Whitney Biennial 2022: 
Quiet as It’s Kept

Narrator: Renée Green’s Space Poem #7 (Color Without Objects: Intra-Active May-Words) 2020, is composed of 28 double sided banners made out of polyester nylon and thread. Each banner measures 42 x 32 inches (106.7 x 81.3 04 cm). 

Green’s Space Poem #7 (Color Without Objects: Intra-Active May-Words) is a work of 28 colorful banners that hang from rods installed on the gallery’s ceiling. All banners are the same size. The banners are evenly spaced apart from each other and inhabit a large area of the gallery. Each banner is double sided with text on each side. The texts reference May Swenson’s 1965 poem “Color without Objects.” The banners’ colors are bright, glowing and playful. 

Let me offer you an example of one banner. I am only describing one side of the banner. Rectangular in shape with the long sides hanging vertically (all banners hang in this manner) the background is a rich, vibrating orange surrounded by a thin border that is a light orange color. Since the banner is made out of nylon, there is a slight puckering where the border is sewn to meet the larger area. Centered in the rich, orange background is text that uses lower case letters in a sans-serif font. All the letters are the same size and are a sour yellowish, green color. The phrase reads as follows: “incubated under the great flat lamp.” There is no punctuation and the words are stacked upon each other. The word “incubated” is at the top above the word “under” which is above the words “the great” that is above the words “flat lamp.” The text is large enough to read at a distance. Different phrases in different color combinations form the remaining twenty-seven banners. This is a poem that shifts in meaning as one’s body navigates the space allowing connections to emerge through movement.

Melanie Taylor: The fifth floor is the largest exhibition space in the Museum. At 67 feet wide and 270 feet long, it's nearly the size of a football field. Capped by 17 foot high windows on both the east and west sides of the gallery, the curators hoped to take advantage of its vast scale and natural light to create what they're calling a “clearing.” The goal was to create a non-hierarchical space, where the visitor determines their own itinerary through the artwork.

Taking the unusual approach of an open gallery with no traditional walls, we had to devise a more transparent way of supporting the two-dimensional works in space. This took the form of frame like armatures made of poplar wood, painted matte white. They range from 8 feet tall to 9 1/2 feet tall and are scattered across the floor. 

We conceived of the armatures to function similar to folding screens that you might have at home, where a single artist might occupy both sides or perhaps two artists occupy the front and then the back leaving lots of room on the floor for you to move in amongst them.

They're open shapes, offering porous views through to other artworks and creating a kaleidoscope of relationships amongst works. Looking to the west with its views of the river, you will experience a layering of artwork on armatures with sculptural works, like Duane Linklater's 20 foot wide naturally dyed textiles hanging from the ceiling or a mini retrospective of archival and video work by Theresa Cha enclosed by an ethereal gauze scrim. To the east, with its softer light, you'll see a vibrant 12 foot wide video of animated watercolors by Danielle Dean and Sable Elyse Smith's slowly rotating 14 foot high ferris wheel assemblage of prison furniture. Throughout the sounds of audio, visual works shift and mix to contribute to a dynamic flux of ideas.

Melanie Taylor: I'm Melanie Taylor, the Director of Exhibition Design here at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The Whitney Biennial begins outside the museum and proceeds through the main level up through to the third, fifth, and sixth floor galleries.

As you approach the glass-walled entry to the Museum, large flat-screen monitors punctuate the façade, showing bright color and text based videos by artist Tony Cokes. Passing through the glass revolving doors into the Museum's light-bathed lobby, you'll see the gift shop and admission desks to the left and colorful text-based fabric banners overhead by Renée Green. To the right is the Museum café and the Eckel Gallery, where Biennial artists Moved by the Motion have staged a video installation on the theme of Moby Dick.

In contrast to the bright Lobby with its views to the Hudson River, the Eckel Gallery is darkened and mysterious. As you enter, only the curving back of a freestanding wall is visible, strangely intersected by a pitched stage clad in distressed wood like a ship's deck. As you follow this wall around to the other side, you begin to glimpse the video projected on the curved wall and see that you can ascend the roughly 25 foot square stage filling the small gallery like a ship in a bottle.

In the Whitney's main staircase, spanning from the coat check up through to the fifth floor, is a cylindrical canvas painting by the artist Rodney McMillian.

Narrator: Puede encontrar el video Learning English en el quinto piso del Museo. Las preguntas de 100 Civics Questions están distribuidas por todo el museo. A continuación, el artista Rayyane Tabet reflexiona sobre la obra 100 Civics Questions. 

Rayyane Tabet: Esas 100 preguntas conforman el imaginario de un ciudadano estadounidense visto a través de la lente del examen de nacionalización; sobre todo cuando, si vas a la calle y haces esas mismas preguntas a personas que son ciudadanos de facto por haber nacido en Estados Unidos, la mayoría no será capaz de responder. Y eso es el resultado de muchos factores. Uno de ellos es que no hay un plan de estudios de educación cívica estandarizado en Estados Unidos. Además, la gente en diferentes estados, en diferentes condados, en cierto modo aprende otro tipo de historia e, incluso, de geografía del país.

Y lo que resulta muy evidente cuando se analizan estas preguntas es que, por supuesto, se cuenta una parte específica de la historia. Se centra más en los deberes cívicos y menos en los derechos civiles. Podemos decir que se abre la posibilidad de entablar un tipo de conversación muy interesante en torno a estos temas.

Rayyane Tabet: The project is called Becoming American. 

The project as a whole looks at the naturalization exam, which is one of the last components of your path to gain U.S. citizenship, which is a path that I'm on right now, which is called a change of status.

The United States citizenship and immigration services provide study guides for these exams. So in a way you go to the exam. Knowing all the questions and knowing all the answers.

The project as a whole kind of takes this exam as a site of inquiry and kind of takes these questions and these elements out of their context of the exam and distributes them around the museum, in the gallery, online for them to become kind of probing.

For me, it became really interesting to follow the process of the change of status as a philosophical one, a poetic one, an artistic one.

Rayyane Tabet: El proyecto se llama Becoming American. 

El proyecto en su conjunto aborda el examen de nacionalización, que es uno de los últimos componentes del proceso para obtener la ciudadanía estadounidense; un proceso en el que estoy ahora mismo, que se llama cambio de estatus.

Los servicios de inmigración y ciudadanía de Estados Unidos proporcionan guías de estudio para estos exámenes. Así que, en cierto modo, vas al examen sabiendo todas las preguntas y las respuestas.

El proyecto en su conjunto toma este examen como un espacio de indagación; saca estas preguntas y estos elementos del contexto del examen y los distribuye por todo el museo, en la galería y en línea para que se conviertan en una especie de exploración.

Para mí fue muy interesante seguir el proceso de cambio de estatus como algo filosófico, algo poético, algo artístico.

Narrator: You can find the video Learning English on the Museum’s fifth floor. 100 Civics Questions is distributed throughout the Museum. Here artist Rayyane Tabet is discussing the work 100 Civics Questions. 

Rayyane Tabet: The United States citizenship and immigration services provides study guides for these exams. So in a way you go to the exam. Knowing all the questions and knowing all the answers.

The project as a whole kind of takes this exam as a site of inquiry and kind of takes these questions and these elements out of their context of the exam and distributes them around the Museum, in the gallery, and online for them to become kind of probing.

For me, it became really interesting to follow the process of the change of status as a philosophical one, a poetic one, an artistic one.

Those 100 questions, what is the imagination of a U.S. citizen seen through the lens of the naturalization exam, especially when, if you go on the street and ask those same questions to people that are de facto citizens by being born in the U.S., most people will not be able to answer those questions. And that is the result of many things. One of which is that there's no standardized civics curriculum across the U.S.. And the idea that people in different states, in different counties, in a way learn possibly a different kind of history and even geography of the country.

And what becomes very apparent when you look at these questions is of course it tells you one specific part of the history. It focuses more on civic duties and less on civil rights. Let's say it opens up the potential for a really interesting kind of conversation around those issues.

Renée Green: I’ve had a very long relationship with painting. I'm 61, I grew up in Cleveland and I was taken to the Cleveland Museum of Art. I had a lot of opportunities to look at the collection.

Narrator: Renée Green made Lesson when she was a resident at the Studio Museum in 1989, just before she participated at the Whitney's Independent Study Program.

Renée Green: I went to the Whitney program in 1989. It was fall of ‘89 to spring 1990. This was a time of transitioning forms. And that's part of why I mention this work. It's called Lesson. It’s trying to combine almost like a critique of museums and collection, because it has this collection that's included in it itself. It's not representative of anything else really. But it also has these elements that are quotations from novels. So from Jules Verne, there’s a quotation that has to do with something being destroyed when it was in the process of being collected.

Something I've been thinking about a lot has to do with language and how language is brought into my work, and how it's always been there. I don't think of the painting in isolation, that's the thing. I see it more as a prompt in relation to new works and other works that I've made or that I make that I'm in the process of making. 

Narrator: In that sense, Green’s Space Poem, text on colored banners hanging in the Lobby, is conceptually related in her mind to this painting and to her overall trajectory as an artist.

Narrator: Welcome to the Whitney Bienniel 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept. This exhibition was curated by two Whitney curators: Adrienne Edwards, whose title is the Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney, and David Breslin, the DeMartini Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives. In this audio tour, listen to artists speak about their work and find other materials like transcripts and verbal descriptions. The tour is also available in Spanish. Sound quality may vary, as some of the interviews were conducted during the pandemic over Zoom. 

David Breslin: Hola, soy David Breslin. Soy curador DeMartini Family y director de Iniciativas Curatoriales del Whitney, y cocurador junto con Adrienne Edwards, de esta Bienal de Whitney 2022: aunque nadie diga nada.

Leidy Churchman crea y pinta mundos. Se encarga de fusionar mundos que quizás tú y yo no pensaríamos en unir. 

Esta es una pintura que Leidy hizo para la Bienal, en la que reunió a Monet, el uso de la cuadrícula y el espacio exterior. El caballete se transforma en un elemento escultural de toda la pintura. Por lo general, no suelo pensar en Monet, en el espacio exterior y en una cuadrícula juntos, pero cuando lo hace Leidy, tiene sentido. O más bien, el hecho de que no tenga mucho sentido me hace querer entender mejor cada uno de los elementos; o quizás sea que no todo debe tener sentido, o que hay formas nuevas de crear significado. 

Y sé, tanto por Adrienne como por mí, que la pintura puede hacer eso, que un artista que usa óleos y un lienzo extendido puede lograrlo (aunque Leidy nunca nos presenta solo un lienzo extendido). Quiero decir, mira los pies de esta escultura/pintura. Que estas formas que creemos conocer pueden adoptar otro cariz, dependiendo de quién las creó, de lo que vemos y de cuándo lo vemos.

Narrator: El artista Rick Lowe se formó como paisajista. 

Rick Lowe: Pero muy pronto, empecé a rebelarme contra los aspectos formales de la pintura tal como me la habían enseñado, y me interesaba mucho más el contexto político de las cosas con las que estaba lidiando. No me sentía a gusto con cómo funcionaba la pintura en el mundo del arte, el mundo del arte tal y como yo lo veía.

