Planning for the 2022 Whitney Biennial began in earnest in 2019, a place in time you may look back on with dread or nostalgia; the old days, not all good old or bad old, just the before times. It was before COVID-19 went viral, before racial justice uprisings brought something of an awakening in some and sparked division elsewhere. A time when Donald Trump was still America’s president.

“Although underlying conditions are not new, their overlap, their intensity, and their sheer ubiquity created a context in which past, present, and future folded into one another,” wrote David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives, and Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, in their introduction to the event.

“We organized this Biennial to reflect these precarious and improvised times,” the two wrote.

A fearless and kinetic 80th iteration of the Whitney Biennial opens to the public April 6 and runs through Sept. 5. One of the art world’s most important shows, the Biennial does more than showcase trends in art, it has influenced the very trajectories of those trends. Among the artists whose early-career stature was raised through Biennial appearances: Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Jeff Koons.

The show is oddly titled “Quiet as It’s Kept,” a colloquialism the Urban Dictionary defines as “secrecy, to keep quiet, not volunteering or distributing information on certain relations.” But the show keeps nothing quiet, it faces head-on the world’s manifest troubles and conditions. The Biennial also has incorporated )( as a symbolic gesture toward openness and interlude.

The show occupies the first, third, fifth and six floors on the museum, with the fifth and six floors playing off each other, one dark and labyrinthine, the other open and light. There is also motion, in videos, moving walls, and animated works. 

“Rather than offering a unified theme, we pursue a series of hunches throughout the exhibition: that abstraction demonstrates a tremendous capacity to create, share, and sometimes withhold meaning; that research-driven conceptual art can combine the lushness of ideas and materiality; that personal narratives sifted through political, literary, and pop cultures can address larger social frameworks; that art can complicate the meaning of “American” by addressing the country’s physical and psychological boundaries; and that our present moment can be reimagined by engaging with under-recognized artistic models and artists we have lost. Deliberately intergenerational and interdisciplinary, this Biennial proposes that cultural, aesthetic, and political possibility begins with meaningful exchange and reciprocity.” Breslin and Edward wrote in their intro.

“All of the Whitney’s Biennials serve as forums for artists, and the works on view reflect their enigmas, the things that perplex them, and the important questions they
are asking,” they concluded.