The 82nd Whitney Biennial opened on March 8th at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition, which doesn’t have a theme this year, features 56 artists, duos, and collectives.
2026 Whitney Biennial Exhibitions
Artist Teresa Baker, of the Mandan/Hidatsa nation, incorporates foraged twigs and buffalo hide hunted by her father into her large-scale works on synthetic turf, juxtaposing the natural and artificial.
Another artist, Jasmin Sian, takes littered paper bags collected while biking to work and turns them into delicate paper cuttings that resemble antique lace doilies. Her pieces also incorporate animals she encounters along her bike rides through the Manhattan Greenway.
Also working with lace, Kelly Akashi embosses imprints of her grandmother’s doilies after the originals were destroyed when the artist’s home burned down in last year’s Eaton Fire. She even reconstructed the chimney on the museum’s fifth-floor terrace in cast glass. The piece acts as both a memorial and a warning of the dangerous effects of climate change.
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An emotional exhibition from Emilie Louise Gossiaux titled Kong Play created sculptures of their guide dog’s favorite chew toy, as a tribute to their dog, London, who passed away in September 2025. This exhibition is also surrounded by drawings of the artist and London, which vary from simple drawings of the pair playing to those illustrating the psychic or mythical connection between dog and owner.
Although the show is overall light on AI-inspired works, one such piece is Zach Blas’s CULTUS (2023), a large installation with high-definition video and surround sound, LED spheres and panels, and 3D-printed, vitrine-encased torture objects. The piece is meant to allude to religious beliefs on AI and how the technology can be seen to have god-like abilities. The exhibition features AI models and audio created with machine learning.
A few of the exhibitions also utilize unusual materials. Artist Precious Okoyomon incorporated dolls, CFGNY combined different stuffed animals into a sculptural form, and Malcolm Peacock created a coastal redwood tree with 3,500 braids of synthetic hair.
“Whitney Biennial 2026” will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, March 8–August 23, 2026.