Narrator: En la década de 1990, Lowe fue uno de los fundadores del Project Row Houses en Houston, un colectivo que transformó veintidós casas del vecindario de Third Ward en un espacio comunitario para el arte y el empoderamiento. Este proyecto público y colaborativo tuvo una gran influencia en su pintura. Lowe dice que en los últimos años, su proceso se ha vuelto más intelectual y menos físico, por necesidad. Empezó a jugar al dominó y, con el tiempo, a crear nuevas obras inspiradas en el juego. 

Rick Lowe: Me vi pasando más tiempo en la mesa de dominó, aprendiendo, hablando y compartiendo con la gente, jugando al dominó; y es una experiencia increíblemente espiritual y educativa cuando lo haces a menudo con la gente que vas conociendo. Pero una de las cosas en las que me fijo es en estos patrones que se producen a medida que se desarrolla el juego, especialmente cuando la gente juega con fichas de colores diferentes. Se creaban formas muy interesantes, sabes, y luego los jugadores terminaban una partida y yo les decía: “esperen, esperen un momento, esperen”. Y sacaba mi cámara y tomaba una fotografía, de ese tipo de fotografías a vista de pájaro. Luego empecé a adentrarme en el tema y a poner las fotografías en capas. Y entonces la obra comenzó a hablarme, como algo independiente del juego.

Narrator: Después de tantos años de ser el rostro público de Project Row Houses, Lowe dice que los dibujos del dominó le dieron una nueva oportunidad más introspectiva.

Rick Lowe: Pude retraerme un poco y hacerme un tiempo para mí. Es decir, me encanta eso de que cada decisión deba ser una decisión colaborativa, con muchas voces y ese tipo de cosas. Me encanta todo eso. Ya sabes, estar en el estudio creando algo, es mi elección. Es mi decisión. Tengo la oportunidad de hacer estas cosas, ¿sabes? Es algo que yo había dejado atrás, y es una gran alegría poder volver a conectar con eso. Hay una parte de mí que adora ese lado colaborativo y social, pero también hay otra parte que aprecia muchísimo lo privado y lo personal, lo cual es algo que dejé de lado durante casi treinta años.

Eric Wesley: Me llamo Eric Wesley. Soy un artista de Los Ángeles. Siempre me ha interesado la escultura cinética.

Narrator: El pájaro bebedor hizo su debut como juguete a mediados de la década de 1940. Funciona mediante la transferencia de calor, lo que crea el movimiento que imita a un pájaro bebiendo agua. 

Eric Wesley: En realidad, el “pajarito bebedor” o “pájaro de la suerte”, o sus muchos otros nombres, es un motor de calor disfrazado.

Se dice que Albert Einstein estudió al pajarito bebedor que tenía sobre el escritorio durante cuatro meses… No podía descubrir cómo funcionaba, pero se negaba a desarmarlo. 

El movimiento sucede básicamente gracias a dos factores: el calor y la humedad. Entiendo que el espacio del Whitney Museum tiene una temperatura de unos 70 a 72 grados Fahrenheit, y entre un 50 y 55 % de humedad relativa. Así que siente lo mismo que tú. 

Es muy sisífico. Tiene un diseño bastante pop. Incluso me atrevería a decir que tiene un estilo Disney o, más bien, de arte pop, que es lo que intento hacer; o una suerte de dinámica koonsiana, de Paul McCarthy, algo así. En términos de la condición humana, se podría decir que funcionamos siempre tan solo con respirar. Cuando duermes, el corazón no se detiene. Está trabajando. Creo que la obra tiene algo de eso, de esta suerte de naturaleza cíclica de la vida en general.

Me detuve cuando llegué al tamaño natural por un motivo: si fuese tan solo un poquito más alto que tú y te estuviese mirando como a una presa, si tuviera una altura de 20 pies, sería algo completamente distinto. 

Narrator: Escuchamos a la artista Awilda Sterling-Duprey.

Awilda Sterling-Duprey: Este video que se tomó de esa exploración, explorando yo el espacio, está contenido con los dibujos que voy a crear, días antes de que se instale mi aportación Es un dibujo que está blanco y negro y no tiene sonido, pero si se ve la cualidad del movimiento, yo dibujando trazos en el espacio, pensando hacia donde es que esos gestos me van a llevar. Quería entonces vendarme los ojos para no ver lo que estaba haciendo.

Narrator: Sterling-Duprey interpreta sus pinturas y dibujos para darles vida. Se venda los ojos y deja que la música la guíe en movimientos improvisados que la llevan a hacer marcas en el papel y en las paredes.

Awilda Sterling-Duprey: Me acompaño con sonidos de jazz para traer de nuevo esta primera experiencia. Por los matices del sonido, por las esperas. Entonces, visualizando esas estructuras sonoras del artista que escoja en este momento. Es que entonces voy marcando los trazos en la superficie, ya sea en papel o en la tela. Siempre trabajo el yeso, aunque sea tela. Así es que lo que va, lo que va a la muestra que llevo es todavía un formato. No lo sabré hasta que llegue a ver los paneles. Así que, por ahí, hasta ahora, como todo es en proceso, de eso podemos hablar, porque es lo más seguro que ocurra, lo que ocurra después va a ser una sorpresa hasta para mí misma, porque hasta que yo no termino de dibujar, yo no me quito la venda y por lo regular tengo que brincar y saltar y brincar porque me fascina el resultado.

Narrator: En estas esculturas, Veronica Ryan combina materiales encontrados y materiales fabricados, utilizando la metáfora y la asociación personal para crear una sensación de lugar. 

Veronica Ryan: Quiero hablar del ambiente, de observar el estado del calentamiento global y de esta disyunción en términos de la ley natural, la ley interna, el caos y el trauma, los diferentes estados; todo esto forma parte de la conversación que se está dando en la obra al tratar de resolver las cosas, de forma material, y al tratar de deconstruir y de dar significado, de entender la manifestación cultural más amplia y todo lo demás. 

Narrator: Ryan nació en la isla de Montserrat, un territorio británico de ultramar en el Caribe, y creció en Londres. Su obra está profundamente arraigada en el concepto de lugar, de historia y de migración global, temas que aborda de forma muy metafórica mediante materiales y conexiones poéticas. 

Veronica Ryan: Con respecto a la migración y al lugar, siempre me da curiosidad lo que la gente quiere decir. Acabo de leer un artículo muy interesante esta mañana sobre el Pacífico, sobre la isla de basura en medio del océano, y sobre cómo para los científicos, se está creando un fenómeno interesante en el que, según esta teoría, una parte de la basura se está convirtiendo en accesorio para algunas criaturas marinas. Mi obra es realmente global. Se mueve por diferentes partes que se conectan, y hay una interconexión. 

No veo ningún aspecto que no esté relacionado con la cultura en general. Por ejemplo, el artículo hablaba de que los percebes de cuello de cisne ahora se adhieren a las marañas de hilo de pescar o a las botellas de plástico. Me interesan mucho las referencias metafóricas, y pensar en cómo el desplazamiento de personas por distintas partes del mundo hace que la gente se lleve su cultura original, y luego adopte la cultura a la que se ha trasladado. Luego, hay personas que nunca pueden adoptar diferentes paradigmas. Así que ese tipo de espacio intermedio, esa zona gris de dislocación, es en general la forma en que trabajo.

Narrator: La fotógrafa Pao Houa Her ahora vive en Minnesota. Se dedica a captar las vivencias del pueblo hmong.

Pao Houa Her: Soy hmong y históricamente el pueblo hmong es originario de China, pero durante la dinastía Han se vieron forzados al exilio, por lo que se dirigieron hacia el sur hasta llegar al sudeste asiático; yo pertenezco a un grupo de personas hmong que son de Laos.

Narrator: Las fotografías que se muestran aquí van rotando. En cualquier momento, podrá ver una selección de obras, y todas hacen referencia a la diáspora hmong de una forma u otra. La artista ha hablado acerca de la compleja naturaleza de su identidad hmong estadounidense:

Pao Houa Her: Los hmong ayudaron a los estadounidenses a luchar durante la guerra de Vietnam, concretamente en Laos.

Narrator: Una obra que se podrá ver durante una parte de la Bienal. La Bienal cuenta con retratos de soldados hmong que ayudaron al Gobierno estadounidense en el sudeste asiático durante la guerra de Vietnam. Estos soldados, a los que se les niega el reconocimiento oficial y el estatus de veteranos, llevan mucho tiempo tratando de ser reconocidos. Los retratos de Her transmiten la dignidad que se les ha negado a estos hombres, a pesar de que tuvieron que armar sus uniformes en la tienda de excedentes del ejército. 

Pao Houa Her: Me interesa mucho el legado de la guerra de Vietnam y cómo el trauma sigue reproduciéndose en la vida cotidiana de lo que significa ser una persona hmong. Me interesa la idea del deseo dentro de la propia conciencia hmong. También me interesa mucho la idea de cómo sería el Laos de la fantasía o cómo se vería una madre patria.

Narrator: Otra selección de imágenes que se podrá ver durante una parte de la Bienal proviene de un conjunto de obras llamado After the Fall of Hmong Tebchaw.

Pao Houa Her: Y ese conjunto de obras surgió esencialmente a partir de una historia. Se trata de un hombre hmong que, a mediados de 2015, consiguió estafar a algunos ancianos hmong para que le pagaran una suma de dinero, porque decía que estaba creando un país hmong. Y decía que, si invertían en esta nueva institución, podían ser miembros fundadores, y de ese modo pudo sacarles más de un millón de dólares a los hmong de la comunidad.

A mí lo que realmente me interesa es: ¿qué hay en este deseo? ¿De qué se tratan esas ganas de querer volver? Volver a un país al que le tenían tanto miedo que se tuvieron que ir. Hay algo en esa psicología que me interesa mucho.

Narrator: Algunas de las obras fueron fotografiadas en el Conservatorio de Como Park, en Minnesota.

Pao Houa Her: Cuando llegamos a Estados Unidos, durante mucho tiempo mis padres iban todos los fines de semana a un conservatorio en St. Paul, porque era el único lugar en el que hacía calor y había humedad, un clima que se parecía al de Laos. Pero para mí, el conservatorio era algo muy simbólico y metafórico en cierto modo. Allí hay ciertas plantas que no son nativas de Minnesota, que fueron trasplantadas en Minnesota y que se conservan en unas hermosas casas de cristal. Y entonces solo pienso en esa metáfora.

Narrator: La serie “Valle San Pedro” de Mónica Arreola retrata un conjunto de proyectos de viviendas en Tijuana. Estas viviendas se construyeron, aunque quedaron sin terminar, cuando azotó la recesión económica de 2008. Hablamos con la artista en español. Para escuchar la entrevista, vaya a la sección en español de la audioguía.

Mónica Arreola: Mi nombre es Mónica Arreola. Soy artista y arquitecta. Nacida y residente de la ciudad de Tijuana. Mi obra particularmente tiene que ver con mis dos actividades cotidianas que esta tanto la arquitectura como el arte.  En mi obra siempre trato de hablar muy particularmente de la ciudad de Tijuana, de cómo se va construyendo o cómo se va deconstruyendo la ciudad de Tijuana.

