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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Working with materials sourced from their local environments, self- and community-taught Black artists in the southeastern US have produced hybrid collage-paintings, complex sculptures, and abstractly patterned textiles that derive from their lived experiences. Martha Jane Pettway, one of a group of quiltmakers from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, makes her art from functional remnants—her quilt tops are pieced together from scraps of relatives’ clothes and used sugar sacks. Similarly, Joe Minter’s assembled sculptures share a visual vocabulary with the African Village in America, the immersive sculptural environment that he began working on in his Birmingham, Alabama, backyard in 1989. Purvis Young often portrayed the occupants of his historically segregated neighborhood in Miami on pieces of locally scavenged wood. Alabama artist and musician Lonnie Holley, who since the late 1970s has practiced what he calls “improvisational creativity,” makes sculptures and installations out of salvaged objects, while Bessie Harvey credits her sculptures, made from found wood and branches, to divine inspiration. Through these artists’ vision, everyday materials are transformed into something enduring, carrying the stories of their origins forward.