Watch and Listen

Moving among performance art, drawing, sculpture, and electronic media, Matt Mullican focuses on the intersection of personal cosmologies and public systems of communication.

Launched in the late 1960s as one of the Museum’s first public programs, Seminars with Artists is an open forum for conversations with some of the most notable American artists. This season’s series of talks features artists exhibiting in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Photographers James Welling and Walead Beshty both take up the representational field of photography itself as the subject of their works, often producing abstractly beautiful compositions of common objects.

Launched in the late 1960s as one of the Museum’s first public programs, Seminars with Artists is an open forum for conversations with some of the most notable American artsts.

Known for his interventions in identity politics and artistic forms, Daniel Joseph Martinez addressed globalization as well as the function of violence in everyday life for his 2008 Biennial installation. In this program, Martinez is joined by writer and critic David Levi Strauss.

Launched in the late 1960s as one of the Museum’s first public programs, Seminars with Artists is an open forum for conversations with some of the most notable American artists.

Eduardo Sarabia’s staged, semi-fictional events, revolving around the artist’s Mexican heritage, are meticulously documented to transform the exhibition space into a site for satirical storytelling. This evening, he shares stories and homemade tequila with the Whitney’s audience.

Multiple Edition is conceived as a platform for discussion and experimentation. Each emerging artist in the series is commissioned to create 200 multiples that will be given away to the public—free of charge—at the event. This season’s programs feature artists exhibiting in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Painter Olivier Mosset and filmmakers Amy Granat and Drew Heitzler have collaborated on T.S.O.Y.W., a dual-screen projection that allegorically traces one man’s compulsory and ultimately futile search for his object of desire. Discussion moderated by Biennial co-curator Henriette Huldisch.

Launched in the late 1960s as one of the Museum’s first public programs, Seminars with Artists is an open forum for conversations with some of the most notable American artists.

2008 Whitney Biennial Curators Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin share some of their ideas and insights about the process of putting together the exhibition.

Trained as both a painter and an attorney, Ellen Harvey balances an artist’s sense of faith with a lawyer’s skepticism, as she investigates art’s simultaneous potential for beauty and failure.

Launched in the late 1960s as one of the Museum’s first public programs, Seminars with Artists is an open forum for conversations with some of the msot notable American artists. This season’s series of talks features artists exhibiting in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

2008 Whitney Biennial artist Jedediah Caesar describes how he created his sculpture Helium Brick aka Summer Snow from a block of industrial Styrofoam covered with layers of colored resin.

For the 2008 Whitney Biennial, artist MK Guth created a participatory work called Ties of Protection and Safekeeping. The artist invited visitors to the Park Avenue Armory to answer the question “What is Worth Protecting?” Visitors wrote their answers on strips of red flannel cloth which MK Guth weaved into a long braid over the course of the exhibition.

Walks along the L.A. River Basin inspired artist Charles Long’s installation of sculptures and photographs in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. His commentary details the rich birdlife he found there and describes how he used materials from the river to make his sculptures.

Artist Fritz Haeg’s discusses his work for the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Animal Estates 1.0: New York, New York for which the artist built model homes for animals (including the Beaver, Bald Eagle, and the Mason Bee among others) that once lived in the vicinity of the Whitney Museum 400 years ago.

2008 Whitney Biennial artist Walead Beshty discusses his photographs of the former Iraqi embassy to the former East Germany (two nations that no longer exist) and the complex ideas behind them. He also explains why his glass sculptures have acquired multiple cracks and fissures.

Ellen Harvey introduces her 2008 Biennial work, Museum of Failure, which consists of an illuminated lightbox and large painting depicting a wall of mirrored frames. She discusses the “impossibility” of self-portraiture and political subject matter in relation to this work

Bert Rodriguez reveals what goes on inside the “white cube” of his 2008 Whitney Biennial installation in the Park Avenue Armory. The artist explains how and why he offers visitors free therapy sessions.

During the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Neighborhood Public Radio (NPR) hosted live radio broadcasts next door to the Museum which featured James Chimpton, a robotic chimpanzee who conducted interviews with artists. The public was invited to stop by and contribute to NPR’s multifaceted notion of what constitutes a community.

Artist Lisa Sigal talks about her work, The Day before Yesterday and the Day after Tomorrow—a “painting of a painting” that extended throughout the museum during the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Omer Fast, winner of the 2008 Bucksbaum Award, discusses his 2008 Whitney Biennial work, The Casting (2007), a four-channel video featuring a young American army sergeant who recounts two stories—which seem to be his own anguished memories—one about dating a woman while stationed in Germany, and the other of accidentally killing a civilian in Iraq.

Lisa Sigal’s inventive constructions, both self-contained and site-specific, fuse painting, sculpture, installation, and architecture. Moderated by K. Michael Hays, formerly the Whitney’s adjunct curator of architecture.

Launched in the late 1960s as one of the Museum’s first public programs, Seminars with Artists is an open forum for conversations with some of the most notable American artists. This season’s series of talks features artists exhibiting in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Ry Rocklen doctors and assembles society’s leftovers from streets, dumps, and thrift stores into playful readymades with calculated cultural connotations. Rocklen discusses his work in our Multiple Edition series.

Multiple Edition is conceived as a platform for discussion and experimentation. Each emerging artist in the series is commissioned to create 200 multiples that will be given away to the public—free of charge—at the event. This season’s programs feature artists exhibiting in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.