New Sensations: Introducing Whitney Biennial 2024

Online, via Zoom

Open to All Members

Friday, February 16, 12 pm
Monday, February 26, 6 pm
Tuesday, March 12, 6 pm

Get ready to immerse yourself in the exhibition Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, opening to members first this March. As the longest-running survey showcasing contemporary artists’ evolving notions of American art, the Biennial has been a hallmark of the Museum since its founding, and this year will feature the work of over seventy artists. This virtual program, led by Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow Fred Cruz Nowell, highlights a selection of 2024 Biennial artists who examine the connection between art and the senses by incorporating sound, performance, and haptic vibration into their work, creating unique multisensory experiences within the galleries.

This talk will closely examine two installations which foreground auditory-tactile perception: Nikita Gale’s new work featuring a modified self-playing piano with a silencer and Constantina Zavitsanos’s infrasonic ramp, made with sounds extending beyond the typical range of human hearing, which is activated through vibratory touch.  

The program will also cover three immersive video installations by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Isaac Julien, and Diane Severin Nguyen, which raise questions about the interpretation of historical narratives as factual reality and reimagine how reverberations from the past are heard, touched, and otherwise felt in the present by cultivating heightened sensory experiences.

Fred Cruz Nowell is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Cornell University and Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is also a new co-editor for the Society of Music Theory (SMT) History of Theory blog. Cruz Nowell’s research focuses on broadening the narratives surrounding art in the twentieth century, situating modern and contemporary art within a more expanded history of sensuality and the senses. His dissertation, titled Dada Organology, sheds new light on Dada and Surrealist theories of androgyny, female sexuality, and sense-perception by interrogating the influence of speculative music theory (cf., esoteric music) in the work of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray.