This year’s Whitney Biennial seeks to unhook and lay bare the ways in which American authority both shapes and reflects the contemporary canon.
Curated by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, the 2026 Whitney Biennial seeks to redefine American art by measuring the geopolitical influence of the United States through the prisms of segregation and relationality. In the limited space across four levels at the Whitney Museum of American Art, works by 56 artists, duos and collectives portray the ever-expanding landscape of US influence worldwide, both present and back in time.
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Across from Ishikawa’s photographs are Kamrooz Aram’s series of installations and paintings exploring relationality through abstraction. These works emphasise the expressive and conceptual value of ornaments, challenge its marginalisation within Western art history and address the shared roots between Eastern architectural ornamentation and Western painting traditions. Consisting of ceramics, book pages, a folding screen and lines in pencil and crayon, they form a layered visual field in which geometry and texture interact in a language of ordered chaos.
