Whitney Biennial 2022: 
Quiet as It’s Kept

Apr 6–Oct 16, 2022

The Whitney Biennial has surveyed the landscape of American art, reflecting and shaping the cultural conversation, since 1932. The eightieth edition of the landmark exhibition is co-curated by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives, and Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs. Titled Quiet as It’s Kept, the 2022 Biennial features an intergenerational and interdisciplinary group of sixty-three artists and collectives whose dynamic works reflect the challenges, complexities, and possibilities of the American experience today.

Read more about the exhibition in a statement by the curators.

View performance series.

En Español

Desde 1932, la Bienal del Whitney ha examinado el panorama del arte estadounidense, reflejando y dando forma a la conversación cultural. La octogésima edición de esta emblemática exhibición está co-curada por David Breslin y Adrienne Edwards. La Bienal 2022 titulada: Quiet as It's Kept (Aunque nadie diga nada), presenta un grupo intergeneracional e interdisciplinario de sesenta y tres artistas y colectivos, cuyas dinámicas obras reflejan los retos, complejidades y posibilidades de la experiencia americana actual.

Nos complace ofrecer los siguientes recursos y programas en español para la Bienal 2022: una guía portátil, traducciones de todos los videos relacionados a la exposición, visitas guiadas gratuitas de la exposición, y visitas guiadas gratuitas para las escuelas públicas de la ciudad de Nueva York. Todos los textos descriptivos de la exposición estarán en inglés y español en el Museo.

Back

71 / 63

Previous Next

Rick Lowe

71

Floor 5

Born 1961 in rural Alabama
Lives in Houston, TX

Rick Lowe, who uses playing dominoes as the basis for his paintings, has talked about the symbolic qualities of the game as scenarios for community engagement. Lowe began by photographing and later tracing the patterns made by domino games, using them as a model for a form of abstraction grounded in lived experience. He finds playing dominos to be “an incredibly spiritual and educational experience. There’s a code of ethics around the way the game is played; rigorous competition, humility, and respect.”

Lowe’s early career was focused on painting until his work shifted into social practice. This work’s title frames the question that helped instigate this pivot. A teenager had asked him: if artists are creative, why can’t they create solutions? With this question in mind, he co-founded Project Row Houses in 1993, transforming condemned houses in Houston’s Third Ward into spaces for artists’ projects, educational programs, and social services. Returning to painting, Lowe has explained, provides “nourishment” and a space for reflection, complementing his activism.

Project Row Houses: If Artists Are Creative Why Can’t They Create Solutions, 2021

White-on-black representation of a dense urban map of housing plots on a grid.

Rick Lowe, Project Row Houses: If Artists Are Creative Why Can’t They Create Solutions, 2021. Acrylic and paper collage on canvas, sixteen panels, 36 × 48 in. each, 144 × 192 in. overall (91.4 × 121.9 cm each, 370 × 490 cm overall). Collection of the artist; courtesy the artist and Gagosian, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, and Hong Kong

White-on-black representation of a dense urban map of housing plots on a grid.

  • Rick Lowe, Project Row Houses: If Artists Are Creative Why Can’t They Create Solutions

    In Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet As It's Kept

    0:00

    Rick Lowe, Project Row Houses: If Artists Are Creative Why Can’t They Create Solutions

    0:00

    Narrator: Artist Rick Lowe trained as a landscape painter.

    Rick Lowe: But very quickly I started to rebel against formal aspects of painting the way that it was taught to me, and I was interested much more in the political context of things that I was dealing with. And I wasn’t comfortable with how painting functioned in the art world, the art world as I saw it.

    Narrator: In the 1990s, Lowe was one of the founders of Project Row Houses in Houston, a collective that transformed twenty-two homes in the city’s Third Ward into a community space for art and empowerment. This public, collaborative project influenced his painting. Lowe says that, in recent years, his process has become more intellectual, less physical, out of necessity. He started playing dominoes, and, eventually, making new work inspired by the game.

    Rick Lowe: I really found myself at the domino table a lot more, you know, and just kind of learning and talking and sharing with people, playing dominoes and it's an incredibly spiritual and educational experience when you’re doing that on a regular basis with people you get to know. One of the things that I’m thinking about though is actually these patterns that would happen as the game plays out. Especially when people play with different colored dominoes. The shapes were really interesting, you know, and after people would play a hand and I was like, say, hold on, hold on, wait, hold it. And I would take a photograph of it, you know, with my camera, these bird’s-eye-view photographs. Then I started kind of getting into it and start layering them. And then it just starts to speak to me as something that’s separate from the game.

