The Whitney Biennial is the “most important group show in the U.S.,” in the words of Chicago-raised sculptor Simone Leigh.
She should know. She’s been making art for decades, and she was one of the fortunate dozens tabbed for this year’s Biennial, up through Sept. 22 at the New York City institution.
The Whitney’s every-two-year survey of, very roughly speaking, what’s new and exciting in American visual arts can make the career of a young artist or change the trajectory of an older one’s.
Because it is the highest-profile ongoing art exhibition in the U.S., it can also become a flashpoint for controversy. That was the case this year, after the art publication Hyperallergic alleged that Safariland Group, a company owned by museum board vice-chair and major benefactor Warren Kanders, supplied U.S. authorities tear gas canisters that were used on the Mexican border against migrants last autumn.
A large group of Whitney employees signed a letter protesting Kanders’ role in the institution, and another Chicago artist tabbed for the exhibition, Michael Rakowitz, withdrew from the show in solidarity, the only artist known to have done so.
In addition to Rakowitz and Leigh, five other artists with strong Chicago ties were also chosen for the show, dance installation creator Brendan Fernandes, sculptor Diane Simpson, experimental dancer Mariana Valencia, painter Keeghan Monaghan, and visual artist Alexandra Bell. After seeing the Biennial in New York, I talked to these people about their routes to artmaking, being in the exhibition and the controversy. The interviews are edited for space and clarity.
DIANE SIMPSON
The path: “Grew up in Joliet. My art training took place over an extended period,” including two years majoring in art at University of Illinois in the mid-1950s, then transferring to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She returned to SAIC to complete her degree in 1971 and then earned a master in fine art in 1978. Simpson currently lives in Wilmette. We communicated by e-mail, her preference.
The Biennial: “It is the most exciting thing by far that has happened for me in my 40-year career as an artist. Having been chosen for this exhibition in a way, validates my work. It tells me I’m doing something that is current and meaningful even to a generation much younger than myself. It just tells me I’m doing something ‘right’ and to keep working.”
The work: “When I begin a new group of sculptures, I spend some time researching visual sources that directly feed into the works. The works in the Biennial refer to my long-time interest in clothing forms and to a more recent interest in commercial and domestic window treatments. The titles Peplum, Robe, Valance, Lambrequin, and Jabot refer to these dual interests. I like to combine commercial materials like wood and perforated aluminum with more common everyday materials like canvas, crayon, and colored pencil. The details of the drawn lines and joinery are important aspects of my work. Ideally they should be viewed in person up-close to appreciate these details.”
Her age (84): “I think it’s not unusual for the majority of artists selected for the Whitney Biennial to be on the younger side of 50. But I’ve also noticed that recently more attention is being paid to under-recognized older artists. So all I can say is ‘hoorah.’ If it’s odd being chosen at my age, I’m happy to feel odd, and I hope that my inclusion in the show will give encouragement to all those artist over 50 who continue to go into their studios day after day.”
Chicago vs. New York: “I used to think it was a hindrance living here, that any serious artist had to move to (New York). I don’t think that’s as much of an issue now. Exposure has been helped due to the internet and prevalence of art fairs. Also, a bit of Isolation can be a good thing, allowing an artist to develop something more uniquely their own.”
The controversy: “I expected this one and was hoping you wouldn’t ask. My first reaction when I learned about the controversy was, ‘But what does this have to do with me and my art … and I hope this doesn’t dominate the conversation over the exhibition.’ In a way, it has. A good amount of every article and review is about this issue. I have not taken an active role in the protest but support those who have. If the protests help to oust this board member and in the future promote ethical decisions on who should and should not be on institutional boards, then I feel it’s worth all the fuss.”
MICHAEL RAKOWITZ
The path: Reversing the path of most of the artists in the show, Rakowitz, now in his mid-40s, was raised in New York City and moved to Chicago, where he lives in Edgewater and teaches at Northwestern. He’s shown widely and in 2017 had his first solo exhibition, “Backstroke of the West,” at MCA Chicago. His first European survey is currently up at Whitechapel Gallery in London, where he was when we spoke by phone.
