Whitney Biennial 2022, Quiet as It’s Kept

The Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan, New York presents a vast overview of twentieth-century and contemporary American art with a special focus on the work of living artists. All in a building designed by Renzo Piano which opened to the public in 2015. The building, located between the High Line and the Hudson River, adds to the museum’s exhibition and programming space to improve the user experience.
The Whitney Biennial is based on an idea of the museum’s founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, in 1932, as an exhibition on invitation to exhibit artworks created in the previous two years. It initially alternated between disciplines, painting followed by sculpture and works on paper. Beginning in 1937 the museum offered annual exhibitions, called Annuals. The current format, an exhibition of work in all media held every two years, was introduced in 1973.
Designed to be an ongoing experiment in the world of art, this eightieth edition of the Biennale is subtitled Quiet as It’s Kept, a colloquialism. The curators of the 2022 edition, David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, explain: “We were inspired by the ways novelist Toni Morrison, jazz drummer Max Roach, and artist David Hammons have invoked it in their works. The phrase is typically said prior to something—often obvious—that should be kept secret.” 
We must look at the genesis of this Biennale to fully understand its dynamism. The organisation of the Biennale began at the end of 2019, before the great pause due to the Covid-19 pandemic, before the uprisings demanding racial justice, before the widespread questioning of institutions and their structures, prior to the 2020 presidential elections in the United States: a series of conditions which, as the curators explain, with “their overlap, their intensity, and their sheer ubiquity created a context in which past, present, and future folded into one another. We organised this Biennial to reflect these precarious and improvised times.”
As all Whitney Biennals are a forum for artists, in which their works reflect their enigmas, the things that perplex them, and the important questions they are asking, the 2022 edition stands out as particularly dynamic, based on a deliberately intergenerational, interdisciplinary approach. 
Thus architecture becomes a container for the artists’ contributions, with artworks that change, walls that move, and performances that animate the galleries and surrounding objects. The various levels provide contrasting atmospheres, from labyrinth and dark space of containment to open, light-filled clearing, reflecting the complex polarity of our society. 
For those who cannot go to New York to attend the event, considered “a barometer of contemporary American art”, every participant is represented by a story in the catalogue, a bibliography, images and, lastly, a personal declaration or interview emphasising the artist’s voice.

Christiane Bürklein

Whitney Biennal 2022, Quiet as It’s Kept,
4 April - 5 September 2022
co-organised by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives, and Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Mia Matthias, Curatorial Assistant, Gabriel Almeida Baroja, Curatorial Project Assistant, and Margaret Kross, former Senior Curatorial Assistant
Location: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Images: see captions, courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art
01: Installation view of Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It's Kept (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, April 6-September 5, 2022). Photograph by Ron Amstutz
02: Installation view of Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It's Kept (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, April 6-September 5, 2022). From left to right: Veronica Ryan, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, 2022; Awilda Sterling-Duprey, . . . blindfolded, 2020–; Duane Linklater, a selection from the series mistranslate_wolftreeriver_ininîmowinîhk and wintercount_215_kisepîsim, 2022. Photograph by Ron Amstutz
03: Installation view of Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It's Kept (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, April 6-September 5, 2022). Photograph by Ron Amstutz
04: Installation view of Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, April 6-September 5, 2022). From left to right: Charles Ray, Burger, 2021; Charles Ray, Jeff, 2021; Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall, 2021. Photograph by Ron Amstutz
05: Installation view of Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It's Kept (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, April 6-September 5, 2022). Photograph by Ron Amstutz
06: Installation view of Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, April 6-September 5, 2022). Alia Farid, Palm Orchard, 2022
07: Whitney Museum, Photograph by Ed Lederman
08: Whitney Museum, Photograph by Karin Jobst
Catalogue: Yale University Press