Attention art collectors! If you’re looking for new artists to collect, pay attention to these highlights of this year’s Whitney Biennial. Curators Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley have visited artists over the past year in search of the most important and relevant work. Featuring seventy-five artists and collectives working in multiple mediums including sculpture, installation, film and video, photography, performance and sound, the 2019 Biennial takes the pulse of the contemporary artistic moment. Introduced by the Museum’s founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1932, the Biennial is the longest-running exhibition in the country to chart the latest developments in American art. I highlighted ten favorite artists and their works to check out at the exhibition now.
TODD GRAY
Born 1954 in Los Angeles, LA. Lives in Los Angeles, CA, and Akwidaa, Ghana | @toddgrayla
Todd Gray’s works draw from his archive of photographs amassed during the past forty-five years. Taken in locations from Hollywood to Ghana (where he maintains a studio), these images have been selected by the artist to explore the complex interrelation of Blackness, diasporic identity and historic systems of exploitation. For his ongoing series Exquisite Terribleness, started in 2013, Gray collages photographs into layered arrangements of thrift-store frames, creating compositions of fragmented bodies. Many of the individual photographs Gray uses for the collages were shot following his own creative vision; others were commissioned, including many he took as Michael Jackson’s personal photographer in the 1970s and early 1980s. Jackson is significant here for Gray, not as a celebrity or a figure of controversy, but as a global phenomenon whose mythic status serves to frame the complex issues explored in Gray’s work.
NICOLE EISENMAN
Born 1965 Verdun, France. Lives in Brooklyn, NY | @NicEisenman
The figures in Nicole Eisenman’s sculptural ensemble Procession appear downtrodden, yet they carry on and move forward. For the artist, this tension poses questions about what it looks like to be disenfranchised, but also part of a community, and about how to protest when protests feel like a constant cycle. Eisenman often combines traditional materials such as bronze and plaster with foam, sneakers, clothing, fog machines, and fountains that hint at bodily realities that sculpture has traditionally worked to transcend. Ultimately Eisenman seeks to pull the viewer into her mirrored view of the world, which she has created as a means of carefully examining our own. Procession also features a live video feed of the Museum’s eighth-floor gallery where Gamma Delta (1959–60) by Morris Louis is on view as part of the exhibition Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s. The video presents a thermal mapping of the gallery overlaid with an animation. Museums and art institutions have often been characterized as secular temples dedicated to the vision of the historically male “genius.” In the video feed, Eisenman subverts the sanctity of that space and questions the cultural framework that has been built up around such places. Eisenman’s piece also have a market her piece DEATH WAITS IMPATIENTLY CO-STARRING CLIVE BANKS was sold in Sotheby's London Contemporary Art Day Auction on June 27, 2018 for $131,371.
ALEXANDRA BELL
Born 1983 in Chicago, IL. Lives in Brooklyn, NY | @yesitsalex
In her prints, Alexandra Bell revisits articles from the New York Daily News that reflect the paper’s coverage of the now infamous 1989 Central Park Five case, in which five innocent teenage boys of color were wrongly convicted of assaulting and raping a white female jogger in Central Park. Bell highlights headlines and body text and redacts photos to draw attention to latent failings in journalistic objectivity, and to interrogate how journalism can perpetuate racialized violence through language.
The title of Bell’s series refers to a 1994 essay by critical theorist Sylvia Wynter, No Humans Involved, in which the writer responds to a radio report on the riots that followed the 1992 acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers who brutally beat an unarmed Rodney King. According to that report, public officials in the city routinely used the acronym NHI—“no humans involved”—to describe cases involving young Black men like King.
CALVIN MARCUS
Born 1988 in San Francisco, CA. Lives in Los Angeles, CA | @calvinmarcus
The paintings in a new body of work by Calvin Marcus are diverse in their subject matter, but linked to each other formally and through their playful, exploratory sensibility. In works that often confront their audience with bold colors and dark humor, Marcus plays with viewers’ expectations, throwing their perceptions into question. At the same time, the paintings are direct in their approach. “The work has no tricks,” the artist has explained, “it is as people see it and that’s fine.” A work offered by White Cube, London titled Automatic Drawing #1, which was estimated to reach $40k-$60k, fetched $68,750 at Phillips 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale Afternoon Session on May 15, 2019.