Hace aproximadamente ya 3 años, en el 2018, en esta búsqueda de encontrar estas nuevas formas de crecimiento arquitectónico de la ciudad, encontré un lugar, un fraccionamiento que se llama Valle San Pedro. Valle San Pedro se encuentra en la zona sureste de la ciudad de Tijuana, entre Tijuana y Tecate. Y en esa época, en el sexenio de Felipe Calderón, una de sus agendas, o parte de su agenda, fue desarrollar fraccionamientos sustentables. Esa era su agenda. ¿No? Su prioridad era cómo darle a México una vivienda que fuera sustentable. Pero en el 2008–por la recesión de los Estados Unidos, se ve golpeado también México. Y en el 2011, pues todo lo que tuvo que ver con la vivienda en el país, y también obviamente en Tijuana, pues se ve colapsada. Valle de San Pedro es un fraccionamiento que queda semiabandonado. Entonces al estar yendo a Valle de San Pedro, pues obviamente mis imágenes–con mis imágenes empiezo a explorar estas zonas de vivienda multifamiliar abandonada en la periferia de Tijuana.  

Particularmente, el paisaje que fotografío, parte como de estos lugares que yo voy a fotografiar, me condiciona mucho el paisaje, me condiciona mucho la arquitectura. Por ejemplo, yo defino un poco que es como empezar un baile con el paisaje. En el sentido de que me tengo que coordinar con todo lo que está a su alrededor para poder crear una fotografía. Cuando yo tomo las fotos, tengo muy poco tiempo para tomar las fotografías. Siempre voy acompañada de mi hermana. Ella se queda en el auto, y el auto está encendido. Y otra persona, que siempre regularmente es un hombre, me cuida la espalda. Mientras yo voy fotografiando, él me va cuidando de que no se me vaya a acercar alguien. Entonces sí es de estar tomando rápido las fotos, subirnos al carro y movernos. Entonces eso es como otra condicionante que dicta mucho mis fotografías. Y los cielos son nublados. Busqué la característica de los cielos nublados, porque me permitía generar mayor intensidad en la imagen, y también un mayor volumen en la imagen, y también no contar con sombras.

Rindon Johnson: Me llamo Rindon Johnson.

Trabajo con cuero porque es un subproducto de la industria de la carne. Gran parte de mi idea original para esta obra era pensar en cómo la negritud estadounidense es un subproducto de la trata transatlántica de personas esclavizadas, y me preguntaba con qué otros subproductos podía trabajar. Cuando empecé a buscar materiales que fueran tan negros como yo, empecé a darme cuenta de que, debido a la forma en la que funciona el capitalismo en nuestra sociedad—especialmente en la sociedad estadounidense—, todos los materiales están atravesados por la violencia. Y así, lo que me quedó claro fue que podía elegir cualquier material, y que este estaría cargado del peso y el dolor que conlleva la acumulación de capital. 

Narrator: Hay otros productos—como el índigo, el café, la cera y el tinte para madera—que también despertaron el interés de Johnson, porque comparten historias marcadas por la explotación. Estos materiales trazan las rutas comerciales coloniales y agotan los recursos naturales. Aunque utiliza estos materiales para alterar el cuero de la vaca, incorpora deliberadamente pequeños fijadores y, al hacer esto, reconoce la impermanencia de estas marcas. 

Rindon Johnson: Utilizo una serie de baños y lavados de índigo sobre los cueros para tratar de llegar a un azul muy profundo. No va a funcionar, y gran parte de mi obra tiene que ver con cosas que no funcionan. 

Narrator: Johnson conjuga en esta obra una serie de reacciones materiales: la naturaleza voluble de los colores que utiliza y los cambios que los cueros atraviesan con el paso del tiempo. El artista describe esta relación como una “línea de reconocimiento” entre un medio y otro. 

Rindon Johnson: Tengo muchas preguntas sobre el abandono y tengo muchas preguntas sobre lo que significa dejar algo de lado. ¿Dejas algo de lado porque quieres darle la agencia de existir por sí mismo, o dejas algo de lado porque no te importa?

Narrator: Mónica Arreola’s series “Valle San Pedro” captures a group of Tijuana housing projects. They were constructed, yet left unfinished, when the 2008 economic recession hit.

Mónica Arreola: Mi nombre es Mónica Arreola…

Narrator: In my work, I always try to speak very particularly about the city of Tijuana, about how the city is being built or how it’s being deconstructed. 

I found a place, a subdivision called Valle San Pedro. Valle San Pedro is located in the southeast area of the city of Tijuana, between Tijuana and Tecate. During Felipe Calderon’s six-year term, part of his agenda was to develop sustainable subdivisions. But in 2008–due to the recession in the United States, Mexico was also hit. And in 2011, everything that had to do with housing in the country, and also obviously in Tijuana, collapsed. Valle de San Pedro is a subdivision that is semi-abandoned, and with my images I want to trigger a series of critical dialogues about failed architecture, or these silent or violent imaginaries that are generated in these abandoned areas. 

I start with the landscape in the sense that I have to coordinate with everything around it to be able to create a photograph. It’s like this dance between the landscape and me and photography. When I take the photos, I have very little time. I’m always accompanied by my sister. She stays in the car, and the car is on. And another person, who is always usually a man, watches my back. While I’m photographing, he makes sure no one approaches me. So yes, it’s about taking the photos quickly–get in the car and move. So that’s like another conditioning factor that dictates my photographs a lot. And the skies are cloudy. I looked for the characteristic of cloudy skies, because it allowed me to generate greater intensity in the image, and also a greater volume in the image.

Narrator: Adrienne Edwards es una de las curadoras de la Bienal de Whitney 2022: aunque nadie diga nada.

Adrienne Edwards: Tenemos una de las obras de poemas espaciales de Renée Green: estos banderines realmente bellos y dinámicos. Renée utiliza un lenguaje muy poético, abstracto y a veces oblicuo que funciona para abrirnos la mente en cuanto a la forma de entender lo que creemos entender, la forma de llegar a la información, porque tiene una sensibilidad casi publicitaria. Resulta interesante, ese tipo de desliz entre esperar que te digan algo y que te den la oportunidad de pensar en algo de cierto modo, como por arte de magia.

Narrator: Renée Green habló acerca de la serie. 

Renée Green: Space Poems son frecuencias de onda abiertas, muy a menudo en forma serial. He elegido esto como forma de trabajo porque es muy abarcativo. Me interesa buscar diferentes tipos de resonancias. Cada una es diferente y siempre estoy recopilando ideas para los Space Poems. Diría que mi obra, con el paso del tiempo, busca encontrar destilaciones en todo. Siempre estoy intentando hacer eso. Y entonces sería refinarlo en cierto modo, casi como un poema.

Rayyane Tabet: El proyecto se llama Becoming American. 

El proyecto en su conjunto aborda el examen de nacionalización, que es uno de los últimos componentes del proceso para obtener la ciudadanía estadounidense; un proceso en el que estoy ahora mismo, que se llama cambio de estatus.

Uno de los componentes se llama 100 Civics Questions, que es una especie de intervención en múltiples sitios, y el segundo se llama Learning English. 

Narrator: Puede encontrar el video Learning English en el quinto piso del Museo. Las preguntas de 100 Civics Questions están distribuidas por todo el museo. A continuación, el artista Rayyane Tabet reflexiona sobre la obra 100 Civics Questions. 

Rayyane Tabet: Los servicios de inmigración y ciudadanía de Estados Unidos proporcionan guías de estudio para estos exámenes. Así que, en cierto modo, vas al examen sabiendo todas las preguntas y las respuestas.

El proyecto en su conjunto toma este examen como un espacio de indagación; saca estas preguntas y estos elementos del contexto del examen y los distribuye por todo el museo, en la galería y en línea para que se conviertan en una especie de exploración.

Para mí fue muy interesante seguir el proceso de cambio de estatus como algo filosófico, algo poético, algo artístico.

Esas 100 preguntas conforman el imaginario de un ciudadano estadounidense visto a través de la lente del examen de nacionalización; sobre todo cuando, si vas a la calle y haces esas mismas preguntas a personas que son ciudadanos de facto por haber nacido en Estados Unidos, la mayoría no será capaz de responder. Y eso es el resultado de muchos factores. Uno de ellos es que no hay un plan de estudios de educación cívica estandarizado en Estados Unidos. Además, la gente en diferentes estados, en diferentes condados, en cierto modo aprende otro tipo de historia e, incluso, de geografía del país.

Y lo que resulta muy evidente cuando se analizan estas preguntas es que, por supuesto, se cuenta una parte específica de la historia. Se centra más en los deberes cívicos y menos en los derechos civiles. Podemos decir que se abre la posibilidad de entablar un tipo de conversación muy interesante en torno a estos temas.

Rose Salane: Todas estas monedas, que estaban repartidas por el sistema y que no son dinero, en algún momento se utilizaron para pagar pasajes de autobús.

Narrator: La artista Rose Salane compró en una subasta una colección de dinero falso utilizado por los usuarios del transporte público de la ciudad de Nueva York, y así surgió la idea de esta instalación. Salane es licenciada en arte, pero también tiene una maestría en planificación urbana. Su obra combina su interés por el arte con su curiosidad por la ciudad y su funcionamiento.

Rose Salane: Es una especie de muestra que abarca un período de dos años, en el que la gente introducía cualquier cosa que pareciera dinero en la máquina del autobús o de un sistema de transporte para llegar a algún sitio, para llegar físicamente a algún lugar.

Se trata de los intentos de burlar al sistema, pero también de necesitarlo para poder transitar la vida por la ciudad. Por eso, me parece que los objetos ponen de manifiesto esos momentos en los que la gente lucha y, al mismo tiempo, se sale con la suya.

Utilizo la ciudad como un lente muy poderoso. Y lo que trato de ver es, por ejemplo, cuáles son los cambios que han reconfigurado notablemente la forma de moverse por un mismo entorno, como este. A veces pienso que Nueva York puede revelar verdades muy desafortunadas. Por eso me interesa, como neoyorquina, conocer la energía o el ritmo de la ciudad.

Me interesaba mucho dejar que los objetos hablaran y que contaran sus verdades; de esa forma, se conserva una psicología del propio objeto. 

También me interesa mucho la burocracia en cuanto a cómo esta moneda logró pasar por el sistema, pero no pudo pasar por el nivel principal de la agencia que la cobra, la cual no pudo declarar su ingreso, como impuestos o ganancias, ante el fideicomiso, por lo que queda retenida en un nivel específico. Pero el individuo puede pasar hasta ese nivel, hasta que la institución lo impida.

Narrator: Jason Rhoades falleció en 2006. Adrienne Edwards es la curadora Engell Speyer Family y la directora de Asuntos Curatoriales del Whitney. Ella señala que seleccionó la obra de Rhoades para incluirla en la exposición porque da cuenta del momento cultural actual.