The Biennial: “I was elated to be invited by (Biennial curators) Rujeko (Hockley) and Jane (Panetta). They were both really thoughtful and just incredibly engaged. And I think that the show probably reflects that. The moment where everything shifted was when the museum staff very bravely wrote that beautiful letter to the director in the aftermath of the tear gas canisters from Safariland being found at the border with Mexico in late November. The letter was a miracle, you know, because you don’t see it happen very often. It was from the senior curatorial staff all the way through to the front-of-house staff.”
When the museum’s response didn’t suggest any changes were coming, Rakowitz asked the curators “if any other artists had offered to withhold their work. They seemed a little bit taken aback. For me it didn’t seem like an outlandish suggestion. It just seemed like this is one of the few points when we as artists might have a little leverage.”
The work: “One of the works that I was supposed to show was the film that was in the MCA survey, ‘The Ballad of Special Ops Cody,’ which is about this incredible story of this hoax with this doll,” during the first Gulf War. (Rakowitz is Iraqi-American and much of his works centers on questions of inter-cultural conflict.) “But it’s also using the voice of a veteran that came back to the U.S. completely changed in the worst possible way because of all the violence. And so I just felt like I would be betraying the work that I do. I couldn’t reinforce this person’s presence on the board. I wrote a letter to Rujeko and to Jane more or less offering my reasons as to why I couldn’t participate, and it was for their eyes only.”
The controversy: “I didn’t want to engage in a public shaming of the institution. It was also important to me that it be kept private because I didn’t want to put my fellow artists in the Biennial in an impossible situation. A lot of artists, they need this. They need something like the Whitney Biennial. And that’s not lost on me. I can say ‘no’ to that and make my stance known, but not everybody can.”
But the letter did leak. How, Rakowitz doesn’t know. Meanwhile some of the work in the exhibition directly addresses the controversy. “I want to make it clear that I have a lot of respect for all the artists that are in the show. And I think it’s an importantly diverse show. And I’ve been happy to see people taking notice of that even while also having the temperature on the criticism about somebody like Kanders’ presence raised the way that it’s been raised.”
SIMONE LEIGH
The Path: Leigh, 51, grew up in the South Shore neighborhood and graduated Kenwood Academy High School. “I left and pretty much never returned,” she said, in a phone interview from Brooklyn, where she now lives. But “I really appreciate my childhood in Chicago. Experiencing Harold Washington becoming mayor was really significant to me — and growing up in a majority black community where the bankers were black and the doctors, the teachers were black. It was very good for my self-esteem as an American.”
The Biennial: “It still remains a significant moment in an American artist’s career that they would be included in this Biennial, which is the most important in the United States. So for me it’s quite significant.” Leigh has a concurrent sculpture exhibition up at the Guggenheim, “Loophole of Retreat,” the result of her winning the 2018 Hugo Boss Prize.
The work: “Leigh merges the human body with domestic vessels or architectural elements that evoke unacknowledged acts of female labor and care,” the Guggenheim says. “These works summon the ancient archetype of the nude statue and inflect it with folk traditions from across the African diaspora.”
Her three sculptures in the Biennial “are part of the body of work that I started last summer, which kind of continue my work in sculpture but at a greater scale,” she said. “I discovered that I’m much happier in the slightly larger-than-life scale, and I’m going to continue to work that way. I think I’m just in the zone.”
The controversy: While Leigh said she considers the issue of Kanders and his company important, she felt like the significance of the show’s diversity was being lost to a degree. “If anything, I felt that it was a distraction from a really important Biennial, especially being the first that was, like, 50 percent women and majority people of color probably in America. And so I thought that was much more significant than pointing out that there’s a jerk on the board, because most of these boards are full of jerks.”
BRENDAN FERNANDES
The path: Trained as a ballet dancer, Fernandes, 39, was born in Kenya, raised in Canada and now lives in Chicago. He “uses dance to foreground queer embodiment, considerations of labor, and critiques of colonialism in his practice,” the Whitney wrote. He’s currently an artist-in-residence teaching at Northwestern and has a collaborative dance piece, “A Call and Response,” ongoing at the MCA through Oct. 13.
The Biennial: “I’m actually sitting in the exact spot where I got told. It was July 3rd when I found out. It meant the world to me ’cause the Whitney is one of those exhibitions that traces the history of what’s happening and what’s relevant in the art world. It was one of my career goals, and I have fulfilled it.”
Keeping the secret of having been selected, which artists agree to do for a period of months, was not easy, however. In planning the backdrop for his work at the Whitney during the embargo period, “I remember being there one day with like a Benjamin Moore paint swatch book,” he said. “And a friend was like, ‘What are you doing?’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, you know, just hanging out at the museum with a paint swatch book.'”
