Protesters in the lobby of the Whitney Museum on May 18, 2019 (image by the author for Hyperallergic)
From undergoing nine weeks of protests to displaying more ethnically and racially diverse than previous years, this year’s Whitney Biennial has a lot to unpack, particularly around the resignation of Warren B. Kanders, the former vice chair of the Whitney Museum and the man behind Safariland, a tear gas and military equipment manufacturer.
I asked our associate news editor Jasmine Weber, editor and critic Seph Rodney, and reporter Hakim Bishara to join me and reflect on months of controversy and protest, while offering their opinions on the exhibition itself. We discuss favorite works, what the state of affairs is post-Kanders, and the biennial’s duds. You’ll want to hear this.
A special thanks to Wanderraven, who provided the music to this week’s episode. The song is “Here Into The Dark” and you can hear more at wanderraven.com.
As part of Hyperallergic’s Emily Hall Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators, Sadaf Padder presents an exhibition to offer insight into her curatorial process.
The two-part exhibition features the work of 41 graduating artists across disciplines, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, and integrated practices.
Through small-scale works, this exhibition at the Katonah Museum of Art in New York examines Cornell’s prominent role in the lives and careers of Johnson and Kusama.
There must be a lesson in Vasilis Katsoupis’s film Inside about the vacuousness of the art market or the claustrophobia of exhibition spaces — I just don’t care.
Hrag Vartanian is editor-in-chief and co-founder of Hyperallergic. You can follow him at @hragv.
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2 replies on “After Kanders: Reflecting on the 2019 Whitney Tear Gas Biennial”
We certainly need more, many more, children to tell everyone what art really, really is.
How is it possible that a group of art critics that are personally and intellectually invested in the diversification of the so called art world, get together to talk about the highlights of the Whitney Biennial and fail to mention even one Indigenous artist in the exhibition- except the sloppy blunder at the end when you remembered the “best piece in the exhibition” and couldn’t remember the artist’s name? Laura Ortman! The Whitney Museum of American Art has historically excluded Indigenous artists from its collections and exhibitions and is finally taking steps to correct this obvious gab in it definition of what constitutes “American” art, and this Biennial showed that effort more explicitly than ever before.
We certainly need more, many more, children to tell everyone what art really, really is.
How is it possible that a group of art critics that are personally and intellectually invested in the diversification of the so called art world, get together to talk about the highlights of the Whitney Biennial and fail to mention even one Indigenous artist in the exhibition- except the sloppy blunder at the end when you remembered the “best piece in the exhibition” and couldn’t remember the artist’s name? Laura Ortman! The Whitney Museum of American Art has historically excluded Indigenous artists from its collections and exhibitions and is finally taking steps to correct this obvious gab in it definition of what constitutes “American” art, and this Biennial showed that effort more explicitly than ever before.