The last time the Whitney Biennial came around, in 2022, its production had been extended an extra year by the Covid pandemic, and the curators had to plan the exhibition and meet artists in virtual visits over Zoom.
To prepare for the 2024 Biennial — the latest iteration in the landmark exhibition of American contemporary art, which opens March 20 — this edition’s organizers, the Whitney Museum curators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, hit the road. They conducted some 200 studio visits around the country and well beyond. They visited scores of exhibitions and art events from the German mega-show Documenta 15 to the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.
So this cycle has been, in one sense, more normal. But normal stops here. The drastic phase of the pandemic, with its restrictions, may have receded. But the landscape left in its wake is a panorama of compounding crises — and for artists, like everyone else, a period of high uncertainty and anxiety with the U.S. election looming.
As they moved around, Iles and Onli said in a joint interview at the museum, they felt ambient pressure everywhere, whether they were smelling smoke from the wildfires wafting over the freeways in Los Angeles — a reflection of land overuse and climate change — or hearing firsthand from women and L.G.B.T.Q artists the effect of the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the spread of laws undermining bodily autonomy.