The work: Fernandes’ work “The Master and Form,” a sculpture of dangling ropes behind a central sort of pipework form resembling a jungle gym that gets periodically “activated” by a group of dancers, occupies a full gallery in the Whitney. “I just assumed that maybe they wanted to show a piece of it,” Fernandes said. “But no, they were like, ‘This is your space and we want to have the whole ‘Master and Form’ in this exhibition, and we’re going to support you to have it activated continuously.”
As the dancers move, “long, slow, arduous and kind of liquid,” through ballet positions and movements, “the question is always about the kind of ideas of mastery and form within the ballet technique, but also looking at how a body is supported but also burdened by these devices that become kind of like BDSM furniture. It’s also questioning our masochism as dancers.”
The piece was first shown in and commissioned by Chicago’s Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, but it grew for New York. “I started working right away with Norman Kelley architects here in Chicago to make the renderings,” Fernandes said.
Chicago vs. New York: “I used to live in Brooklyn, so I did the opposite (of others’ paths). It’s three years now. I am fortunate, and I love Chicago. I’ve fallen in love with the city. I bought a home. I was introduced to an art community that was very welcome and supportive. It has challenged me and given me space to do things I don’t think I could have done — I hate to say it — in Brooklyn.
“The first week I was here, I met Madeleine Grynsztejn, the director of the MCA, at an opening. And she didn’t know about my work that well at the time and just knew I was an artist. And the first thing she said to me was, ‘Welcome home.’ And that was something that has stuck with me.”
The controversy: Along with a majority of the artists and collectives in the show, “I signed a letter to ask for Kanders’ resignation, but I was always going to stay in the Biennial because I wanted to find a voice within the institution. We always talk about how we decolonize spaces, how do we challenge spaces? I think by stepping out I erase my voice and I don’t have a platform.”
MARIANA VALENCIA
The path: Valencia, who grew up here and went to high school at the Waldorf School, began in the arts at a summer program at Block 37, a teen arts apprenticeship. “I did the theater art audition specifically for comedy improv,” she said, “and that’s when I felt like, ‘Oh, this is something I could do.'” She studied dance as an undergrad at Hampshire College in western Massachusetts and moved to New York City afterward and became part of the “experimental dance” community, she said.
The Biennial: Hers is “a pretty underrepresented community. It’s not commercial in any way. It’s not work that is made to tour. So the kind of exposure that something like the Biennial offered, to me it felt important. The art world isn’t always inclusive of dance, and this kind of dance isn’t often the one that is chosen when the art world includes dance. It felt big. It feels big.”
The work: Valencia performed a new piece, “Futurity,” several times in the museum’s main entry hall, described by the museum as using “dance and choreography, which she intermingles with storytelling, object theater, and humor.” It was inspired, in part, by a performance residency she did at Chicago’s MCA in January, she said. To craft it, she asked herself “what is the site of this place and what was it before the monument of this art institution arrived?” She went after questions of the “history of the West Side and LGBTQ rights and also the politics of cities.” Using fictional characters, “it’s a very repetitive cycling of content, like a song cycle, that keeps kind of expanding, expanding, expanding and then it dissipates again.”
A unifying line of text throughout the sections, she said, is, “When people are forced into invisibility, it is important to say that they are here.”
Chicago vs. New York: “For the kind of dance I make, you do have to live here. Where it continues to cross-pollinate and reshape itself and re-identify, it is New York. I wouldn’t be able to have made any of the work that I’ve made if it weren’t for living and having community in New York City.”
The controversy: “I didn’t consider turning down the Biennial. The subject is concerning, and I addressed it in my work,” by calling attention to the controversy and a central museum stairwell near her performance site named for the Kanders family, she said.
KEEGAN MONAGHAN
The path: Monaghan “always wanted to be a painter,” he said. He grew up in Wilmette, went to New Trier High School, then studied art at Cooper Union in New York.
The Biennial: “It made me feel that the work I was making would be deliverable on maybe a larger scale. When you work in your studio, it’s a very solitary thing, obviously. And then you have a show, and the show is up for a month maybe, and then it’s gone, and you kind of start again from scratch. And this felt like the first opportunity for me to show something that would maybe be seen on a larger scale. For one thing, it’s up longer, but it’s also just being next to other artists that I admire. I was so excited that Diane Simpson was in the show. I’m also from Wilmette, and we realized we’re not neighbors literally but very close to each other.”
