Whitney Biennial 2017

Floor 1 and 6

Born 1984 in Raleigh, NC
Lives in New York, NY

Park McArthur produced her work for the 2017 Biennial following federal specifications for signs designating cultural points of interest such as museums, national parks, and battlefields. As directed by the Manual of Unified Traffic Control Devices, she had signs manufactured in one-eighth-inch-thick aluminum with rounded radius edges, using the Pantone 469 shade of brown. The Whitney Museum is a textbook example of the kind of cultural site that official roadside signs designate. McArthur’s signs differ quite obviously from those produced by the government, however, in that they are blank. In their openness, McArthur’s works maintain the possibly of gesturing toward points of interest that fall outside of traditional histories, including those that have been radically transformed by—even lost to—the gentrifying city, such as the Meatpacking District, or the nearby West Side piers that were once sites of a thriving shipping industry and centers of gay art, sex, and life.

This image represents previous work by Park McArthur. The work on view in the Biennial is Another word for memory is life, 2017.