    Narrator: After so many years as the public face of Project Row Houses, Lowe says the domino drawings gave him a new, more introspective opportunity.

    Rick Lowe: I could kind of pull myself back and buy time for myself. I mean, I love that stuff where every decision should be a collaborative decision with many voices in that kind of stuff. I love that stuff. You know, in the studio making something, it’s my choice. It’s my decision. I get to make these things, you know? And that’s something that I kind of left behind, which is kind of a joy to reconnect with that. There’s a part of me that really loves this collaborative and social part, but there’s another part of me that has a deep appreciation for the private and personal, which I just kind of let go for you know, nearly thirty years.

Events

View all

Audio guides

Colorful banners with lines of text on them, suspended from a ceiling.

Renée Green, Space Poem #7 (Color Without Objects: Intra-Active May-Words), 2020 (installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Polyester nylon and thread, 28 double-sided banners, 42 × 32 in. (106.7 × 81.3 cm) each. Collection of the artist; courtesy the artist; Free Agent Media; and Bortolami, New York. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

Colorful banners with lines of text on them, suspended from a ceiling.

Hear directly from artists and curators on selected works from the exhibition.

View guide

Exhibition Catalogue

Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept book cover

Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept catalogue cover

Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept book cover

The 2022 Whitney Biennial is accompanied by this landmark volume. Each of the Biennial’s participants is represented by a selected exhibition history, a bibliography, and imagery complemented by a personal statement or interview that foregrounds the artist’s own voice. Essays by the curators and other contributors elucidate themes of the exhibition and discuss the participants. The 2022 Biennial’s two curators, David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, are known for their close collaboration with living artists. Coming after several years of seismic upheaval in and beyond the cultural, social, and political landscapes, this catalogue will offer a new take on the storied institution of the Biennial while continuing to serve—as previous editions have—as an invaluable resource on present-day trends in contemporary art in the United States.

Buy now

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

View 33 works

In the News

"After three years of soul-rattling history, this year’s survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art is reflective and adult-thinking."—The New York Times

". . . the exhibition offers a mix of styles, practices and perspectives that invite contemplation, conversation and return engagements."—Gothamist

". . . a tender, understated survey of the American art scene as it stands right now that also acts as a means of processing the grief of the last two years."—ARTnews

". . . if this Biennial doesn’t feel quite like it can let itself go fully wild, there is also a quiet weirdness to it that sincerely reflects the disorienting headspace of the present, and that is worth the trip."—Artnet News

"Delayed for a year by the pandemic, the show is exciting without being especially pleasurable—it’s geared toward thought."—The New Yorker

". . . the show feels serious and thoughtful throughout, as if dire times require us to forgo old strategies of confrontation and performative anger and get down to the hard work of understanding the world."—The Washington Post

"Revelling in difference—not just of opinion but of style, focus, and approach, it pushes for meaningful exchanges between objects and viewers alike."—Ocula

"An ambitious survey of American art that locates both hope and precarity in the mutability of the present moment."—4Columns

"The 63 artists’ works interact with one another, offering alinear, yet continuous conversation through the psyche and also the pits of our stomachs."—Flaunt

"The exhibition mimics the range of emotions we felt during the past two years, from fear and pain to joy and hope, and everything in between."—Time Out New York

". . . this year’s offering, even with the inclusion of deceased artists, radiates with the power of now."—Vulture

Curatorial Statement
By David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards

Since the start of the pandemic, time has expanded, contracted, suspended, and blurred—often in dizzying succession. We began planning this Biennial in late 2019: before Covid and its reeling effects, before the uprisings demanding racial justice, before the widespread questioning of institutions and their structures, before the 2020 presidential election. Although underlying conditions are not new, their overlap, their intensity, and their sheer ubiquity created a context in which past, present, and future folded into one another. We organized this Biennial to reflect these precarious and improvised times. Many artists’ contributions are dynamic, taking different forms during the course of the exhibition. Artworks change, walls move, and performances animate the galleries and surrounding objects. The spaces of the Biennial contrast significantly, acknowledging the acute polarity of our society. One floor is a labyrinth, a dark space of containment; another is a clearing, open and light filled.

