Issue link: https://www.balharbourdigital.com/i/1543791
C O U R T E S Y O F I G N AC I O G AT I C A ; W H I T N E Y B I E N N I A L 2 0 2 6 ; P H OTO BY BY B R YA N D E R B A L L A ( I N S E T ) Our guide to the exhibitions and performances that everyone will be talking about after spring break is long over. BY KAT HERRIMAN spring cheat sheet WHITNEY BIENNIAL As the longest-running American-art survey, the Whitney Biennial is one of the most important barometers of contemporary art. Over the decades, it has launched the careers of artists and curators alike; for many it's considered a rite of passage. For viewers in the know, those latent stakes are what make the exhibition so tantalizing to follow. If the Venice Biennale is the Olympics, the Whitney Biennial is the National Championships. As a result, the show is widely covered by critics and closely watched by gallerists searching for the "winners" amid what sometimes amounts to a scorched-earth landscape of reviews. Polarizing though it may be, even the grumbling has become a kind of comforting ritual—one that feels stabilizing in a moment when nearly everything else seems up for grabs. Nevertheless, the Biennial must still contend with the present. Each edition inevitably returns to the same enduring question: What does American art look like today? This year's curators, Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, were not too humble to admit that they had no idea what 2026 would look like. They didn't try to find evidence to fit a hypothesis or their own expertise. They devoted themselves to going on the road and seeing art everywhere they could. As they met with artists and attended exhibitions— the legwork of a biennial—they allowed the conversations they were having to shape the exhibition as a whole. The result? A year in art in the US. That openness also allowed timely projects to proliferate. Kelly Akashi, who lost her home and studio in the LA wildfires, plans to reconstruct the sole structure left standing, her fireplace, as a monumental sculpture. It is one of the clearest examples of how a recent catastrophe can enter the exhibition, without symbolic buffering or aesthetic distance. The exhibition also reflects the curators' recent travel for the 2025 Hawai'i Triennial, suggesting a curatorial desire not to duplicate a moment but to extend its visibility—bringing work seen by comparatively few into a national frame. an art lover's A still from Sanhattan, by Ignacio Gatica, on view at the Whitney Biennial, co-organized by curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer (inset at right). BALHAR B O U RSH O P S .CO M