Adrienne Edwards: El Caprice es un coche por el que Jason se sintió inmediatamente atraído, ya que había sido el coche de tantos empleados federales y estatales, sobre todo de la policía, y también porque pasó de ser un coche de policía a ser un taxi. Y pensamos en cómo la economía de trabajos esporádicos en una ciudad como Nueva York ha afectado la industria del taxi. Ha habido auténticas calamidades en torno a eso, así que aquí tenemos una obra que el artista creó en los noventa y que resultó ser bastante profética y relevante para la actualidad.

Pero también se trataba de una noción casi romántica del motor, de la movilidad y de la expansión, y del modo en que todo eso está ligado a nuestras ideas de libertad y de individualidad. Y creo que para Rhoades, no se trata de una especie de apego emocional a los coches o a un coche en particular, sino que se trata de pensarlos como máquinas y como herramientas. Al crear la obra, el coche se convierte en un espacio liminal para él, entre su estudio y todos los lugares que visitaba en Los Ángeles para conseguir materiales para sus instalaciones.

Podría ser muy fácil preguntarse por qué situar a Jason Rhodes en este lugar o en este momento. Hubo un artículo en el New Yorker en 2017 titulado “Un artista de Los Ángeles que anticipó nuestro momento trumpiano”. Y recuerdo haberlo visto y pensar que se trataba de exactamente eso.

Narrator: Rhoades le describió el proyecto al curador Hans Ulrich-Obrist mientras iba en uno de los coches.

Jason Rhoades: Está basado en las herramientas, en la idea de una herramienta de percepción o un vehículo para el pensamiento. Ya sabes, no necesariamente un vehículo motorizado, sino un vehículo como medio. Así como en la pintura, que es polvo, se utiliza un medio que puede ser un aceite o semillas de lino; es el vehículo en el que se transporta el color. En ese sentido, me interesa el cómo, el qué y el por qué transporta las cosas, y cómo se puede utilizar como herramienta para determinadas percepciones. Una herramienta para transportar cosas físicas, una herramienta para transportar cosas mentales y también una herramienta para impulsarse por el espacio. Quiero decir, miro los objetos. En verdad me interesa muchísimo Duchamp en ese sentido, el modo en que puso el objeto encontrado, el ready-made, en un contexto artístico. Pero también creo que podemos volver a ponerlos en funcionamiento, hacer que esos objetos tengan significados simultáneos y niveles simultáneos en todo momento. Sabes, ese objeto que compras en la tienda, el gesto de comprarlo es un gesto increíblemente escultural, el gesto de consumirlo, de ponerlo en tu coche, el gesto de abrir la caja, el gesto de colocarlo en tu obra de arte. Todo eso es una parte muy, muy importante del proceso escultórico.

Duane Linklater: Me llamo Duane Linklater y soy originario de la Primera Nación Moose Cree, situada en el Territorio del Tratado N.° 9 en el noreste de Ontario, a lo largo de la costa sur de la Bahía James.

Narrator: Linklater utiliza pigmentos que han sido importantes para los artistas indígenas, como el zumaque, el carbón vegetal y el carmín. Los ha plasmado en lienzos de lino que serán modificados y reconfigurados en el transcurso de la Bienal. 

Duane Linklater: Estas son cubiertas de tipis. No son cubiertas de tipis funcionales, pero creo que se entiende la idea. Hay algo importante en estas obras y en su capacidad para articular un cambio, o su capacidad para articular una fluctuación del tiempo y del espacio. Y eso se debe, en cierto modo, al uso que se les daba en un principio como cubiertas de tipis, como este tipo de arquitectura muy, muy flexible, esta flexibilidad de poder trasladarse de un lugar a otro según la situación del entorno.

La serie se llama Winter Count. Y es porque en mi propia cultura, mi cultura como omaskeko cree, cuando te preguntan cuántos años tienes, cuando nos hacemos esa pregunta en lengua cree, si tuviéramos que traducirla, sería literalmente preguntar “¿cuántos inviernos tienes?” Si consideramos toda la vida de una persona, esa persona es medio invierno, según mi forma de ver las cosas, ¿no? Y esta es una forma realmente hermosa de pensar en la presencia del invierno. En este caso, hay ciertos asuntos en los que he estado pensando durante los últimos tres, cuatro o tal vez cinco años, y que se han incorporado a la obra. Por ejemplo, creo que uno de los más importantes fue el del verano pasado en Kamloops, donde se descubrieron varias tumbas sin marcar de niños que iban al internado.

Narrator: La Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación de Canadá ha descrito los internados como un elemento central de la política canadiense respecto de los pueblos indígenas durante más de un siglo. Se separó a los niños de sus familias en una iniciativa por forzar la asimilación y borrar las culturas indígenas. Se han descubierto miles de tumbas sin marcar en todo Canadá, y aún se siguen buscando más. En noviembre de 2021, el Departamento del Interior anunció planes para comenzar a identificar las tumbas sin marcar que existen en escuelas similares en Estados Unidos.

Duane Linklater: Yo no fui a un internado, pero muchos de los miembros de mi familia fueron obligados a asistir a estas escuelas. Esto tuvo un profundo impacto en mi familia; y parte de lo que está sucediendo aquí, parte de hacer este trabajo, ser capaz de articularme y ser capaz de hablar y de crear, de tomar decisiones libres y abiertas con respecto a la obra, parece importante al tener en cuenta este contexto histórico.

Renée Green: He tenido una relación muy larga con la pintura. Tengo 61 años, crecí en Cleveland y me llevaron al Cleveland Museum of Art. Tuve muchas oportunidades de ver la colección.

Narrator: Renée Green creó Lesson cuando era residente en el Studio Museum en 1989, justo antes de participar en el Programa de Estudios Independientes del Whitney.

Renée Green: Participé en el programa del Whitney en 1989, desde el otoño de 1989 hasta la primavera de 1990. Fue una época de transición de formas. Y en parte es por eso que esta obra se llama Lesson. Se trata de intentar hacer una especie de crítica a los museos y a las colecciones. Tiene esta colección que se incluye en sí misma. No representa nada más en realidad. Pero también tiene elementos que son fragmentos de novelas. Por ejemplo, de Julio Verne hay una cita que tiene que ver con algo que se destruye cuando estaba en proceso de completarse.

He estado pensando en algo que tiene que ver con el lenguaje, en cómo el lenguaje se incorpora en mi obra y en cómo siempre ha estado ahí. No pienso en la pintura de forma aislada, esa es la cuestión. La veo más bien como un estímulo en relación con las nuevas obras y con otras obras que he hecho o que estoy haciendo. 

Narrator: En ese sentido, el poema espacial de Green, el texto en los banderines de colores que cuelgan en el vestíbulo, está conceptualmente relacionado en su mente con esta pintura y con su trayectoria general como artista.

Narrator: El artista James Little.

James Little: No logro encontrar la autoexpresión, la libertad de expresión y la autodeterminación en ninguna otra forma de arte que no sea la abstracción. Quieres saber por qué hice esto, cómo lo hice y qué se necesita para llegar a este punto. Se necesita mucho dolor, mucha discriminación… Es una lucha. Requiere mucha esperanza y determinación, esas son las cosas que quiero plasmar en la pintura.

Para mí, el modernismo es como la democracia: son experimentos frágiles, estructuras endebles que han logrado mantenerse y necesitan que sigamos respaldándolas de una u otra manera, ya sea en lo estético o a nivel político. Pero al fin y al cabo son estructuras, y ese es uno de los objetivos que persigo con mi trabajo. Siempre apunto a la estructura.

Tiene que tener una sensación. Pero lo que en última instancia hace que funcione es si tiene o no una síntesis.

En mi opinión, el artista es solo un medio. Es decir, la información está aquí… Simplemente viaja a través del artista para que podamos obtener el arte.

Dyani White Hawk: Me llamo Dyani White Hawk. Soy sicangu lakota por parte de mi madre, alemana y galesa por parte de mi padre. Vivo en Shakopee, Minnesota, y tengo un estudio en Mineápolis.

Soy pintora y artista multimedia, así que me dedico mucho a pintar y a trabajar con cuentas, y también con púas de puercoespín. Mi práctica se nutre de las historias de abstracción del pueblo lakota y de la abstracción de la pintura en caballete.

El arte con cuentas es una parte importante de la historia artística de mi tribu, y se ha convertido en una parte importante de mi propia trayectoria artística. Las cuentas de vidrio, que se han vuelto sinónimo de las obras de arte de las llanuras, eran artículos de comercio que surgieron de un intercambio con personas no nativas. Antes de que el comercio trajera las cuentas, gran parte de ese trabajo se realizaba con púas de puercoespín. Ya ves lo emocionante que debe haber sido disponer, de repente, de este nuevo y hermoso material para empezar a incorporarlo en las prácticas artísticas propias. Y ahora, eso se ha integrado de tal manera en la historia artística de los pueblos nativos que estas cuentas de vidrio europeas ahora son prácticamente un sinónimo de las obras de arte de los indígenas norteamericanos.

Una gran cantidad de personas no nativas y de pintores no nativos se inspiraron en la historia del arte indígena: en las artesanías con cuentas y con púas de puercoespín, en los tejidos, en la cestería. Y muchos de los pintores más famosos, hombres blancos considerados como los pioneros de la abstracción, buscaban inspiración en el arte indígena. Coleccionaban ese arte porque reconocían la fuerza, la voluntad, la belleza y la experiencia que había en esas obras. 

Hay un motivo por el cual les llama la atención, y un motivo por el cual se inspiran en ese trabajo. Y a menudo ni siquiera se habla de las tribus de las que procede el trabajo, no se les da el mismo tipo de relevancia, importancia u honor que a sus colegas no nativos. Por eso, con mi obra, busco resaltar y honrar esas intersecciones, crear oportunidades para entablar conversaciones en las que podamos hablar de las realidades de nuestras historias compartidas y, con suerte, empezar a crear narrativas que sean más honestas y más veraces sobre nuestra historia artística compartida en esta base terrestre, para que, con suerte, nuestras narrativas artísticas en el futuro reflejen una mayor verdad.

Narrator: Rodney McMillian creó esta obra para la escalera. 

Rodney McMillian: No lo veo tanto como una pintura, sino como un objeto que incorpora la pintura, porque se trata del espacio. Se trata de cómo el cuerpo se mueve a través de ese espacio y de cómo el cuerpo interactúa con el objeto, algo que en mi mente quiero llamar un evento, solo porque es el acto de ascender y descender. Y la idea de interactuar con la obra no tiene que ver tanto con la mirada como con toda la experiencia corporal, porque de todos modos no se puede absorber todo con la mirada.

Narrator: McMillian es conocido por sus pinturas de paisajes a gran escala realizadas con materiales industriales como la pintura para casas. Nacido en Carolina del Sur, McMillian vincula su interés por el paisaje con su conciencia política. “Siempre he visto el paisaje como un espacio de opresión debido al sudor, las violaciones, la sangre y los asesinatos que han existido en la tierra”, afirma. “Estas condiciones persisten hasta el día de hoy.  Son condiciones que hemos heredado, y se pueden desmantelar. A mí me interesa el desmantelamiento”.