JENNIFER PACKER
Born 1984 in Philadelphia, PA. Lives in New York, NY | website
Absolutely my favorite and the most beautiful work was by artist Jennifer Packer. “It’s not figures, not bodies, but humans I am painting,” Jennifer Packer says of her intimate, figurative portraits. Packer’s subjects are friends and family members, depicted in casual, candid poses that suggest both familiarity and affection. Often working on an individual painting over an extended period of time, Packer combines areas of thin washes and sweeping gestural brushstrokes, scraping away layers of paint as she works to withhold as much detail as she reveals. While Packer captures a sense of each sitter’s personality, she resists exposing them too fully to the viewer—a decision that communicates her desire to “present or protect humans in the work.”
KEEGAN MONAGHAN
Born 1986 in Evanston, IL. Lives in Brooklyn, NY | website
With their tactile, heavily worked surfaces, glowing light sources, and emphasis on subjective points of view, Keegan Monaghan’s paintings channel aspects of Impressionist painting, but they are very much of today’s image-centric world. Monaghan employs visual tricks to make small items appear disproportionately large, skewing our perspective. The enormously clunky telephone in Incoming, for example, appears within a tightly cropped space, dwarfing the chair behind it. Other paintings play with a sense of inclusion and exclusion, positioning the viewer as a voyeur peering on to a scene through a peephole or fence. It is not always clear in Monaghan’s work whether the viewer is looking out or looking in, excluded or implicated.
BRIAN BELOTT
Born 1973 in East Orange, NJ. Lives in Brooklyn, NY | @brianbelotti
Brian Belott plays with and expands the parameters of painting, collage, and sculpture by encasing various pigments and abject objects that he has accumulated—among them, toothpaste, doorknobs, mustard, and an abacus—into rectangular blocks of ice. Backlit by light boxes inside industrial freezers, these frozen slabs of everyday detritus are temporarily transformed into spectacular multicolored ingots suggesting stained glass. Also part of his installation is Untitled (Fan Puuuuuuuff), which incorporates a working box fan. The artist started his Puuuuuuuff pieces in the late 1990s, covering canvases with cotton balls coated in thick, colorful paint to create textured, three-dimensional surfaces that riff on the tradition of modernist abstract painting. By infusing his works with humor and absurdity, Belott makes a space for creativity and invention, stating, “A well-delivered joke could save the world.”
JANIVA ELLIS
Born 1987 in Oakland, CA. Lives in Brooklyn, NY, and Los Angeles, CA | @ducatimist
In her paintings, Janiva Ellis makes pointed use of humor, repurposing imagery from popular media and art that informed her youth, appropriating animated characters that often represent underlying tension in her paintings’ narratives. In the foreground of the hybrid landscape presented in the Biennial, a mysterious scene unfolds in which a graphically rendered figure guards a morphing cartoon that is carefully blended together from multiple applications of paint. Simultaneously projecting determination, amusement and stress, the forms are exaggerated yet dwarfed by the vastness of the landscape. While the characters are not bound together by an explicit narrative, their relationship to one another becomes an engine of intrigue. It also serves as a complex point of entry to the monumental landscape, which is executed in brilliant colors and with vivid attention to the materiality of paint, creating a distinctive backdrop.
SIMONE LEIGH
Born 1967 in Chicago, IL. Lives in Brooklyn, NY | @simoneyvetteleigh
Simone Leigh developed the visual language of her sculptures from a wide variety of sources, including the art of ancient Egypt, traditional West African adobe structures, American vernacular architecture, and craft—including, in some cases, racist forms stemming from the Jim Crow era. As Leigh’s complex and contradictory sources would suggest, the female figures resist being reduced to a sum of their parts. Multifaceted and inward-gazing, they are conceived with Black women as their primary audience. A trained ceramist who has long engaged with radical Black feminist thought, Leigh has fashioned a multivalent response to outmoded notions of the female body as a vessel. Using sensuously textured materials—here, ceramic and bronze—she examines ways in which objects embody and communicate specific cultural traditions and histories through both material and form.
WALTER PRICE
Born 1989 in Macon, GA. Lives in Brooklyn, NY | website
With elements of both figuration and abstraction, Walter Price’s paintings shift between everyday realities and invented worlds. Couches and cars float and merge into landscapes as space expands and contracts. Price’s subjects are drawn from his own experiences as well as familiar cultural symbols. The artist’s fluency with color, texture, and form gives physical weight to these liminal, dreamlike spaces. In making each new series of works, Price also sets limits. Sometimes he challenges himself to create a big impact on a small scale; in other paintings he reduces his palette to only a few colors. Mixing fragments of memory, recurring signs and symbols, and abstract figures engaged in unclear, ambiguous interactions, the paintings refuse the viewer’s efforts to find a fixed perspective or narrative. Price is currently represented by Karma, New York.
Text and image credit to the Whitney.