From April 6 to September 5 2022, the Whitney Museum will present the 80th edition of its flagship exhibition, the Whitney Biennial. This year, Quiet as Its Kept will include the following Columbia artists: alumni Leidy Churchman '10, Cy Gavin '16, and Buck Ellison CC '10, as well as Professor Sable Elyse Smith, Adjunct Assistant Professor Aria Dean, and Mentor Ralph Lemon.
Established in 1932 by the museum’s founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, it is the longest-running exhibition of its kind. This year, the show will feature 63 artists and collectives from a variety of backgrounds who work across diverse disciplines and media. The much anticipated show takes a look at the current state of contemporary art in America.
A curation of the most relevant art and ideas of our time, the 2022 Whitney Biennial is co organized by two Whitney curators, David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards. The two remarked: “The Whitney Biennial is an ongoing experiment, the result of a shared commitment to artists and the work they do. We began planning for this exhibition, originally slated to open in 2021, almost a year before the 2020 election, before the pandemic and shutdown with their reeling effects, before the uprisings demanding racial justice and before the questioning of institutions and their structures. While many of these underlying conditions are not new, their overlapping intensity, and sheer ubiquity created a context in which past, present, and future folded into one another. We’ve organized the exhibition to reflect these precarious and improvised times. The Biennial primarily serves as a forum for artists, and the works that will be presented reflect their enigmas, the things that perplex them, the important questions they are asking.”
