This year’s Whitney Biennial spotlights “the greater United States”—a term from historian Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire. It describes not only the country’s 50 states but also its occupied countries, annexes, military bases, and territories. Strategically, Immerwahr argues, words like “colony” and “empire” have been evaded by officials since World War II—but that’s just semantics.
As the country turns 250, the 2026 Whitney Biennial—that storied finger on the pulse of American art—takes a deliberate look beyond the “logo map,” another of Immerwahr’s terms for the geographic shape most people picture when they think of “the United States.” Curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer included artists from US-occupied Okinawa, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; from Chile, where the US engaged in clandestine interventions; from current and former territories, like Puerto Rico and the Philippines; and from Palestine, where the US continues to fund a genocide. The move is both timeless and timely: while I was writing this review, my phone buzzed to inform me that Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, had been killed in an airstrike orchestrated by Israel and the United States.
But lest we rehash the same old conversation, I should clarify from the get-go that this Whitney Biennial is about a lot more than the artists’ place of birth. Switching the topic of conversation from the politics of identity to that of infrastructure is its second necessary intervention, for identity is most politically useful when it leads to organizing and material change. May the Democratic party take note.
Artists throughout the show tackle economic systems (Ignacio Gatica, Joshua Citarella), belief systems (Zach Blas), familial systems (Andrea Fraser and her mother, Carmen de Monteflores), ecosystems (Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Kainoa Gruspe, Erin Jane Nelson, Kelly Akashi), energy systems (Ash Arder, Akira Ikezoe), global supply chains (CFGNY, Aziz Hazara), healthcare systems (Cooper Jacoby), institutional systems (Maia Chao, Andrea Fraser, the duo Nile Harris and Dyer Rhoads), legal systems (Jordan Strafer), value systems (Kimowan Metchewais), and civic infrastructure (David L. Johnson, Emilio Martínez Poppe, and Mo Costello).
Spoiler alert: all these systems are crumbling.
Ignacio Gatica: Sanhattan still, 2025.
Courtesy the artist
Aziz Hazara: “Moon Sightings” (detail), 2024.
©Aziz Hazara. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter Kolkata/Bombay.
Two, though, persevere like cockroaches: algorithmic systems (Zach Blas, Michelle Lopez, Cooper Jacoby) and imperial systems (Ignacio Gatica, Aziz Hazara, Mao Ishikawa, and another duo, Aki Onda and José Maceda). Imperial systems are effectively the backbone of the show, connecting its geographic and infrastructural threads. Gatica’s documentary video Sanhattan (2025) takes us through the financial district of Santiago, Chile—a funhouse mirror version of Manhattan called Sanhattan, complete with its own statue of liberty, a Chrysler Building copy, and a spiral Guggenheim-like mall. These structures are visible traces of the American interventions that made Chile the birthplace of neoliberalism.
Aziz Hazara’s “Moon Sighting” (2024)—a group of streaky, blurry green-and-purple photographs made with a night-vision camera—promise pictures of the moon. But I couldn’t find a trace of that famously unphotographable celestial orb. What exactly does night vision—introduced during Desert Storm—really see, and what does it obscure? The ambiguity allows for plausible deniability, which Hazara names in the catalog as a classic US tactic, one that proved devastatingly effective in his native Kabul.
Precious Okoyomon: You have got to sometimes become the medicine you want to take (detail), 2025.
©Precious Okoyomon. Photo Markus Tretter. Courtesy the artist.
Art is uniquely suited to show us infrastructure that unfolds at scales difficult to perceive—systems we mostly notice only when they stop working. The show sees artists translate said systems into sensation. For Sung Tieu, that sounds like danger signals from fracking wells across the US transformed into vibrations you can feel in your bones. For Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, that looks like an immersive, sensorial video installation narrating the genocide in Gaza not through statistics but individuals (though it must be said that with Israel having killed over 240 Palestinian journalists, personal stories are increasingly the most available kind). Where systems imply a cold rationality, this Biennial emphasizes how they are felt, and how they are lived.
But the exhibition is hardly all everything-is-connected doom and gloom. Playful, irreverent, and even “feral” works (borrowing Guerrero’s term) disarm and delight throughout. Consider Pat Olezsko’s riotous court-jester-esque inflatables, or cute cerebral stuffies by both Precious Okoyomon and CFGNY. The effect is an emotional ricochet that feels familiar from life lived online, where images of genocide and adorable animals follow one another in quick succession, and one tries to stay sane by remembering both registers coexist.
