Kamrooz Aram '03 and Michelle Lopez (BC '92) join the 2026 Whitney Biennial

Alums Kamrooz Aram '03 and Michelle Lopez (BC '92) are among the 56 artists, duos, and collectives examining relationality in the eighty-second Whitney Biennial—the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States. 

It's fitting that this year's guiding principle is relationality; rather than choosing a theme, the curators allowed their conversations with artists to guide them:

"After more than 300 visits, we found that many of the artists we gravitated toward were exploring various forms of relationality with a particular emphasis on infrastructures," curator Drew Sawyer said of himself and co-curator Marcela Guerrero.

Born 1978 in Shiraz, Iran and based in Brooklyn, NY, Aram uses painting, collage, and exhibition design to create a dialogue between the Euro-American avant-garde and non-western forms of abstraction. Recent exhibitions include: Elusive Ornament, Peter Blum Gallery, New York; Privacy, an Exhibition, The Arts Club of Chicago; Lives of Forms: Kamrooz Aram and Iman Issa, Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture, Hasselt, Belgium; and The New Arabesque, Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi, India.

Lopez, an interdisciplinary sculptor and installation artist, was born in 1970 in Bridgeport, CT and lives in Philadelphia, PA. Her work reimagines cultural phenomena, appropriating political and social structures through her literal restructuring of industrial materials like hand-twisted steel rope, pulled glass, bent wood, and street rubble toward queer and feminist lineages of abstraction. A recipient of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2023 Pew Fellowship, Lopez's recent solo exhibitions include Lasso Reprieve, Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles; Ballast & Barricades, ICA Philadelphia; House of Cards, Simon Preston Gallery; and Halyard, Alt/Protocinema, Istanbul.

Since 1932, the Whitney Biennial has offered the international art world a vivid, complex survey of contemporary American art. Join the web of relational entanglements—interspecies, familial, geopolitical, and mythological—at Whitney Biennial 2026 March 8–August 23, 2026.