For nearly a century, the Whitney Biennial has been American art’s proving ground. Mounted every two years at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the exhibition brings together a mix of emerging artists alongside mid- and late-career practitioners deserving of renewed attention. It is here that curators, gallerists, critics, and collectors come to discover artists and take the measure of American art as it is now.
Ahead of its 2026 edition, we highlight eight artists whose careers were transformed after their inclusion at the longest-running survey of American art in the United States.
Nan Goldin
B. 1953, Washington D.C. Lives and works in New York.
Year of Whitney inclusion: 1985
The 1985 Whitney Biennial marked the first time Nan Goldin presented The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1973–86), a photographic series widely regarded as her magnum opus. After graduating from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Goldin moved to New York in 1978, where she began documenting the city’s post-punk, No Wave, and post-Stonewall downtown culture. The Ballad emerged from these years and was first shown as a slide projection in clubs and alternative downtown venues. Composed of nearly 700 color photographs shot on 35mm film and sequenced to music, it formed an immersive portrait of intimacy, addiction, love, and loss in 1970s and ’80s New York.
Goldin has often noted that, prior to the biennial, the work was often dismissed by photographers as “not real photography.” Its presentation at the 1985 Whitney Biennial marked a decisive shift in the work’s status, propelling The Ballad into international circulation and culminating in its publication as a book by Aperture in 1986. The photoseries went on to garner major critical recognition: former Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman listed it as one of his top 10 films of 1985; New York Times critic Andy Grundberg called it “an artistic masterwork”; and Max Kozloff devoted a 1987 Art in America essay to the work.
Forty years after its publication, the book remains one of the most influential photobooks ever produced. At its Davies Street location in London, Gagosian is currently presenting all 126 photographs from the original volume, marking the first time the complete body of work has been shown in the U.K. and underscoring its enduring significance.
Catherine Opie
B. 1961, Sandusky, Ohio. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Year of Whitney inclusion: 1995
At the 1995 Whitney Biennial, Catherine Opie presented some of her first self-portraits, extending a body of work already focused on her queer community in Los Angeles. In series such as “Being and Having” (1991) and “Portraits” (1993–97), she photographed friends from lesbian, gay, and leather subcultures against saturated monochrome backdrops, adopting the conventions of studio portraiture to center subjects largely absent from mainstream representation.
At the biennial, she turned the camera onto her own body. In Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993), Opie is topless, facing away from the camera, a childlike domestic scene cut into her back; in Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994), she appears masked and pierced, the word “pervert” carved across her chest. Now among her most iconic works, the photographs expressed her “dream for a lesbian domestic relationship,” according to the Whitney, and its contradictions, shaped by personal loss and contested queer notions of family. Holland Cotter in The New York Times described the photographs as “shock troops crashing a mannerly art-world party,” while Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel observed that “the strangest and most telling quality that Opie manages to smuggle into her images of aggressive misfits is a sense of wholesomeness.”
Institutional recognition followed, with solo exhibitions at MOCA (1997) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2000), culminating in the Guggenheim’s mid-career retrospective, “Catherine Opie: American Photographer” in 2008. Her work has entered major public and private collections, including several Lake Michigan photographs installed in the White House during President Obama’s time in office.
Paul Pfeiffer
B. 1966, Honolulu. Lives and works in New York.
Year of Whitney inclusion: 2000
Shortly after completing his MFA at Hunter College in New York, Paul Pfeiffer’s breakthrough came at the 2000 Whitney Biennial, where he presented Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon) (1999) as a tiny wall-mounted video installation. Re-editing televised basketball footage, Pfeiffer erased the surrounding players and ball so that Knicks forward Larry Johnson appeared alone on the court, arms raised mid-celebration. The work, which digitally reconfigures a 1944 Francis Bacon triptych, recasts the athlete as both martyr and spectacle, a meditation on race, celebrity, and spectatorship in American mass culture.
Pfeiffer’s practice more broadly treats such works as “video sculptures,” digitally manipulating found sports and media imagery to disrupt the seamless consumption of spectacle. In his works, he explores the construction of visibility, history, and identity through images. Awarded the biennial’s inaugural Bucksbaum Award in 2000, he went on to present solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum in 2001, the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2002, the Barbican in 2003, and was included in the 2001 Venice Biennale.
Mark Bradford
B.1961, Los Angeles. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Year of Whitney inclusion: 2006
In 2003, Mark Bradford was trying something new: assembling torn posters, flyers, and street papers gathered around his Los Angeles studio into dense abstract compositions. The shift marked a move away from earlier works rooted in the aesthetics of Black hair culture shaped by his childhood in his mother’s Leimert Park, Los Angeles, beauty salon. However, when he exhibited these new works at the Whitney’s Altria space, the response was lukewarm. New York Times critic Roberta Smith was unconvinced, and Bradford later admitted, “I knew when I was putting it up that it wasn’t there.” He was not selected for the 2004 Whitney Biennial.
