#whitney-biennial

#whitney-biennial

This year, we opted to sort our spring guide into categories, the better to match your mood. There are the shows everyone's talking about - big names like Duchamp and Raphael (seriously, how is this the first major survey of his in the city?), Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. There are major surveys, like the New Museum's inaugural show in its expanded building, MoMA PS1's Greater New York triennial, and of course, the Whitney Biennial.

Taking over the museum's transformed school building starting April 16, the cross-borough survey will celebrate MoMA PS1's 50th anniversary with a bevy of site-specific installations, new commissions, and rarely seen work by 53 artists and collectives living and working across New York City. A complete list of participants is included at the end of this article. This year, Greater New York will coincide with the Whitney Biennial for the first time in the show's history.

As if demolishing the East Wing, gutting arts agencies, and slapping his name and face on several federal buildings weren't enough, the US president now wants to do away with a DC building known as the "Sistine Chapel of New Deal art." This week, we reported on a burgeoning campaign to save the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which houses murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel, and other major American artists. We will continue to follow this story.

Hello, New York! Hope you all enjoyed those beautiful, peaceful couple hours of snow this weekend, before, well, you know the drill. (By the way, reporting businesses and landowners who haven't shoveled their sidewalks to 311 doesn't make you a narc - change my view). In art-related news, the Whitney Museum announced the 56 participants in its 2026 biennial, which includes some familiar names from New York institutions - Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien, CFGNY, and Samia Halaby among them.

In an era when contemporary culture tends to privilege immediacy, the archive offers resistance by inviting slowness, friction, and a longer view. In this three-part series, Document turns to curators Ruba Katrib, Jovanna Venegas, and Drew Sawyer, photographed on location, wearing Vowels, the brand that finds its own voice through archival research. Each of these curators places the archive at the center of their practice.