The Whitney Biennial Captures the America We Actually Live In

The Whitney Biennial does not tell you what America is so much as pull its labor, entertainment, joy, grief, people, and infrastructure into the same frame, revealing a shared national life where we are used to seeing only fragments.

I have already seen people sneering at this Biennial. Too sentimental. Too eager. Trying too hard. Yeah, okay. We are all entitled to our opinions. I am certainly not above reading something to filth from time to time. But with this show, I think some of that contempt says more about the art world than it does about the work.

Museums have spent years acting like public spaces while quietly catering to people with the “right” education, the “right” job, the “right” confidence, the “right” tax bracket. Now, to be clear, there are public museums, and the Whitney is not one of them. But it is a nonprofit that receives public funds, and over the last two years it has expanded free access through Friday nights, second Sundays, and free admission for visitors 25 and under. So yes, obviously, it is trying to pull more of the general public in. That is refreshing. It finally feels like a museum remembering that “the public” is not some abstract category in a grant proposal. It is moms, college students, hair stylists, engineers, real estate agents, construction workers, people coming off a shift, people squeezing in a show before dinner, and people who are simply curious.

And I know what the criticisms are. The politics are too softened. The emotion is too evasive for the current moment. The audience is not being accused enough. The individual works are too sentimental, and the show itself is too loose, too scattered, too willing to drift. I disagree. Part of the problem in America right now is that we are too divided, too angry, too exhausted, and too eager to insist that only my reading, my grievance, my framework gets to count. Almost all of us, myself included, are guilty of that.

Take David L. Johnson’s Rule, a collection of signs posted in privately owned public spaces. On paper, rules like these are supposed to keep public spaces safe and usable. In practice, many of them go a step further, quietly spelling out who the “public” is actually meant to include and who it is meant to push out. No loitering. No lying down. No this, no that, no existing too fully unless you are the right kind of person doing the right kind of public behavior. That is someone’s viewpoint made physical. Just one someone, usually with money or power, deciding who deserves access to a space that still gets to call itself public.

Then there is Emilio Martínez Poppe’s Civic Views, which felt like the perfect work to sit beside it. It is an ode to public servants, yes, but also to the strange, complicated position they occupy: members of the masses, responsible to the masses, and still caught in the same systems as everyone else. These are not lofty portraits of government power. These are office windows. Fluorescent, practical, unglamorous views of the built world outside.

I stood in front of one of Martínez Poppe’s images with another writer and an artist, and all three of us recognized it instantly. Buses, a warehouse, that weird industrial something that somehow feels like everywhere. One said it was her boyfriend’s view in Jersey. One said it was the view from her old apartment. I said it was the view from my daughter’s doctor’s office. None of us named the same place. The picture was not taken from any of them. And still, we all knew it. That view belonged to all of us because, in one way or another, we all belong to that world.

And that, really, is where the Biennial starts getting under your skin. It moves from public space into public feeling, from who gets to occupy the city to who gets seen, consumed, mourned, and remembered inside it.

The curators said they wanted visitors’ “other senses” attuned to what they “see, feel, hear, smell,” and, annoyingly, they were right. Jordan Strafer’s TALK SHOW had me so enthralled they had to kick me out for staying too late. I do not usually sit through museum films. There is only so much mute, intense staring I can take before I start looking for the exit. But this one got at something rotten and true about America. We do not just witness suffering here, we build on it. We cast it, light it, give it a host, a couch, a commercial break, and call it entertainment. We turn pain into programming, package it for mass consumption, and then act surprised when it comes back warped.

That feeling of separation, of turning one another into spectacle or distance, kept echoing through the nearby work. Cooper Jacoby’s haunted intercoms and clocks for the dead let the voices of people who have passed keep speaking words they said while alive, while time ticks on without them. It is eerie, yes, but also deeply sad. A whole system for keeping people half present after they are gone. Then there are Agosto Machado’s altars, which shift the room completely. They are beautiful, intimate, and public all at once, honoring those lost to the AIDS epidemic and making space for grief without trying to sanitize it. Each of these works points toward the same question: who were we willing to lose, who do we choose to remember, and what does it mean to grieve in public instead of pretending the dead were never ours to mourn?

And grief does not only live at the scale of public tragedy. Sometimes it lives in the slobbery, ridiculous, deeply devoted love people have for their pets. Coming back to one of the critiques that irritated me most, Emilie Louise Gossiaux’s Kong Play seems to have left some critics almost embarrassed. Why, they seem to ask, would a major Biennial make room for a work about loving a dog? Why devote so much space to dozens of ceramic dog toys, to silliness, to devotion, to something so openly sentimental? But what could be more American than that? More relatable?

Americans have never exactly been shy about honoring what we love, especially when it comes to our pets. We mourn them hard. We keep the collar, the ashes, the photos, the toys they chewed half to death. We build little shrines out of memory without even meaning to. Not everything has to scowl at you to count as serious. Not everything has to be severe to tell the truth. Gossiaux’s work, made in relation to their late guide dog London, is tender, funny, and quietly devastating because it refuses the idea that grief has to strip itself of affection in order to earn respect.

The show also knows that “America” does not stop at the mainland. Just as Civic Views shows civic workers as members of the public who are also cogs inside the systems they help run, these works remind us that Indigenous people in Hawaiʻi and across America are part of that public too, even as this country keeps treating them like an exception while continuing to profit from their land. Kainoa Gruspe’s welcome to here: doorstops and kekahi wahi with Bradley Capello’s 20-minute workout [WIP] bring Hawaiʻi in not as a postcard, but as Indigenous land marked by occupation, performance, refusal, and survival. Sung Tieu’s fracking pipe rhymes with them through extraction: the land taken, the ground used, the damage buried deep, audible to the people forced to live beside it. Studies of homes near natural gas compressor stations have found elevated residential noise exposure, a brutal reminder that some Americans live with the cost directly while others enjoy the comfort at a distance. They are not outside the public. They are part of it, just as we are. This is America, too.

And then the Whitney did something I wish more museums would stop treating like a stunt. It gave real space to a video game. Leo Castañeda’s Camoflux Recall Grotto is shaped by his grandmother’s paintings, Latin American Surrealism, the Brazilian Amazon, and the South Florida Everglades, which honestly feels extremely American to me. A video game, of all things, commissioned by an American museum, made by a Colombian born artist working in Miami, carrying family memory and immigrant continent energy straight into the Biennial. That does not feel outside America. That feels like America now. I spent twenty full minutes playing it. Not glancing. Not politely interacting. Playing. The visuals were worthy of the room. The interface was worthy of the room. The atmosphere was worthy of the room. It did not feel like a novelty tucked off to the side. It felt like the Whitney admitting that art does not only arrive in the sanctioned forms people already know how to reverence.

For all its unevenness, that is what this Biennial keeps doing. It widens the frame.

That is the real achievement here. Not that the Whitney explains America. It does something better, and much harder. It made a Biennial not just for critics, but for everyone. For the ones fluent in artsy language and the ones who are not. It lets our labor, rules, grief, TV shows, dogs, land, death, joy, and play occupy the same room.

Then, for a minute or so, more of us can see ourselves and our neighbors inside it instead of standing outside wondering who culture was really made for. And that, frankly, is what America needs right now. Not another excuse to sort ourselves into camps, but a reminder that we are still here together.

Or at least 99 percent of us are.