2014 Whitney Biennial: Curators’ statements, painting links

I’m looking forward to the opening of the Whitney Biennial this week because the selection includes a surprising number of painters, including a special nod from Michelle Grabner toward contemporary abstract painting by women. Perhaps reflecting the wide range of approaches artists engage today, the Whitney rejected a team approach and selected three separate curators: Anthony Elms, Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Stuart Comer, Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at MoMA; and Michelle Grabner, artist and Professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; to organize their own independent sections of the show. Here are curatorial statements from each, and a list of participating artists with links to most of the painters.

[Image at top: Laura Owens. Courtesy of artist’s website.]

Anthony Elms: If the Whitney Biennial is a snapshot of American art at this moment, and if any intimate encounter with American art at this moment must be mediated (as all intimacies these days are), then Marcel Breuer�s museum building here at 945 Madison Avenue is a well-disposed mediation for capturing twenty-four scenes of America. In assembling the artistsand groups I tried to answer a question of Breuer�s from his notes on the building: �What should a museum look like, a museum in Manhattan?�

I looked to answer Breuer�s question with twenty-four artists and groups that fit a statement by poet Susan Howe: �I believed in an American aesthetic of uncertainty that could represent beauty in syllables so scarce and rushed they would appear to expand though they lay half-smothered in local history.� [Emphasis mine. I love this quote. –Sharon] In part because, given the sprawl, assembling an overview of American art these days is a fool�s errand�America is constant expansion. And because, to paraphrase a position declared by musician Mayo Thompson: I try for timeliness, while reserving the right to ask my own dumb questions. After all, it is always preferable to make time rather than to mark time.


Stuart Comer:  How to define �American� in a survey of contemporary American art, especially one with as much history behind it as the Whitney Biennial, is a question that has often challenged, even vexed, curators. As an American who has spent much of the last thirteen years in the United Kingdom, I have been compelled by artists whose work is as hybrid as the significant global, environmental, and technological shifts reshaping the United States. The work I have brought together for the Biennial reflects this, whether through complex relationships between linguistic and visual forms; the interface of digital technologies with more traditional media, and the recorded past with the lived moment; the development of two-dimensional scores, scripts, and patterns into three- or even four-dimensional actions and environments; the challenging of binary conventions of gender; or the intricacy of cosmopolitan, cross-national identities. Ideas about migration and movement are raised here too, as are those related to a position (geographic or otherwise) at a kind of periphery, off the mainland so to speak. The surfaces and spaces of the gallery respond in kind, playing multiple roles�from white cube to theater to cinema to publishing forum, and sometimes all of these at once.

Michelle Grabner: Although it may be far-reaching to think that a Whitney Biennial could be organized as a curriculum for other artists, aiming at pedagogy seemed a worthy ambition. Not because I am an artist and a teacher, nor because I sought to create a democratic survey, but because I didn�t want the frame that the viewer will look through to be a purely subjective take on contemporary American art. Instead, I developed a fourth-floor curriculum that presents identifiable themes, generalities even, that are currently established in the textures of contemporary aesthetic, political, and economic realities. Within this curriculum, contours can be drawn around three overlapping priorities: contemporary abstract painting by women; materiality and affect theory; and art as strategy�in other words, conceptual practices oriented toward criticality. Theoretically, the works that I included will each demand from the viewer a varied network of analysis.

103 artists are included in the 2015 Whitney Biennial, and it looks like more than a third are painters. The following is a list, with links to many of the painters’ galleries and websites.

 

Joshua Mosley
Born 1974 in Dallas, TX
Lives and works in Philadelphia, PA
My Barbarian (Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade) 
Founded in 2000; based in New York, NY, and Los Angeles, CA
Dona Nelson
Born 1947 in Grand Island, NE
Lives and works in Lansdale, PA, and New York, NY
Ken Okiishi
Born 1978 in Ames, IA
Lives and works in New York, NY, and Berlin, Germany
Pauline Oliveros
Born 1932 in Houston, TX
Lives and works in Kingston, NY
Joel Otterson
Born 1959 in Los Angeles, CA
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA
Laura Owens
Born 1970 in Euclid, OH
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA
Paul P.
Born 1977 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Lives and works in New York, NY, and Paris, France
taisha paggett
Born 1976 in Fresno, CA
Lives and works in Chicago, IL, and Los Angeles, CA
Charlemagne Palestine
Born 1947 in Brooklyn, NY
Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium
Public Collectors
Founded in 2007; based in Chicago, IL
Sara Greenberger Rafferty
Born 1978 in Evanston, IL
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
Steve Reinke with Jessie Mott
Reinke: Born 1963 in Eganville, Ontario, Canada
Mott: Born 1980 in New York, NY
Live and work in Chicago, IL
David Robbins
Born 1957 in Whitefish Bay, WI
Lives and works in Shorewood, WI
Sterling Ruby
Born 1972 in Bitburg, Germany
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA
Miljohn Ruperto
Born 1971 in Manila, Philippines
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA
Jacolby Satterwhite
Born 1986 in Columbia, SC
Lives and works in New York, NY
Peter Schuyff 
Born 1958 in Baarn, Netherlands
Lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands
Allan Sekula
Born 1951 in Erie, PA
Died 2013 in Los Angeles, CA
Semiotext(e)
Founded in 1974; based in Los Angeles, CA
Amy Sillman
Born 1955 in Detroit, MI
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
Valerie Snobeck and Catherine Sullivan
Snobeck: Born 1980 in Wadena, MN;
lives and works in New York, NY
Sullivan: Born 1968 in Los Angeles, CA;
lives and works in Chicago, IL
A.L. Steiner
Born 1967 in Miami, FL
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA
Emily Sundblad
Born 1977 in Dalsj�fors, Sweden
Lives and works in New York, NY
Ricky Swallow
Born 1974 in San Remo, Australia
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA
Tony Tasset
Born 1960 in Cincinnati, OH
Lives and works in Chicago, IL
Sergei Tcherepnin
Born 1981 in Watertown, MA
Lives and works in New York, NY
Triple Canopy
Founded in 2007; based in Brooklyn, NY
Philip Vanderhyden
Born 1978 in Menasha, WI
Lives and works in New York, NY
Pedro V�lez
Born 1973 in Bayam�n, Puerto Rico
Lives and works in Chicago, IL, and Milwaukee, WI
Charline von Heyl
Born 1960 in Mainz, Germany
Lives and works in New York, NY
David Foster Wallace
Born 1962 in Ithaca, NY
Died 2008 in Claremont, CA
Dan Walsh
Born 1960 in Philadelphia, PA
Lives and works in New York, NY
Donelle Woolford
Born 1977 in Conyers, GA
Lives and works in New York, NY

 

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung
Born 1975 in Los Gatos, CA
Lives and works in Chicago, IL

 

 Dona Nelson

 

“Whitney Biennial 2014,” The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. March 7 through May 25, 2014.

 

Related posts:  

2012 Whitney Biennial: Long on video and film, short on painting

A 2010 Whitney Biennial biopsy

A No Paintings Biennial would’ve at least made everyone hysterical”(2008)

 

 

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