The Whitney Museum had a long history beginning in 1932 of having a large group exhibition of invited American artists every year called the 'Whitney Annual'. In the late sixties, it was decided to alternate between painting and sculpture, although by the 1970s the decision was to combine both together in a biennial. The first Biennial occurred in 1973. Since then, the biennials have pursued a different curatorial approach to include all media. In the past the Whitney Museum has tried different ways to organize its biennial. It has used its own staff members and invited outside curators including Europeans, to present the show. In 2010 it even asked a former art dealer, Jay Sanders, who later became a Whitney curator, to help organize one. The Whitney Biennial often extends to sculpture exhibitions in
Central Park. The 2008 edition took over the Park Avenue Armory as a space for performance and installation art. The 2014 Whitney Biennial is the last one in the museum's Marcel Breuer building. The museum left the
Upper East Side for the meatpacking district, where it opened its new building, designed by
Renzo Piano, in 2015. The 1993 Whitney Biennial was the most diverse exhibit by a major American museum up until that time. In 1970 less than 1% of artists at the Whitney Museum were non-white. In 1991, only 10% of artists were non white. Vanessa Faye Johnson said that despite intentions, the "lack of exchange and dialogue, the simplification of complex issues in the Biennial" effectively cast the artists largely as victims in the eyes of the public. Roberta Smith, an art critic for
The New York Times, called it "pious, [and] often arid". The art historian Robert Hughes vehemently criticized lack of painting, and the "wretched pictorial ineptitude" of the artists, dismissed the abundance of text as "useless, boring mock documentation", and mocked the focus on "exclusion and marginalization... [in] a world made bad for blacks, Latinos, gays, lesbians, and women in general." The largely shared sentiment was that the public felt alienated by the confrontational demands of the artwork. Laura Cottingham, writing for
Frieze, noted that it was the first Whitney Biennial to treat video works with the same attention to space as sculpture, designating two entire galleries to them. She highlighted that text-heavy installations demanded attention and participation and that the artists made it difficult to take in the work as a passive viewer. Since 2000, the
Bucksbaum Award has been awarded to an artist exhibiting at the Biennial. The 2014 Whitney Biennial was also somewhat controversial for its lack of diversity, nine of the 109 artists were black or African American including Donelle Woolford, a fictional character developed by 52-year-old white artist Joe Scanlan. She was the only black female artist included in curator
Michelle Grabner's exhibition. Eunsong Kim and Maya Isabella Mackrandilal criticized the piece, "The insertion of people of color into white space doesn't make it less colonial or more radical—that's the rhetoric of imperialistic multiculturalism, a bullshit passé theory." and suggest the pieces treat "othered bodies [as] subcontractable." Additionally, The YAMS Collective, or HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, a collective of 38 mostly black and queer artists, writers, composers, academics, filmmakers and performers participated and withdrew from the 2014 Biennial as a protest of the Whitney Museum's policies. Yams Collective member and artist Sienna Shields said, "Every Whitney Biennial I have ever been to, you can barely count the number of black artists in the show on one hand. I didn't want to be a part of that," Shields said. "There are so many amazing artists of color that I have known in the past 12 years in New York that are essentially overlooked. But I just felt it was time for an intervention." Poet Christa Bell explained: "[O]ur entire participation was a protest... Just because people don't know that doesn't mean it is any less of a protest. Withdrawal was the final act of protest. Black people en masse being inside of an institution like the Whitney, presenting art, is itself a form of protest. We just followed it through to its inevitable conclusion." The 2017 Whitney Biennial featured a controversial painting of
Emmett Till, entitled
Open Casket by
Dana Schutz, which sparked protest and a highly circulated petition calling for the painting to be removed and destroyed. The 2019 Whitney Biennial was boycotted by a group of artists, in protest of the museum's vice chairman,
Warren Kanders. Kanders' companies sell military supplies (teargas and bullets) via
Safariland. The bullets were used by Israeli forces and snipers during the
2018–2019 Gaza border protests. The
United Nations released a report saying that Israeli security forces may have committed
war crimes and should be held individually and collectively accountable for the deaths of 189
Palestinian protesters in
Gaza. As such, the 2019 Whitney Biennial was labeled "The Tear Gas Biennial" by
Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett in an open letter on
Artforum. The artists who withdrew from include
Korakrit Arunanondchai,
Meriem Bennani,
Nicole Eisenman,
Nicholas Galanin,
Eddie Arroyo,
Christine Sun Kim,
Agustina Woodgate, and
Forensic Architecture. The Forensic Architecture biennial submission, "Triple-Chaser" (2019), collected evidence, ammunition rounds, and eyewitness testimony which links Warren Kanders to the killings and maiming of Palestinians. It is a collaboration with documentary filmmaker
Laura Poitras. ==See also==