The turning point came in 2005, when curator Eungie Joo invited Bradford to participate in “Bounce” at REDCAT in Los Angeles and encouraged him to work on a larger scale. Out of this shift emerged Los Moscos (2006), now in the Tate collection, composed of the signage of South Central Los Angeles, an area long colonized by the entertainment industry. The monumental collage consists of hundreds of fragments of torn printed paper—posters, flyers, packaging—and layered into a vast, shifting picture of the city’s cultural and economic strata. Shown the following year at the 2006 Whitney Biennial, it won Bradford the Bucksbaum Award and led to his first major Whitney solo exhibition in 2007.
He later became a MacArthur fellow, represented the United States at the 2017 Venice Biennale, and in 2018, when his painting Helter Skelter I was sold at auction for nearly $12 million, it set the highest price then achieved by a living African American artist.
Theaster Gates
B. 1973, Chicago. Lives and works in Chicago.
Year of Whitney inclusion: 2010
Theaster Gates’s route into the art world was unconventional. He worked as an art planner for the Chicago Transit Authority before moving to the city’s South Side to become an arts administrator at the University of Chicago, where he began investing in the disinvested Grand Crossing neighborhood. In 2009, he launched the Dorchester Projects by converting a vacant South Dorchester Avenue building into a library, an initiative that expanded into a network of repurposed cultural sites, including Black House Cinema and the Stony Island Arts Bank.
His breakthrough came at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, where he transformed the museum’s sculpture court into an architectural gathering space activated by performances and communal rituals with his musical ensemble, the Black Monks of Mississippi. The installation established Gates’s method of combining social practice, ritual, and architectural transformation on an international stage. Today he works across installation, performance, sculpture, and archives, reusing buildings and materials to address histories of racism, urban disinvestment, and Black culture.
In 2012, he created 12 Ballads for Huguenot House at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, which was later presented as a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Today his work is held in major museum collections, and he is represented by White Cube, Gagosian, and Richard Gray Gallery, while he continues his South Side revitalization initiatives.
Alma Allen
B. 1970, Salt Lake City. Lives and works in Tepoztlán, Mexico.
Year of Inclusion: 2014
The 2014 Whitney Biennial was Alma Allen’s big break. Until then, he had developed his practice largely outside the mainstream art world. In the early 2000s, he supported himself making furniture for the Los Angeles design studio Commune and, with the encouragement of a small circle of tastemakers and collectors, sold his sculptures independently out of his studio on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park (he relocated to Tepoztlán, Mexico, in 2017).
Allen’s sculptures are materially driven and tactile. He carves biomorphic forms in marble and wood, often combining hand-carving with digital technology. Their distilled, elemental silhouettes suggest both ancient artifact and futuristic objects.
At the Whitney, three marble and walnut works, each Untitled (2013), introduced the then little-known West Coast sculptor to a national audience. Co-curator Michelle Grabner invoked the spirit of Constantin Brâncuși, citing the works’ refined formal language and sensitivity to material. Gallery representation followed: Blum in Los Angeles, Kasmin, (now Olney Gleason) in New York, and Mendes Wood DM in Europe. After a chaotic selection process, the U.S. State Department announced Allen will represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale 2026, showcasing some 30 sculptures in a presentation titled “Call Me the Breeze.”After accepting the U.S. pavilion commission, Allen told the New York Times that his galleries dropped him.
Shara Hughes
B. 1981. Atlanta. Lives and works in New York.
Year of Inclusion: 2017
In 2017, Shara Hughes was not exactly a stranger to the U.S. and European art world. Two years after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004, she mounted her first solo exhibition at New York’s Rivington Arms, and in 2016 she joined the roster of downtown gallerist Rachel Uffner (now Uffner & Liu). Yet it was during her inclusion in the 2017 Whitney Biennial that institutional curators and global collectors caught on.
At the biennial, co-curators Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks devoted an entire gallery to her kaleidoscopic landscape paintings, a direction she had begun exploring after moving back to New York in 2015. The presentation drew praise from New York Times critic Roberta Smith, who noted echoes of Fauvism and Charles Burchfield and commended the works for their ability to “push natural forms toward feverish abstraction.”
The market responded swiftly. Within months, three early interior scenes sold well above their estimates, one reaching $68,750 against a high estimate of $8,000. Momentum built to a peak in May 2022, when Hughes’s 2017 painting Spins from Swiss sold at Christie’s New York for just under $3 million, setting an auction record. Alongside this ascent, Hughes secured representation with Galerie Eva Presenhuber and Pilar Corrias. Her institutional presence remains strong, with exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Luzern in 2022, the Norton Museum of Art in 2025, and the Albertina Museum in 2026.