Raven Chacon: Silent Choir, tanto en el formato de audio como en el de fotografía, nunca estuvo destinado a ser una obra de arte. Un día fui a la reserva Standing Rock durante las protestas de #NoDAPL contra la construcción de oleoductos en el norte de Estados Unidos que se desarrollaron en 2016. Y fui como invitado, como otro indígena americano atrapado en este país que quería entender lo que estaba sucediendo en ese lugar. Al mismo tiempo, también quería estar presente, ser otro testigo, pero sobre todo observar y escuchar. 

Se oían ruidos, se oían helicópteros en el cielo. Se oía a la gente cantar en medio de la noche y también se oían largos momentos de silencio. 

Narrator: Los sonidos que se grabaron en ese momento se encuentran en el sexto piso de la Bienal, dentro del Whitney Museum.

El domingo después del Día de Acción de Gracias, las mujeres mayores del campamento encabezaron una resistencia silenciosa en el puente que conecta la reserva con Bismarck, Dakota del Norte. Se enfrentaron a la policía estatal y a la seguridad del DAPL, el proyecto de oleoductos Dakota Access Pipeline. 

Raven Chacon: Liderados por estas mujeres, un grupo de manifestantes llegaron al puente y simplemente se quedaron mirando a los policías. No dijeron ni una palabra. No hubo gritos, ni súplicas, ni nada. Solo una mirada fija. Entonces, lo que pude captar fue el sonido de quinientas o seiscientas personas en absoluto silencio y mirando a la policía. En retrospectiva, cuando volví a casa y escuché la grabación, pude sentir el poder de esos cuerpos, de esas personas, indígenas americanos y aliados que luchaban sin tener que decir una palabra.

Narrator: Instalada a la altura de un segundo piso frente al extremo sur del High Line, la imagen parece recrear esta escena aquí en la ciudad de Nueva York. 

Raven Chacon: Aunque no tenía la intención de que esta imagen se convirtiera en una obra de arte, agradezco que los curadores hayan visto que se trataba de una imagen trasladable, como si la policía fuera a poner una barricada en el High Line. Uno puede encontrarse en ese lado de una situación así.

Por eso, creo que poder ver que estas imágenes o estas fotos en plano subjetivo podrían trasladarse a tu propio hogar puede ser una experiencia muy poderosa.

Narrator: Bienvenidos a la Bienal de Whitney 2022: aunque nadie diga nada. Esta exposición fue curada por dos curadores del Whitney: Adrienne Edwards, curadora Engell Speyer Family y directora de Asuntos Curatoriales del Whitney, y David Breslin, curador DeMartini Family y director de Iniciativas Curatoriales. En esta audioguía, podrá escuchar a los artistas hablar sobre sus obras y encontrar otros materiales como transcripciones y descripciones verbales. La guía también está disponible en inglés. 

Danielle Dean: I lived in Detroit for a few years, and the whole thing started because of the fact that I kind of got obsessed with Ford and Ford cars because of being there. 

Narrator: Some of the nearby animation and the watercolors you see here draw on an archive of Ford advertisements. And on some level, all of the works draw on Ford’s larger idea of the assembly line. 

Danielle Dean: The idea that a division of labor is split along an assembly line so that a worker only does one part of a whole, is so specific and simple, but I feel like it’s so weighted on how we live now. How we work and how we live are intertwined.

And I’m just so interested in that: how that way of life has come about through the influence of something like the production of cars. It used to be rubber, for example, was a big money maker. It was a massively big deal, globally, because so much is made from rubber. And it still is a big deal, but now what’s more of a big deal is data. What they call big data. So getting information for development of A.I. is the new raw material. And so I just personally have this obsession for comparing history to the present and how history has influenced or has a kind of intertwining.

I really was interested in how there’s a lot of labor that people do or a lot of ways of life that have come about that are an extension of this Fordist process and that now affects how people just live their everyday. For example, Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, which is one example of a lot of online crowdsourcing to develop data for A.I. A lot of people get all of their wages from logging in to these sites and filling in questionnaires and information about themselves to contribute to mass data.

That type of history is about: well, what kind of present or what kind of future? Because also, this type of automatization is leading to robots taking over all of the work, right? Which is the speculative sci-fi part, but it’s true that it probably will happen. So then again, what happens to humans? What life are we going to lead in the future?

Narrator: Raven Chacon’s Silent Choir (Standing Rock), 2017–22, is a billboard measuring 17 × 29 feet. (5.2 × 8.8 m).

Raven Chacon: This is an image of a couple hundred water protectors on the Backwater Bridge.

Narrator: This is a photograph by artist Raven Chacon showing water protectors just outside of Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. This bridge connects the reservation to Bismarck North Dakota which is off the reservation. Using some very large vehicles, state police and the Dakota Pipeline—or DAPL—security have barricaded this bridge. 

Raven Chacon: In the foreground, you see a couple hundred water protectors confronting the DAPL security further on the bridge. You also see a few other objects: particularly a giant wind sock that an artist has made that says “mni wiconi,” which means “water is life.” And this photo was taken, I believe, at about 4 o’ clock in the afternoon in November on Thanksgiving weekend, the last hours of daylight. 

Narrator: Rodney McMillian created this piece for the stairwell. 

Rodney McMillian: I don’t think of it as a painting so much as I think of it as an object that incorporates painting because it’s about the space. It’s about how the body moves through that space and how the body is engaged with the object, which in my head, I keep wanting to call an event just because it’s the act of ascending and descending. And the idea of like engaging with the work is not about the eyes as much as it’s about the whole bodily experience, because you can’t absorb the whole thing with one’s eyes anyway.

Narrator: McMillan is known for very large-scale landscape paintings made with industrial materials like house paint. Born in South Carolina, McMillan traces his interest in landscape to his political awareness. “I’ve always seen the landscape as a space of oppression because of the toil and the rape and the blood and the murder that’s existed in the land,” he says. “These conditions persist to this day. These are conditions we’ve inherited, and they can be undone. I’m interested in the undoing.”

Narrator: In these sculptures, Veronica Ryan combines found and fabricated materials, using metaphor and personal association to create a sense of place.

Veronica Ryan: So when I’m talking about environments and looking at the state of the global warming situation and this disjuncture in terms of the natural order, the internal order and chaos and trauma, different states. Those are all parts of the conversation that's going on in the work and by trying to work things out, materially, trying to deconstruct and make meaning, understand the wider cultural manifestation.

Narrator: Ryan was born in the British overseas territory of Montserrat in the Caribbean, and grew up in London. Her work is deeply rooted in a sense of place, history, and global migration—all issues that she approaches very metaphorically, through materials and poetic connections.

Veronica Ryan: About migration and place. I’m always curious what people mean. I just read a really interesting article this morning about the Pacific, and about the garbage patch in the middle of the ocean, and about the way that it’s creating an interesting phenomena for scientists where, according to this swirling ocean, some of the garbage is now creating itself as an attachment for some sea creatures. My work really is global. It does move around different connecting parts, and it is interconnected.

I don’t see any one aspect not related to the wider culture. For instance, the article was talking about gooseneck barnacles that are attaching to either tangles of fishing line or water bottles. I’m quite interested in metaphorical references, and how the movement of people across different parts of the globe, then people take their original culture with them, and then embrace the culture that they’ve moved to, and then, some people are never able to embrace different paradigms. So, that sort of interspace, that gray space of dislocation and so on, and that’s generally the way that I work.

Narrator: These photographs by Buck Ellison take as their subject the real-life figure Erik Prince, reimagined as he might have been around the start of the war in Afghanistan. 

Buck Ellison: The project’s focuses on Erik Prince at exactly my age, thirty-four years old, on his ranch near Cody, Wyoming. And it’s set in 2003.

Erik Prince co-founded the security and mercenary firm Blackwater. The company received widespread notoriety in 2007 when a group of its employees killed seventeen Iraqi civilians in the Nisour square in Baghdad.

Erik Prince is often touted in the media as a war criminal, as a shadow figure in politics, as a monster. And yet, I think with all my work about these real figures, I’m sort of interested in like if a camera allows us to even desire, or be curious, or feel empathy towards a figure like that.

When Erik was thirty-four, he had just gotten his first contract from the Bush administration. It started out with just sort of covert CIA stuff, and then, it really ballooned into, towards the end of the war, he had received billions and dollars of contracts to send men to Iraq, to fight on behalf of our government.

His business was exploding. And then, also, his wife had passed away of cancer the year before. So, he had three young children, and I thought, oh, on a really basic human level, that is difficult for anyone. People, they’re complicated, but I thought this would be an interesting time to come in and look at Erik.

My work on Erik Prince is based a lot on research. This In particular I drew from his book, Civilian Warriors and autobiography of sorts that he wrote to sort of clear his name—that I’ve read a punishing amount of times.

It was all filmed in California using actors, and yet, California, as it often does, is playing Wyoming. So, we shot on two separate ranches.

I’ve done research, but I just wanted to make sure, always, that these things are really authentic. That, for me, is always the goal is less to critique something and more to recreate something with so much precision that it has to be taken seriously.

Narrator: Artist James Little.

James Little: I don’t find self-expression, and freedom of expression, self-determination in any other form other than abstraction. You want to know why I did this, how did I do it, and what does it take to arrive at a point like this and, it takes a lot of pain . . . takes a lot of discrimination it’s a big struggle, it takes a lot of hope and determination, and those are the things that I try to bring to my painting.

Modernism to me is like democracy. You know it’s these fragile experiments, these fragile structures that have held up and they have to keep being supported one way or another aesthetically or politically. But they are structures and so that’s one of the things that I try to pursue in my art. I always go for structure.

It has to have a feeling. But the thing that makes it work in the end, is whether or not it has synthesis.

An artist, to me, is just a conduit. I mean information is here . . . it travels through him so that we can get this art.

Dyani White Hawk: My name is Dyani White Hawk. I am Sičangu Lakota through my mom, German and Welsh through my dad. I live in Shakopee Minnesota and I have a studio in Minneapolis.

I’m a painter and multimedia artist, so I do a lot of painting and beadwork, porcupine quillwork. And my practice pulls from the histories of Lakota abstraction and easel painting abstraction.

Beadwork is an important part of the artistic history of my tribe and has become an important part of my own artistic journey. The glass seed beads that have become synonymous with plains artwork were trade items that came through a relationship with non-native people. A lot of that work before the beads were available through trade was done in porcupine quillwork. You can see how exciting it must have been to all of a sudden have this beautiful new material to start incorporating into your artistic practices. And now, that has become so strongly integrated into the artistic history of native people that these European glass seed beads are now fairly synonymous with Native American artwork.

A lot of non-native people, and non-native painters were looking to the history of Native art. In beadwork, in porcupine quillwork, weaving, basketry you know and a lot of the most famous white male painters, who are lifted up as the founders of abstraction, were looking to Indigenous art. They were collecting that art because they recognized the strength and the agency and the beauty and the expertise of that work.

There’s a reason why they’re attracted to it, right, and a reason why they’re looking at it. And often even the tribes that the work is coming from is not spoken to, is not given the same kind of relevancy, importance, or honor as their non-native counterparts. So, my work really is meant to pull out and honor those intersections, to create opportunities for conversations where we can speak to the realities of our shared histories, and hopefully start creating narratives that are more honest and more truthful about our shared artistic history on this land base, so that hopefully our artistic narratives going forward reflect a greater truth.

