’m very much for this, and I’d like to call out two artists who received such treatment in the 2026 Biennial. The first is Agosto Machado, a self-identified street queen who was in many ways the beating heart of New York’s Downtown scene in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. He’s also one of the few artists to have survived the AIDS crisis, and it was only recently that his elegiac altars for fallen comrades have been exhibited. Shrine (Green), for example, is housed in a green-painted armoire that is chock full of objects Machado has collected over the decades, including memorial service cards, skulls, feathers, handmade butterflies and roses, and artworks by his cohort, like Grady Alexis, who was killed by a police officer in 1991 at the age of 26. These works have a loving touch—they ensure that Machado’s friends are not wiped from the historical record. But for me, the breakout star of this show is Carmen de Monteflores, who will turn 93 this year. The three shapes canvases she has on view, made between 1967 and 1969, are the strongest works on view in the Biennial by leaps and bounds. They clearly belong in the Whitney’s permanent collection. I asked myself: Why haven’t we heard more from de Monteflores? The wall label gives some insight: “Frustrated by the lack of opportunities for women in the art world, de Monteflores stopped painting in 1969, received a doctorate in psychology, and wrote five novels.” It’s a story we’ve heard time and again, and it’s bittersweet to think about the artistic career that could have been. Agosto Machado, Downtown (Altar), 2024.Greenberger: The de Monteflores works were also a revelation, to me—they deserve to stand among the finest examples of Pop art from the ’60s. These paintings draw their bright tones from the bold-faced hues of advertising, but their subject matter is skewed power dynamics, not products available for sale. One shaped canvas features an orange figure with a blue head of hair who’s being eclipsed by a big yellow face. Is this a kiss or some kind of standoff? This delicious painting offers no answers, but either way, because de Monteflores has collapsed the pictorial space to a point where it’s nonexistent, the encounter is an intimate one. Indeed, it is installed intimately, too: the curators have placed de Monteflores’s paintings alongside recent sculptures of babies by her daughter, Andrea Fraser, who has now been in—count ’em—three Whitney Biennials. Because of the type of wax used, Fraser’s infants will never fully set, suggesting a state of arrested development. We will all forever be someone else’s child, after all.Durón: Let’s talk about some overall takeaways from the Biennial. First, let me mention that this Biennial does not carry a subtitle signaling the themes its curators are tackling. But a short wall text does note that the show is “not only [about] what is being made but also what it means to name something ‘American’ at all.” Since moving downtown in 2015, the Whitney has focused on unsettling the term “American art,” across its exhibition program. I think the 2026 Biennial accomplishes that in a less obvious way, by casting its gaze both small (the municipal) and large (the tendrils of American empire). This isn’t the kind of exhibition where you’ll see a disintegrating White House or a Statue of Liberty performance—and that’s OK. The past few Biennials have felt cluttered. I liked that this one was not: it has just 56 artists, which feels manageable. The works here have room to breathe, and I never encountered any awkward sightlines. Maybe I’ll be in the minority here, but this is an exhibition I actually do want to see again, especially given that I’m intrigued by the performance series that will activate some of the works that felt cryptic on their own in the galleries. I’m also excited to enact Maia Chao’s Scores for the Museum Visitor—a series of instructions on how to interact with the exhibition—especially now that I’ve seen the exhibition in full. There’s still a lot to chew on, so I find it successful. If I had to rate it, I’d say 4.75/5. What about you, Alex? Greenberger: I’m mixed-positive—I guess around 3.5/5, if I had to treat this like a Letterboxd review. The 2017 Whitney Biennial holds a special place in my heart because it was so strange, and I’m glad that I can call this Biennial the oddest one since that edition. By the way, it seems like no coincidence that the two most bizarre Whitney Biennials that I can recall both occurred at the start of Trump’s Presidential terms. When the going gets rough, artists at least know how to keep it weird. I’m thinking here of Sung Tieu’s contribution, an installation situated in the museum’s staircase that makes sound every time oil is fracked in certain locations. A gigantic pipe that emits a rumble so loud that it shakes an entire institution: I mean, who does that? That’s praise, by the way.But I also feel like this is a brand of weirdness that feels a little polite, as though the show were afraid to offend. I don’t mind that the show lacks works that flash the phrase “Free Palestine,” videos that double as acid critiques of Whitney board members, or queasy VR artworks about carnage and prejudice. If Whitney Biennial controversies are a thing of the past, that’s fine by me. I do mind, though, that the show goes down so easily, that it somehow manages to even sand down the edges of those horror-themed works I mentioned at the start. I want it darker.Kelly Akashi’s Monument (Altadena) refers to chimneys left behind by houses that burned down in the Altadena fire.Maximilíano Durón for ARTnewsDurón: I totally understand that impulse, though I personally don’t know that I need art that shows how dark the times are—I’m living through them. One purpose of art is to reflect the world back to us, but there should also be room for works that are hopeful, works that are thinking beyond the awful current moment to imagine what a better future could look like. Here, I’d like to highlight Kelly Akashi’s contribution to the Biennial. Akashi lost her home and studio in last year’s devastating Altadena fire. On the Whitney’s fifth floor terrace is Monument (Altadena), a glass sculpture in the shape of a chimney. For anyone who saw the images of Altadena after the wildfires, the reference is obvious: a chimney was often all that remained of burned-down homes. Alongside her chimney sculpture, Akashi is also showing Inheritance (Distressed), a large Cor-Ten steel sculpture of her grandmother’s doily, which Akashi lost in the fire. The choice of materials here is telling. That which can survive is rendered in fragile glass. That which did not is memorialized in sturdy steel. I read these works as being about hope and resilience. At the end of the day, they’re all we have left.