The work: Monaghan has three large, almost obsessively worked paintings in the show, in the gallery with Simone Leigh’s sculptures and adjacent to the one hosting Brendan Fernandes’ piece. A highlight is “Incoming,” a thickly painted image of a bright red vintage telephone, its call light glowing, that the Whitney chose to use on promotional materials for the Biennial.
“I was really excited about that. I didn’t know they were going to do that,” he said. “In a way I see all these paintings, including the phone, as these kinds of views of an internal headspace. To me that phone is really all about the light source in it, which becomes also a figurative thing. The light source is like a person, someone somewhere else calling, and then I think you have all these questions: What, is there some kind of emergency? Is it some kind of nuclear thing? But it could just be a phone in an apartment. My biggest desire in making a painting is that it has multiple emotional levels and terms.”
Chicago vs. New York: “The reason I’m in Brooklyn is because I came to school here. I’ve got tons of people that I really admire and am inspired by, and I couldn’t think of any reason to leave that community. But I think if I went to the Art Institute (school) and the same thing happened to me, I think that can happen anywhere, maybe.”
The controversy: “I felt conflicted morally, but then at the same time, Jane and Rujeko and everyone I’m working with, I don’t see them as part of the problem. I see them as being very much trying to be in dialogue with these problems. This is not like an apology or an excuse, but if you look at any major institution, if you follow the money, it’s extremely troubling and dubious and, I mean, I guess this is capitalism, right? But you’re working in your studio, all these things are hanging over you, and you’re trying to make something with all those feelings and all those, like I said, anxiety and fears. And for me, that’s in the paintings a lot, you know?”
ALEXANDRA BELL
The path: Bell, 36, grew up in the South Shore neighborhood, attended Morgan Park High School and the University of Chicago, studying creative writing and film. After college she moved to New York and worked as a grant writer for public health nonprofits, she said, before returning to school to earn a journalism masters from Columbia University. Seeing a lot of art through the years led to arts writing, she said, “and then from there I kind of spun out to me saying, ‘I have an (art) idea and this is what I think it looks like.'”
The Biennial: “This is my second (art) series, so I mean it’s kind of crazy for me. It’s affirming. You know, I started with telling narratives as a public art project and kind of posting in the street. I didn’t really think forward to being in a museum and definitely not the Whitney, right? But it’s kind of full circle, if you think that the first time that I thought that I actually really want to do art, I was looking at a show at the Whitney probably eight years ago, maybe. To then be in the Whitney with my own text-based work? I have some moments I have to kind of pinch myself.”
The work: Her series “No Humans Involved: After Sylvia Wynter” is an examination of the tabloid New York Daily News’ coverage of the early days of the so-called ‘Central Park Five,” the five teenage boys, later exonerated by DNA testing, who would first be convicted for attacking and raping a white female jogger in Central Park in 1989. Bell “highlights headlines and body text and redacts photos to draw attention to latent failings in journalistic objectivity, and to interrogate how journalism can perpetuate racialized violence through language,” says the Whitney. “I really quite literally wanted to highlight some of the language that was assigned to young black and brown boys,” said Bell.
People at the exhibition were spending a lot of time with the pages Bell reproduced and edited, which ended with the full-page ad then-New York real estate developer Donald Trump took out calling for the return of the death penalty.
“The goal of the work is a kind of continual sharpening of critical thinking skills,” the artist said. “There’s this really weird moment when I’m looking at my (student) loan and I’m like, What the hell? Why did I do this? And then there’s a moment that’s like, Whoa, if you didn’t do that, then you probably wouldn’t be doing this work this way. It is the basis of my art practice.”
The controversy: Bell began our interview by saying she did not want to address the topic.
Chicago vs. New York: “I don’t know. I have a friend. He’s actually from Chicago, and he lives in New York. He’s a great artist. He has a tagline. It’s like, ‘Chicago made me, but New York made me do it.’ My reason for leaving Chicago was less about what I felt was a limitation of Chicago, because Chicago’s brilliant. I think New York was a place for me where I had some space and exposure and a freedom. You just need to change the scenery, that was my thing.”
This story has been updated since it was first published online.