Charles Ray’s Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall (2021) is made out of aluminum and measures 76 × 79 × 62 in. (193 × 200.6 × 157.5 cm). 

Charles Ray’s sculpture shows a young man (a drunk student) sitting on 3 blocks stacked on top of 3 blocks - all measuring the same size. The stacked blocks are approximately the height of a bench. The sculpture is life size and the entire surface is a silvery white color. The young man leans back. His head tilts to our right. His eyes are closed. His nose tilts up and his full lips are at rest - neither frowning nor smiling. His youth is reflected in his smooth unlined face. His hair is short with a few stray curls visible behind his right ear. 

He wears a buttoned-down shirt open at the neck. The shirt is not tucked into his pants. His left arm hangs down with a closed fist resting on the surface of his seat. His long-sleeved shirt is closed at the wrist. His right-hand rests in his lap. His left leg is crossed over his right and the edge of his straight legged pants rides up revealing the weave of the sock covering his left ankle. He wears flat laced walking shoes and his left shoe extends out. His right leg is bent and his right foot comes to rest near the floor. Upon close examination, one becomes aware that there is a gap of air between the edge of his right pant leg and the mouth of his right shoe. His shoe rests upon a piece of wood that is placed between the sole of the shoe and the gallery floor. The right shoe angles outward.

Pao Houa Her’s Untitled (Portrait), 2017 is an inkjet print. It measures 52.5 × 42 inches (133.4 × 106.7 cm). It is from the series After the Fall of Hmong Teb Chaw

In this black and white print by Pao Houa Her, an older Hmong woman sits surrounded by large leafy plants as if she is in a jungle. She gazes to our left. Her expression is thoughtful. Her hair is pulled back and an earring dangles from her left ear. Leaves from the surrounding plants cover the top of her head. Garlands from white flowers dangle from the top of the image but they do not reach her head. Her right elbow rests on something that we cannot see but for one very big leaf emerging from under her arm. Her left hand clasps her right wrist. The elegant fingers of her right hand hang down. She is dressed in a brocaded jacket from which a white collar of a shirt appears at the neck. Her jacket spreads slightly open upon her lap. The bottom part of her outfit is black, and the image is cropped below her lap.

After the Fall is a body of work that has two types of images. One group are portraits that are set up in a way that resemble traditional Hmong portraiture. In traditional Hmong portraiture the individual is placed in the center and they are surrounded by fake florals or greenery. In Her’s portraits, the artist photographed Hmong women from a senior day care center at the site and surrounded them by plants found in the center. The artist volunteers at the senior center and knows the woman in this work.

Narrator: Sable Elyse Smith.

Sable Elyse Smith: I’ve always been interested in invisibility, things that are just barely legible or sort of perceptible and trying to point at objects that have a kind of ambiguity in them potentially like upon first encounter, but are inherently violent and a part of perpetuating these sort of oppressive or violent systems.

This one is configured to look like a Ferris wheel. There is this really extreme and intense relationship between entertainment and violence.

Narrator: By referencing a Ferris wheel, the artist evokes places where, beneath the sheen of carefree fun, there are unacknowledged systems of protocols, rules, and rituals. Smith is interested in locations where, in her words, “we agree to suspend our sense of morality . . . hopscotching from harm to pleasure.”

Sable Elyse Smith: We can go to a traveling carnival and consume and witness human beings that we deem different or that we other, participating or fighting or doing anything to each other. And that could be a source of entertainment, whereas if we’re outside of the framework of the carnival or a show or whatever it is, then that behavior or consuming that wouldn’t be permissible.

Narrator: This slowly-rotating sculpture brings to the fore other social environments as well, ones with similarly concealed social contracts. Making up the wheel-like shape are tables and chairs designed for a range of municipal spaces, and particularly prison visiting rooms.

Sable Elyse Smith: All of the decisions about the design of the furniture are about power and surveillance. So the height of the tables is just at your knee so that it distracts from and also it’s difficult to pass things under the table for example. So that’s one way where there’s a specific mechanism of power embedded into the object that it is like upon first glance or if you don’t have experience with, it seems neutral. It seems like it’s just a piece of furniture, how bad could it be? Or how could this object just be considered violent or have a kind of action and impact in a space?

Emily Barker’s Kitchen (2019) is made of PET plastic and measures 15 x 15 x 15 ft. (4.6 x 4.6 x 4.6 m).

Emily Barker creates elements of a typical kitchen but on a massive scale using translucent plastic. Placed on the floor, is a kitchen island flanked by two cabinets. Though translucent, these objects replicate the real elements of a typical kitchen including the molding found on much kitchen cabinetry. These kitchen elements are intentionally oversized, in order to communicate the experience of a wheelchair user in a standard kitchen. The height of the countertop is 5 feet 9 inches, the average height of an adult male in the US. Imagine moving between the island and the cabinets and how your body might feel. All the floor pieces have a white wooden base. Suspended from the ceiling are a group of kitchen cabinets made in the same translucent plastic and on the same massive scale. These cabinets hover over the floor pieces providing the upper kitchen storage and reflect the same cabinet design. Their outrageous height renders them useless because of our inability to reach them.

Jane Dickson’s 99¢ Dreams (2020) is made of acrylic paint on linen and measures 39 x 73 inches (99 x 185.4 cm).

On the top of Jane Dickson’s painting is the phrase ”99 CENTS DREAMS.” The symbol for “cents” follows the number 99. The word “dreams” is in capital letters. The phrase is painted in red in a blocky, chunky style and appears handwritten as it lacks the sleek, clean look of machine design. There is a thin greenish line around each element in the phrase (numbers, symbol and letters) causing the phrase to visually pop. Below ”99 CENTS DREAMS” is the phrase: EVERYTHING 1 DOLLAR AND UP.” The symbol for money is placed before the number 1 and all text is in capital letters. The font is a very thin handwritten line. The phrase is in red, outlined by a thin line of green. This area takes up slightly more than half of the painting. Its background is a milky greenish white. A dark greenish line separates the top area from the bottom area of the painting. 

The bottom part of the painting contains the phrase “99 CENTS DREAMS.” Again, the symbol for “cents” follows the number and “dreams” is in capital letters–but now they resemble neon signage in glowing red hanging on a storefront window allowing us to see the yellowish, green glow of the store’s lighting (you can almost hear the florescent lights’ buzz) and the murky green aisles of a 99 cents store. There is a thin green border around the entire painting and that border slightly crops the signage of “99 CENTS DREAMS” at the bottom of the painting.

Narrator: Gordon creates much of his subject matter by constructing spaces, depicting mundane scenes that we might not think are deserving of the hours of observation he devotes to them. Though painting is only one portion of his practice, for his Biennial contribution he meticulously painted hyperrealistic surfaces in multiple layers. This fascinated the Biennial curators, David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards. Here’s David Breslin.

David Breslin: We were really drawn to Adam Gordon’s paintings because of the way that he makes places that seem deeply uncanny, really weird. He’s pointing to the fact that so much of what we’ve inherited, and see, and live with every day is weird enough as it is. And to take the time to make a painting, to lavish this much attention on something found that he sees, that he finds on the internet, that he slightly changes in his own environment, to pay attention to the oddity of what already is, feels like a very profound gesture about how odd our time is, and how surreal it is, and how we don't necessarily need to skew it too much to acknowledge that.

Narrator: This installation represents six month’s worth of medical records and hospital bills in the life of artist Emily Barker, who experienced a spinal cord injury and uses a wheelchair. 

Emily Barker: It’s the printout of the files that I got from the hospital. It shows the medical industrial system and the healthcare industrial system and the pharmaceutical industrial system and how those all operate together when something tragic happens or an accident happens. You’re then faced with millions of dollars of medical bills and debt.

And so the first six months of being hospitalized, I racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars, or I think I hit a million in the first year. I was nineteen years old, there's a date of the start of the paperwork, and It’s almost like an oral history of what my body experienced in those first six months being hospitalized and having surgeries. 

Emily Barker: As far as the kitchen piece is concerned, I was examining a blind spot in our culture and in our society and in the world in general of which we have these dimensional standards.

Narrator: The disorienting height of this kitchen replicates the feeling the artist has navigating the built environment in a wheelchair.

Emily Barker: You have a standard or a norm for something that will exclude people that exist outside of this conceived norm or standard. And so the piece itself is questioning the repercussions of building a world for a very limited amount of people in a very specific point in their lives that doesn't consider aging or disability or motherhood or living outside of a very specific body type in the world.

So the height of the kitchen countertop goes to just above the chest level for the average height of a U.S. male. So not a very tall person but a medium-height person in the U.S. And so it’s forcing a perspective that exist in every single space that we encounter, because in every single building and restaurants everywhere are these design standards and norms that really infantilize and leave out and patronize people who do not fit within these preconceived notions of normalcy that are absurd really, that shouldn't exist.

Narrator: Barker talked about their decision to use a transparent material to create the kitchen.

Emily Barker: These are invisible ideas, concepts and scales that we're working with. And so it was more of a metaphorical choice for it to be transparent. And I'm trying to be transparent with the work as much as possible. I’m trying to be transparent and vulnerable without being too intimidating because of the scale, because I don't want these ideas or concepts to cause people to feel guilty or intimidated or defensive. I want them to take this experience with them in a way where the first impression is one of beauty.

What if this happened to you, which it could at any moment? And how do we create systems and a world in which it makes sense for all of us and it doesn't further traumatize and harm us after something bad has already happened? My experience has been one that there are not systems of care in place for anything out of the ordinary happening or outside of the status quo that your Being different and becoming different is severely punished and very expensive. I don't even mean to make work that is so charged, politically. This is just my experience and I couldn't make work about anything else at this point.

Narrator: Artist Alejandro Morales has offered something for free: a pocket-size viewfinder filled with images of Juárez, Mexico, the border city where he was born.

Alejandro Morales: This is a project I started last year during the pandemic. It’s an archive project. And most of my projects are like that. I work with images and photographs that I take from newspapers, from websites. And this time I use Google Maps.

And what I wanted to do was to see how the city was changing in the two years that I haven’t been able to go there. I was missing a lot, my home and my family, and the nostalgic idea of the printed photographs and 35 millimeter cameras. So I wanted to try to do something where you can translate this digital image of Google Maps, like a screenshot into a 35 millimeter photograph, which is unique. You can not share it. And it’s something really personal and intimate. 

Narrator: Morales says that the media publicized the violence in Juárez in ways that exploit images of bodies and bloodshed.  

Alejandro Morales: So if I want to talk about my city to someone else that doesn’t know it, it is not a good idea to use these kinds of images. You have to use something else, so they can be drawn to it like these photos. If I show you the things that I see in the newspapers, you’re not gonna want to talk to me anymore. I think it’s a good experience if you see something else,  something that makes you think about what's going on there.

Guadalupe Rosales: My name is Guadalupe Rosales.

Los Angeles became a dark place for me towards the late nineties, early 2000s, and I left. I moved back to L.A. and the first thing I did was go back to these siteswhere I was raised. Sites that were considered safe spaces for me. And the energy was still there, at night especially. 