Emilie Louise Gossiaux: Co-Shaping One Another with the Moon, 2025.
©Emilie Louise Gossiaux. Photo Charles Benton. Courtesy the artist and David Peter Francis, New York.
A touching throughline involves networks of care captured by Mo Costello, Agosto Machado, and Emilie Louise Gossiaux. Gossiaux contributes a series of show-stopping, affectionate homages to her late guide dog London, drawing scenes from their life of reciprocal care using techniques she developed after going blind. She also built for her late canine a pleasure palace of 100 sculptural Kong toys: if all dogs do go to heaven, this is what it looks like. Machado, meanwhile, crafted his shrines after caring for friends dying of AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s. Upon inheriting their belongings—pictures, papers, and more—he crafted tender reliquaries in their honor. Orphaned and queer, Machado knew better than most the importance of care beyond the nuclear family or the state, and of the desire to be remembered and to have mattered to someone—the ways art can leave a trace of a life.
Elsewhere in the show, you’ll find one of the most moving portraits of family that I know. Andrea Fraser, an icon of institutional critique, shows work alongside knockout paintings by her mother, Carmen de Monteflores. Locked away in storage for decades, de Monteflores’s vibrant cut-out canvases show figures and faces intertwined. Here, we learn how Fraser came to scrutinize institutions so thoroughly: the obstacles De Monteflores faced as a brown woman in the art world eventually led her to give up painting altogether. It’s tragic. Her works are extraordinary, real contenders for best-in-show.
Agosto Machado, Ethyl (Altar), 2024.
© Agosto Machado. Courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Fraser suggests her whole career might be “revenge” for her mother’s treatment in the catalog. Alongside de Monteflores, she shows sculptures of toddlers sleeping in vitrines. Rare art objects on the conceptualist’s part, they embody Fraser’s recent revelation as to why, exactly, she was yearning to make something saleable. What she desired, she admits, was “to be wanted and valued and cared for,” as well as “unconditional love.” But did she want a market, or a mother?
Therein lies the crux of this Whitney Biennial: at issue is a matter of scale. In private life, most of us know a little something about how to care for one another (narcissists notwithstanding). Scale it up and systematize it, and cruelty and dehumanization too often ensue—as seen in Cooper Jacoby’s haunting, surreal clocks. They evoke biological age tests that insurance providers offer to reward “healthier” individuals with lower premiums. Layers of bureaucracy and technology enable estrangement from patients’ humanity. Some employees tasked with upcharging the ill might care and might even help, but the system does all it can to keep them cogging along in the corporate machine. Yet private care is too easy to romanticize, when too many caretakers go unpaid and those with less social capital lack access. Care too is a systemic issue—feminized, racialized, classed, and exploited—and hardly equipped to fight off fracking and genocide and imperialism.
So what are we going to do about all these pernicious systems? For Daniel Chew, a member of the fashion-forward collective CFGNY, “Everyone’s come to the understanding that everything is somewhat co-opted.” Power, he adds, “isn’t about trashing the system but surviving in it, navigating it.” Their strategy for survival, in a word: collaboration.
I’m game, but I can’t call theirs the most powerful proposal. In Chew statement’s, I hear sense a note of compromise and practicality. Privatizing our problems might enable survival, and crucially so. But I find myself more inspired by works that scale up and imagine revolutions. The silver lining of crumbling infrastructure: their failure reminds us that empires do fall.
Kimowan Metchewais: Untitled, from the series “Self-portraits,” 1998.
©National Museum of the American Indian. Courtesy the National Museum of the American Indian Photo Services,
Take Emilio Martínez Poppe, who captures caretaking at the scale of citizenship. His photo-text installation comprises worker portraits of blue-collar Philadelphia civil servants—bus drivers and sanitation workers—who came to see and shape their city differently once they had some agency over it.
But it is David L. Johnson who takes infrastructural intervention to its most logical and liberatory conclusion: he plays the system against itself until the foundations start to crack. For the Biennial, he removed rule signs from various privately owned public spaces around New York: NO SKATEBOARDING, NO SMOKING, NO PANHANDLING, NO CAMPING, NO SLEEPING. Displayed at the Whitney, the signs draw attention to the creeping privatization of the city while also rendering those rules obsolete. If such directives are not visibly posted, they can’t be legally enforced. Where systems want you to believe that automatism is your only option, Johnson, for his part, insists emphatically on agency.
