Shifting Landscapes

Through Jan 2026

Vehicles driving through a dimly lit tunnel with blurred lights creating a sense of motion.

On view
Floor 6

Open: Nov 1, 2024–Jan 2026

While the landscape genre has long been associated with picturesque vistas, Shifting Landscapes considers a more expansive interpretation of the category, exploring how evolving political, ecological, and social issues motivate artists as they attempt to represent the world around them. Drawn from the Whitney’s collection, the exhibition features works from the 1960s to the present and is organized according to distinct thematic sections. Some of these coalesce around material and conceptual affinities: sculptural assemblages formed from locally sourced objects, ecofeminist approaches to land art, and the legacies of documentary landscape photography. Others are tied to specific geographies, such as the frenzied cityscape of modern New York or the experimental filmmaking scene of 1970s Los Angeles. Still others show how artists invent fantastic new worlds where humans, animals, and the land become one. Whether depicting the effects of industrialization on the environment, grappling with the impact of geopolitical borders, or proposing imagined spaces as a way of destabilizing the concept of a “natural” world, the works gathered here bring ideas of land and place into focus, foregrounding how we shape and are shaped by the spaces around us.

Shifting Landscapes is organized by Jennie Goldstein, Jennifer Rubio Associate Curator of the Collection; Marcela Guerrero, DeMartini Family Curator; Roxanne Smith, Senior Curatorial Assistant; with Angelica Arbelaez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow; with thanks to Araceli Bremauntz-Enriquez and J. English Cook for research support.

Generous support for Shifting Landscapes is provided by Judy Hart Angelo and the Henry Luce Foundation.

Major support for Shifting Landscapes is provided by Judy Hart Angelo, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Whitney’s National Committee.

Significant support is provided by The Keith Haring Foundation Exhibition Fund.

Aunque la pintura paisajista se ha asociado durante mucho tiempo con vistas pintorescas, Paisajes cambiantes considera una interpretación más amplia de esta categoría, explorando cómo la evolución de los temas políticos, ecológicos y sociales motiva a artistas cuando buscan representar el mundo que les rodea. La exhibición presenta obras de la colección del Whitney que abarcan desde la década de 1960 hasta el presente y está organizada en distintas secciones temáticas. Ciertas obras giran en torno a afinidades materiales y conceptuales: ensamblajes escultóricos construidos con objetos obtenidos localmente, enfoques ecofeministas del arte ambiental, los legados de la fotografía paisajista documental. Otras están vinculadas a geografías específicas, como los frenéticos paisajes urbanos del Nueva York moderno o la escena cinematográfica experimental de Los Ángeles en los años setenta. Algunas, muestran cómo artistas inventan mundos nuevos y fantásticos donde los seres humanos, los animales y la tierra se vuelven uno. Ya sea representando los efectos de la industrialización en el medio ambiente, abordando el impacto de las fronteras geopolíticas o proponiendo espacios imaginados como una forma de desestabilizar el concepto de un mundo “natural”, las obras reunidas aquí se centran en ideas de lugar y territorio, poniendo en primer plano cómo la gente da forma y a la vez es formada por los espacios que nos rodean.

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The term “New Topographics” describes a stark style of landscape photography that debuted in the 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Rather than presenting idealized or transcendent depictions of nature, the artists in the show focused on the mundane and the banal, documenting the effects of industrialization and suburbanization on the American terrain. Robert Adams’s photographic series, for example, recorded the residential spread along the Rocky Mountains in Colorado in a straight-on and detached style.

More recent images of the North American landscape by artists such as Christina Fernandez and An-My Lê carry on this aesthetic tradition but with more pointedly political undertones. Centering the impact of the human-made encroachments of colonization, war, and pollution, these works invoke the lived consequences of such intrusions on both the body and the land, serving as ethical acts of resistance through documentation.

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A woman in a floral dress leans back over a stair railing in an old building with graffiti on the walls.

In the Abandonment series, Nicole Soto Rodríguez documents herself enacting site-specific choreographic exercises in neglected sites, including the historic Temple Del Maestro building, once the headquarters of the teachers’ union in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the now-defunct Continental Motors factory in Detroit, the closure of which in the 1990s caused the loss of thousands of jobs. Soto Rodríguez’s performance, which is accompanied by the ambient sounds of birds, the city, and debris crackling underfoot, is a dialogue with the built environment and the now-broken promises of progress these spaces once carried.