The times when I hung out with my friends and my lovers, being a teenager, being out on the streets, we were confronted by violence and the police, but there's also this essence of home with that. And that is what I'm capturing, ghostly remnants or markings. 

For me, I have a different relationship to these sites, but there are multiple stories similar to mine. And in some ways that's what I'm trying, or I guess I'm capturing with these photographs. They could be very specific to a location, but I'm also really interested in what is being activated for other people.

I’ve shared other photos that I've taken in the past of other locations and I'm surprised by how people respond and just this familiarity in them, even though they don't know exactly where these photos are from.

Rose Salane: All of these coins that had been sorted through the system that are not money at all, but they were used at one point to pay for bus fare.

Narrator: Artist Rose Salane purchased a collection of fake money used by riders on the MTA at an auction, and thus began the idea behind this installation. Salane has an art degree, but she also earned a master’s in urban planning. Her work combines her interest in making art with her curiosity about the city and how it functions.

Rose Salane: It was almost this sampling of a two-year period of people dropping whatever resembled money into this machine or into a transportation system that they would get somewhere, physically get somewhere.

The attempts at kind of cheating the system, but also like needing it as well to just live one’s life through the city. So I do find that objects are really revealing of these moments that, I don’t know, kind of fighting and also getting away with something.

I use the city as a very powerful lens. And I try to see: what are the changes that have significantly reshaped people’s way of moving through an environment, this one. And sometimes I think New York can reveal very unfortunate truths. So I’m interested, as a New Yorker, in knowing the vibe or rhythm of the city.

I was just really invested in letting the objects speak and having objects hold the truths that it does and in that form it retains a psychology of the object itself.

I’m also really interested in the bureaucracy in how this currency that passed through, but it couldn’t pass through to the main level of the agency cashing it in for something that they can report on, like their taxes or like their earnings, so it gets stopped at a specific level. But the individual is able to pass through up until that level until the institution prevents it.

Eric Wesley’s North American Buff Tit (2022) is made out of plastic, glass, stainless steel, and dichloromethane and measures 84 × 26 × 26 inches. (213.4 × 66 × 66 cm). 

Similar to those small dippy bird toys that mimic a bird drinking water - rocking back and forth - the beak pecking at water, Eric Wesley’s North American Buff Tit resembles the toy but on a larger scale. It is slightly bigger than average human height, with a clear transparent body topped by a transparent rounded bird head. It has an orange beak and silver disk eyes surrounding black circle pupils and its body moves back and forth. The movement is dependent on the heat, light, and humidity within the gallery. A pressure device rises from the top of its head. 

Narrator: Jane Dickson based some of these paintings on photographs she had taken of Times Square during the 1980s.

Jane Dickson: I found bags and bags of negatives that I had not really looked at since I shot them. And once I started looking at them, I would remember that experience and go, I meant to do more with this. And actually, even though it’s forty years ago, you know, we don’t have amnesia. History is important. And these were done in the eighties. This was a different pandemic, but it was a pandemic. And it has things to say to this moment.

I decided I wanted to be a witness of my time and a witness not of the heroic moments. I feel like I’m more able to offer some fresh insights into the small moments and the overlooked, very everyday things that are such background that nobody thinks about it, you know, as you’re living it.

Narrator: In other paintings on view here, Dickson focused on the suburbs.

Jane Dickson: God knows they’re lonely in a different way, but profoundly lonely. One of my subjects is: how do spaces make you feel?

You don’t maybe think about it, but this is what you’re dealing with every day, are these non-places that are strictly designed for someone’s economic advantage. And we’re all trying to figure out how to wend our way through these worlds.

David Breslin: Hi, I’m David Breslin. I’m the DeMartini Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives at the Whitney, and the co-curator with Adrienne Edwards of this Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept.

Leidy Churchman is a maker and painter of worlds. And perhaps bringing together worlds that I, you, we might not think to bring together.

This is a painting that Leidy has made for the Biennial; Leidy has brought together Monet, the grid, and space. The easel becomes a sculptural element of the entire painting. I don’t usually think of Monet, and outer space, and a grid together, but when Leidy does it, it makes sense. Or, how it doesn’t make sense makes me want to understand each element better, or maybe insist that not everything has to make sense, or there are other and new ways to make meaning.

And I know for Adrienne and me, that possibility that painting can do that, that an artist who’s using oil paint on a stretched canvas, even though Leidy doesn’t ever just have a stretched canvas. I mean, look at the feet on this sculpture/painting. That these forms that we think we know can take new resonance, depend on who’s making them, what we’re seeing, and when we’re seeing it.

Narrator: Sable Elyse Smith’s A Clockwork (2021) is made of aluminum, steel and a motor. It measures 14 ft. 7 1⁄2 in. × 13 ft. 9 1/8 in.× (4.5 × 4.2 × 2.5 m). 

A Clockwork is a large-scale sculpture that resembles a Ferris wheel one might find at a traveling carnival. The work is extremely large, rising to a few feet below the gallery’s ceiling. A Clockwork is a continuation of a series of sculptures that Sable Elyse Smith has made referencing furniture design used in prison visiting rooms. The center wheel is framed by hexagon shapes that connect edge to edge and encircle the wheel’s entire perimeter. The hexagon is a replica on a one-to-one scale of the tables found in prison waiting rooms. The circumferences of smaller wheels to the left and the right of the main wheel incorporate replicas of the round seats that accompany the hexagon tables. 

Sable Elyse Smith: The entirety of the piece is powder coated in matte black. And it sort of slowly rotates, which also, I guess when you sort of first encounter it, I think the movement takes maybe a moment to be able to register. There is this uncanny sensibility or this questioning of, "Is it moving or is it not moving?" that happens.

Danielle Dean’s 2.00. a.m. (2021) is a watercolor on paper measuring 48 × 84 inches (121.92 × 213.36 cm). 

Narrator: This painting by Danielle Dean is a large-scale imaginary landscape bathed in moonlight. The viewer is placed in the position of looking over large rocks placed in the center foreground of the painting. From the upper left corner green palm leaves drift in the night sky. Beyond the rocks enframed by the palm leaves lies a valley of rough terrain in which an office workspace is located. 

Danielle Dean: In this first layer of rocky terrain, you can see a sort of workspace that has three computers, two computer screens and one laptop and an open chair. There's no one there, but the screens are on. And, actually, the first screen is a depiction of Amazon Mechanical Turk website, so the work that the person may be doing, and then there is an image of the whole landscape that you see, but reduced in size on the screen. 

Narrator: In the foreground is a sandy area that is the top of a cliff with a small dog sitting on top of it. A stick lies near the animal. The dog is turned away from the viewer and gazes into the distance.

Moving into the center area of the painting beyond the valley of the desolate office space is an area of trees, the colors of autumn leaves. To the right of the foliage is a large, jagged boulder. Beyond the trees and the boulder are rows and rows of data servers. Silvery and geometrically organized they recede into the distance meeting a river overlooked by midnight blue cliffs. Boats drift on the water - a bridge spans the river. 

Danielle Dean: And hovering above a cliffs and is an alien spaceship. Beyond the alien spaceship is a flat city with lights. And then beyond that is more mountains, and you can see the night sky, the stars, and a kind of dramatic lightning-like moon. 

Narrator: This work is from a series based on elements of Ford car ads from different time periods. The artist removes most people and cars from the ads in order to empahsize the fantasy created by the landscape. 

Danielle Dean: In all of the ads, there's people and cars, but I always take the people out and I always take the cars out, but I like to leave the animals. So that's why there's a little dog there.

Eric Wesley: My name is Eric Wesley. I am an artist from Los Angeles. I’ve always had an interest in kinetic sculpture.

Narrator: The drinking bird debuted as a toy in the mid-1940s. It works by heat transfer to create the motion that mimics a bird drinking water.

Eric Wesley: What it is the “dippy bird” or “lucky bird,” or it’s got various names, is a dressed up heat engine.

It’s said that Albert Einstein studied the dippy bird for four months on his desk, and couldn’t figure it out and refused to take it apart.

The movement is predicated on, basically two factors, heat, light, and humidity. The Whitney Museum space which I think is 70–72 degrees Fahrenheit, and 50–55% relative humidity. And so she feels the same as you feel.

It’s very Sisyphean. It’s very Pop in its design. I would even go so far as to say Disney or, more accurately, with what I’m trying to do, Pop art, or a kind of Koonsian dynamic, or Paul McCarthy or so. In terms of human condition, we are all always working simply by breathing, let’s say. When you sleep your heart doesn’t stop. You’re working. And so I think that there’s something about that in there, and this kind of cyclical nature of life in general, I suppose.

And I stopped at the human-size for a reason, you know if it’s just a little taller than you and looking at you as if you’re prey, if it’s twenty feet tall, it becomes about something else.

Jason Rhoades’ Caprice (1996) is a Chevrolet Caprice Classic 4 Door Sedan. It measures 55 x 77 x 214 inches (139.7 x 195.6 x 543.6 cm) 

Rhoades’ Caprice is a real 1996 white Chevrolet Caprice, 4 door sedan that now sits parked on Gansevoort Street like it once sat parked outside the artist’s studio. The Caprice has rounded lines, a roomy interior and a stand-up hood ornament. A good cruising car, both durable and tough, it’s a car that has been used both for NYC taxis and police vehicles. 

There are more visual descriptions of artworks in the Biennial on floors five and six. These are also found at whitney.org/guide. 

Narrator: Adrienne Edwards is one of the curators of the Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept. She discusses one of Renée Green’s Space Poems, which are the banners hanging from the ceiling.

Adrienne Edwards: Renée uses very poetic, abstract, sometimes oblique language that sort of functions to open our mind as to how we understand what we think we understand, how we encounter information, because it has almost an advertising kind of sensibility. It’s interesting: that kind of slippage between expecting to be told something as opposed to being presented with the opportunity to think magically in a way about something.

Narrator: Renée Green talked about the series. 

Renée Green: Space Poems are open-ended wavelengths very often in serial forms. I chose it as a way of working because it is so capacious. I’m looking for different kinds of resonances. Each one is different and I’m always collecting ideas for the Space Poems. I would say my work over time is try to find distillations throughout. I’m always trying to do that. And so it would be refining it in a way, almost like a poem.

Narrator: Jason Rhoades died in 2006. Adrienne Edwards is the Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney. She says she selected his work for inclusion in the exhibition because it speaks to the current cultural moment.

Adrienne Edwards: The Caprice is a car that Jason was immediately drawn to, the fact that it had served as the car for so many federal and state employees, particularly the police, that it also was a car that was converted from a police car into taxis. And we think about how the gig economy has, in a city like New York, impacted the taxi industry. There have been real calamities around that, so here's a work that he created in the nineties that actually was quite prescient and relevant to today.

But also that it was about an almost romantic idea about the engine and mobility and expansion and the way it’s all bound up in our ideas of freedom and also individuality. And I think for Rhoades it’s not about a kind of emotional attachment to cars or any one car, but it’s about them as machines and as tools. Making the work, the car becomes this liminal space for him, between his studio and then all the places he would go visit to source materials all over Los Angeles for his installations.

