Every two years, the Whitney Museum asks the question, “What does America look like and feel like to artists right now?”
Over the years, artists have considered political realities, American identity, neglected histories, and uncertain futures. This year, “Even Better Than the Real Thing”—the eighty-first edition of the Whitney Biennial, which is the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States—features seventy-one artists and collectives facing today’s most pressing issues.
Co-organized by two Whitney curators, Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, the Biennial presents the efforts of contemporary artists working across a variety of media and disciplines, representing advanced ideas of American art.
“The Biennial is an engine that powers the Whitney forward, by introducing new artists and ideas to our community and beyond. It is both what we do and who we are,” said Scott Rothkopf, Alice Pratt Brown Director at the Whitney Museum.
Surveying the art and artists of this current Whitney Biennial, which opens to the public on March 20 and runs through August 11, Art & Object has picked 10 artists who we believe best illustrate this moment in time and the ideas and art that are most pertinent to it.
Mary Lovelace O'Neal, Twelve Thirty-Four (from the Doctor Alcocer's Corsets For Horses series), 2023
Marrying experimental black aethetics with influences of Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism painting, Mary Lovelace O'Neal has been creating lively large-scale canvases for more than 60 years. Greatly involved with the civil rights movement on a political level, she didn't shift her aesthetic style of painting to make representational works that would illstrate the struggle, rather she believed that abstraction was able to reveal an equal side of Black life. Returning to the attention of critics, curators, gallerists, and collectors with a 2020 New York solo show - her first in the city since 1993 - the Mississippi-born, California and Mexico-based artist now commands three walls in the Biennial with paintings like Twelve Thirty-Four (from the Doctor Alcocer's Corsets For Horses series), which wildly depicts an expressively painted, white-corseted-horse charging across a black, Minimalist landscape with bold determination.
