Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi

Mar 8–Aug 23, 2026

Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi, is a site-specific presentation by Los Angeles based artist Kelly Akashi on the Museum’s fifth-floor outdoor gallery and is a part of Whitney Biennial 2026.  The commission brings together a new sculptural installation, steel relief, works on paper, and an outdoor-screen animation across the Whitney’s terrace and adjacent spaces.

Monument (Altadena) stands as a testament to the widespread losses suffered in Altadena, California, in the Eaton Fire in January 2025. After Kelly Akashi’s home and studio burned, the chimney was the only structure left standing. She worked with a mason to rebuild it piece by piece, alongside a reconstruction of her home’s walkway, in luminous glass brick. 

Akashi made Inheritance (Distressed) using one of her grandmother’s doilies that she saved from a family garage sale but was later lost in the Eaton Fire. Here the delicate form of the doily is cut into Cor-Ten steel, a material linked to Minimalist sculpture and its art-historical associations with masculinity. The work explores the ways that artists—especially women—inherit and grapple with artistic and familial histories.

Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi is organized by Marcela Guerrero, DeMartini Family Curator, and Drew Sawyer, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, with Beatriz Cifuentes, Biennial Curatorial Assistant, and Carina Martinez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow.

Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi is part of a multiyear partnership with Hyundai Motor in support of an annual site-specific installation on the Whitney Museum's fifth-floor outdoor gallery.