It could be very easy to ask: why put Jason Rhodes in the Biennial at this moment? There was an article in The New Yorker in 2017 and the title of this piece is “An L.A. Artist Who Anticipated Our Trumpian Moment.” And I remember seeing that and thinking that that was precisely right.

Narrator: Rhoades described the project to the curator Hans Ulrich-Obrist, while driving in one of the cars.

Jason Rhoades: They are based in tools, the idea of a tool for perception or a vehicle for thinking. You know like a vehicle as a, not a motorized vehicle necessarily, but like a medium. You know like in paint is powder right and you use a medium which is either an oil or linseed, you know the vehicle which the color is transported in. So I use it, my interest is in how and what and why it transports things and how it can be used as a tool for certain perceptions. The tool for hauling physical things, a tool for hauling mental things and also a tool to be used to propel yourself through space. I mean I look at objects, I mean I’m incredibly interested in Duchamp in that way, I mean he put the readymade into an art context but then I believe we can put it back to work, to where objects can have simultaneous meanings, simultaneous levels, at all points in time, you know the object that you buy at the store, the gesture of buying it is an incredibly sculptural gesture, and the gesture of consuming it, putting it in your car, the gesture of opening the box, the gesture of putting it in the work of art, you know is all very, very important part of sculptural process.

Raven Chacon: Silent Choir, both in the audio form and the photograph form, were never intended to be an artwork. I went to the Standing Rock Reservation during the #NoDAPL water protection that was happening in 2016. And I came as a guest, as another American Indian trapped in this country who wanted to understand what was happening in this place. At the same time, be another presence, another witness to this as well, but mostly watching and listening. 

You would hear noises, you would hear helicopters in the sky. You would hear people singing through the night and then you would hear big instances of silence as well. 

Narrator: The recorded sounds from this moment are on the sixth floor of the Biennial inside the Whitney Museum.

On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the elder women of the encampment led a silent resistance on the bridge that connects the reservation to Bismarck, North Dakota. They faced state police and DAPL—or, Dakota Access Pipeline—security. 

Raven Chacon: Led by these women, this group of people came onto the bridge and just stared at the police. And didn’t say a word. No yelling, no pleading, nothing. Just staring. And so, what I was able to capture was the sound of five or six hundred people just being absolutely silent and staring at the police. In retrospect, when I went home and listened to the recording, I could feel the power of those bodies, of those people, American Indian people and allies confronting and having to not say a word.

Narrator: Installed at second-story height across from the southern tip of the High Line, the image appears to recreate this scene here in New York City. 

Raven Chacon: Even though I had not intended this image to become an artwork, let’s say, I’m grateful that the curators had seen that this was a transposable image, as if police would barricade off the Highline. One might find themselves on that side of such a situation.

So, to be able to see that these images or these point of view photos could be transposed in your own home, I think can be a very powerful experience.

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.

Narrator: Photographer Pao Houa Her now lives in Minnesota. She captures the lived experience of the Hmong people. 

Pao Houa Her: I’m Hmong and the Hmong people are historically from China during the Han dynasty, they were sort of forced out and made their way south into Southeast Asia, so I am a group of Hmong people that are from Laos.

Narrator: The photographs here rotate. At any given time, you’ll see a selection of work, all of which references the Hmong diaspora in one way or another. The artist has spoken about the complex nature of her Hmong-American identity:

Pao Houa Her: Hmong people helped the Americans fight during the Vietnam War, specifically in Laos.

Narrator: One body of work that will be on view for part of the Biennial represented over the course of the Biennial is comprised of portraits of Hmong soldiers who assisted the US government in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Denied official acknowledgement and veteran status, these soldiers have long sought to achieve recognition. Her’s portraits convey the dignity denied to these men, though they had to assemble their uniforms from the army surplus store.

Pao Houa Her: I’m really interested in the legacy of the Vietnam War and how the trauma continues to get played out in sort of the everyday lives of what it means to be a Hmong person. I’m interested in ideas of desire within like the Hmong consciousness. I’m also very much interested in ideas of what an imaginative Laos or a homeland would look like.

Narrator: Another selection of pictures that will be on view for a portion of the Biennial comes from a body of work called After the Fall of Hmong Tebchaw.

Pao Houa Her: And basically that body of work came from a story essentially. There’s a Hmong man in mid-2015, he was able to swindle Hmong elders into paying him a set amount of money, because he said that he was establishing a Hmong country. And that if you can pay into this new establishment, you can be a founding member, and he was able to swindle over a million dollars from Hmong people in the community.

And for me, I’m really interested in like, What is it about this desire? What is it about wanting to go back? To go back into a country that you feared so much that you had to leave. There’s something about that psychology that I’m like really interested in.

Narrator: Some of the work was photographed at the Como Park Conservatory in Minnesota.

Pao Houa Her: When we came to America, for a long time my parents would go to a conservatory in St. Paul every weekend because it was the only place that was hot and humid, the atmosphere resembled Laos. But then also conservatory, for me, was very symbolic and metaphorical in a way too right. Here are these plants that are not native to Minnesota, that have been transplanted to Minnesota that are kept in these beautiful glass houses. And so I just think about that metaphor.

Rayyane Tabet: The project is called Becoming American. 

The project as a whole looks at the naturalization exam, which is one of the last components of your path to gain U.S. citizenship, which is a path that I'm on right now, which is called a change of status.

One component is called 100 Civics Questions, which is kind of this intervention in multi-sites and the second one is called Learning English. 

Narrator: You can find the video Learning English on the Museum’s fifth floor. 100 Civics Questions is distributed throughout the Museum. Here artist Rayyane Tabet is discussing the work 100 Civics Questions. 

Rayyane Tabet: The United States citizenship and immigration services provides study guides for these exams. So in a way you go to the exam. Knowing all the questions and knowing all the answers.

The project as a whole kind of takes this exam as a site of inquiry and kind of takes these questions and these elements out of their context of the exam and distributes them around the Museum, in the gallery, and online for them to become kind of probing.

For me, it became really interesting to follow the process of the change of status as a philosophical one, a poetic one, an artistic one.

Those 100 questions, what is the imagination of a U.S. citizen seen through the lens of the naturalization exam, especially when, if you go on the street and ask those same questions to people that are de facto citizens by being born in the U.S., most people will not be able to answer those questions. And that is the result of many things. One of which is that there's no standardized civics curriculum across the U.S.. And the idea that people in different states, in different counties, in a way learn possibly a different kind of history and even geography of the country.

And what becomes very apparent when you look at these questions is of course it tells you one specific part of the history. It focuses more on civic duties and less on civil rights. Let's say it opens up the potential for a really interesting kind of conversation around those issues.

Duane Linklater: My name is Duane Linklater, and I’m originally from Moose Creek First Nations, which is located in Treaty 9 Territory in Northeastern Ontario situated along the southern coast of James Bay.

Narrator: Linklater uses pigments that have been important to Indigenous artists, including sumac, charcoal, and cochineal. He’s painted them onto linen canvas that will be shifted and rearranged over the course of the Biennial.

Duane Linklater: These are teepee covers. They’re not functional teepee covers, but I think that the idea is there. There’s something important about these works and their ability to articulate a change, or their ability to articulate a fluctuation of time and space. And that’s sort of originating from their original uses, as teepee covers, as this sort of very, very flexible mode of architecture, this flexible mode of being able to move from one place to another, according to the situation of the environment.

The series is called Wintercount. And so in my own culture, my Omaskeko Cree culture that when we ask each other this question of how old are you? And when we ask each other that question in Cree, if we were to translate, that would literally be saying, how many winters are you? If we are looking at a lifetime of a person, that person is half winter, the sort of way I look at it, right? And so this really beautiful way to think about the presence of winter. In this case, there were certain things that I’ve been thinking about over the past three or four years, five years, and that have made their way into the work. For example, I think one of the important ones this past summer in Kamloops, they uncovered a number of unmarked graves of children who went to residential school.

Narrator: The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission has described the residential schools as a central element in Canadian policy on Indigenous people for over a century. Children were taken away from their families in an effort to force assimilation and erase Indigenous cultures. Thousands of unmarked graves have been uncovered around Canada, and the search for more continues. In November of 2021, the Department of the Interior announced plans to begin identifying the unmarked graves that exist at similar schools in the United States.

Duane Linklater: Myself, I didn’t attend residential school, but many of my family members were forced to attend residential schools. And it had a profound impact on my family, and part of what it is that’s happening in here, and part of making this work, being able to articulate myself, and being able to speak and make work, make choices, free, open choices with the work seems important in light of this historical context.

Rindon Johnson: My name is Rindon Johnson.

I work with leather because it’s a byproduct of the meat industry. A lot of my original thesis with this work was thinking about how American Blackness is a byproduct of the transatlantic slave trade and I wondered what other byproducts I could work with. I began to realize, when I started trying to find a material that was as Black as I was, that, because of the way that capitalism functions in our society—especially in American society—every material is touched by the violence of it. And so what became clear to me was that I could choose any material and it would be filled with the charge and the pain of capital accumulation.

Narrator: Other products—like indigo, coffee, wax, and wood stain—also interested Johnson because they share histories inflected by exploitation. These materials trace colonial trading routes and exhaust natural resources. Though he uses these materials to alter the cow hide, he purposefully adds little fixatives and in doing so acknowledges the impermanence of these marks.

Rindon Johnson: I’m using a series of indigo baths and indigo washes across the cows to try and arrive at a very deep blue. It’s not going to work, and so much of my work is about things not working.

Narrator: Johnson marries a set of material reactions in this work: the mercurial nature of the colors he uses and the leather’s subsequent changing over time. The artist describes this relationship as a “line of recognition” between one medium and another.

Rindon Johnson: I have a lot of questions about neglect and I have a lot of questions about what it means to leave something alone. Do you leave something alone because you want to give it the agency to be itself or do you leave something alone because you don’t care about it?

Narrator: Artist Awilda Sterling-Duprey:

Awilda Sterling-Duprey: I have always been very curious and very into impulsive, something attracts me and I don’t ask for permission or whatever. I just go there to see what is happening or to see is it true what I felt or what I heard.

Narrator: Sterling-Duprey performs her paintings and drawings into being. She blindfolds herself, then allows music to guide her in improvisational movements that lead to mark-making on paper, and the walls.

Awilda Sterling-Duprey: I am using sound, I am following sounds, the energy of improvisation, jazz improvisation to produce those images or those traces on the paper that my body has to follow. I don’t have a sense of what I am doing at the moment, but I do know that I am enjoying what I am doing. Yes. I have to feel that I am enjoying grasping the idea and the concept.

My impression is that I have so much information in my brain, what I have been doing before, always using my body to do things, to create things, usually in large spaces, large format, that I think I don’t have to see what I am doing, because it is already there. It’s just a way of feeling where I am feeling the surfaces, listening to the sound and the noise, and the music.

I think that’s probably also very much connected to jazz. You cannot just memorize the song. You memorize the song, but you have to imbue it with your own feelings. Even when following the rules for jazz interpretation, you have to feel it first and you make it your own. And then you can improvise.