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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Rather than accepting the border between the US and Mexico as a fixed and immutable geopolitical line, artists working in the region propose that this part of the American landscape is an herida abierta or open wound—as the Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa described it in her 1987 book Borderlands/La Frontera— where loss and regeneration coexist. Enrique Chagoya, for example, employs a satirical approach in his codices, made in the tradition of ancient Mesoamerican manuscripts, that tell the history of Western civilization from the perspective of the colonized, while Leslie Martinez draws inspiration from the rugged geography of their native south Texas by sewing rags and other recycled materials to their canvases to evoke a landscape marked by pain but also healing. The works gathered here consider political, cultural, and spiritual borderlands as manifestations of a landscape straddling two realities at once, revealing the creative forces that can grow from the grief of historical trauma, erasure, and omission.

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Abstract map with swirling lines, a blue river, and a green hill with a red symbol. Black footprints and plant illustrations are visible.

Guadalupe Maravilla’s drawings take their inspiration from maps in a sixteenth-century Nahuatl manuscript about the Toltec and Chichimec peoples of a region now part of Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Reproducing some of the book’s pictographic symbols alongside lines suggestive of immigration routes, Maravilla alludes to his own childhood path from El Salvador to the United States. He drew the lines in collaboration with undocumented immigrants in this country by playing Tripa Chuca, a popular Salvadoran game in which two players take turns drawing lines that do not intersect. By using a book dating from the Spanish Conquest as a starting point and adding his and fellow Salvadorean’s migratory experience, Maravilla pointedly elevates contemporary accounts of Central American immigration to the status of an epic narrative worth recording.

Maravilla discusses the journey revealed in this drawing.