Rather than offering a unified theme, we pursue a series of hunches throughout the exhibition: that abstraction demonstrates a tremendous capacity to create, share, and sometimes withhold meaning; that research-driven conceptual art can combine the lushness of ideas and materiality; that personal narratives sifted through political, literary, and pop cultures can address larger social frameworks; that artworks can complicate the meaning of “American” by addressing the country’s physical and psychological boundaries; and that our present moment can be reimagined by engaging with under-recognized artistic models and artists we have lost. Deliberately intergenerational and interdisciplinary, this Biennial proposes that cultural, aesthetic, and political possibility begins with meaningful exchange and reciprocity.

The subtitle of this Biennial, Quiet as It’s Kept, is a colloquialism. We were inspired by the ways novelist Toni Morrison, jazz drummer Max Roach, and artist David Hammons have invoked it in their works. The phrase is typically said prior to something—often obvious—that should be kept secret. We also adorned the exhibition with a symbol, ) (, from a N. H. Pritchard poem, on view in the exhibition, as a gesture toward openness and interlude. All of the Whitney’s Biennials serve as forums for artists, and the works on view reflect their enigmas, the things that perplex them, and the important questions they are asking. But each of the Biennials also exists as an institutional statement, and every team of curators is entrusted with making an exhibition that resides within the Museum’s history, collection, and reputation. In its eightieth iteration, the Biennial continues to function as an ongoing experiment.

Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It's Kept is co-organized by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives, and Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Mia Matthias, Curatorial Assistant; Gabriel Almeida Baroja, Curatorial Project Assistant; and Margaret Kross, former Senior Curatorial Assistant.

Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It's Kept is presented by

   

Generous support is provided by

 

Generous support is also provided by Judy Hart Angelo; The Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston; Elaine Graham Weitzen Foundation for Fine Arts; Lise and Michael Evans; John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation; Kevin and Rosemary McNeely, Manitou Fund; The Philip and Janice Levin Foundation; The Rosenkranz Foundation; Anne-Cecilie Engell Speyer and Robert Speyer; and the Whitney's National Committee.

Major support is provided by The Keith Haring Foundation Exhibition Fund, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and an anonymous donor.

Significant support is provided by 2022 Biennial Committee Co-Chairs: Jill Bikoff, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Barbara and Michael Gamson, Miyoung Lee, Bernard Lumpkin, Julie Mehretu, Fred Wilson; 2022 Biennial Committee Members: Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons, Sarah Arison and Thomas Wilhelm, Candy and Michael Barasch, James Keith (JK) Brown and Eric Diefenbach, Eleanor and Bobby Cayre, Alexandre and Lori Chemla, Suzanne and Bob Cochran, Jenny Brorsen and Richard DeMartini, Fairfax Dorn and Marc Glimcher, Stephen Dull, Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Melanie Shorin and Greg S. Feldman, Jeffrey & Leslie Fischer Family Foundation, Cindy and Mark Galant, Christy and Bill Gautreaux, Debra and Jeffrey Geller Family Foundation, Aline and Gregory Gooding, Janet and Paul Hobby, Harry Hu, Peter H. Kahng, Michèle Gerber Klein, Ashley Leeds and Christopher Harland, Dawn and David Lenhardt, Jason Li, Marjorie Mayrock, Stacey and Robert Morse, Daniel Nadler, Opatrny Family Foundation, Orentreich Family Foundation, Nancy and Fred Poses, Marylin Prince, Eleanor Heyman Propp, George Wells and Manfred Rantner, Martha Records and Richard Rainaldi, Katie and Amnon Rodan, Jonathan M. Rozoff, Linda and Andrew Safran, Subhadra and Rohit Sahni, Erica and Joseph Samuels, Carol and Lawrence Saper, Allison Wiener and Jeffrey Schackner, Jack Shear, Annette and Paul Smith, the Stanley and Joyce Black Family Foundation, Robert Stilin, Rob and Eric Thomas-Suwall, and Patricia Villareal and Tom Leatherbury; as well as the Alex Katz Foundation, Further Forward Foundation, the Kapadia Equity Fund, Gloria H. Spivak, and an anonymous donor.

Funding is also provided by special Biennial endowments created by Melva Bucksbaum, Emily Fisher Landau, Leonard A. Lauder, and Fern and Lenard Tessler. 

Curatorial research and travel for this exhibition were funded by an endowment established by Rosina Lee Yue and Bert A. Lies, Jr., MD.

New York magazine is the exclusive media sponsor.

More from this series

Learn more about the Whitney Biennial, the longest-running survey of American art.