Artists Announced for the The Whitney Biennial 2012

Written by Clarice Starling Saturday, 24 December 2011 02:05

New York City.- The Whitney Museum of American Art today announced the list of artists participating in the upcoming 2012 Whitney Biennial, which takes place at the Whitney Museum from March 1 through May 27, 2012. This is the 76th in the ongoing series of Biennials and Annuals presented by the Whitney since 1932, two years after the Museum was founded. The Whitney Biennial is an exhibition held every two years in which we gauge the current state of contemporary art in America. The 2012 Biennial is being curated by Elisabeth Sussman, Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney, and Jay Sanders, a freelance curator. The curators began working on the research and planning of the show in early December 2010. Fifty-one artists have been selected. The Biennial comprises work—including paintings, sculptures, photographs, and installations—from both emerging and established artists. In addition to visual artists, the exhibition includes a select group of filmmakers, choreographers, musicians, and playwrights. These multidisciplinary arts will be presented in a large open space in the Museum’s fourth floor galleries.

The curators are working on the Biennial’s film program with Ed Halter and Thomas Beard, the co-founders of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn. The exhibition will be accompanied by an innovative catalogue designed by Joseph Logan with contributions from each Biennial artist. More details on the artists, other Biennial projects, and the schedule of events will be released in January 2012.

Artists announced as participating in the 2012 Biennial are Kai Al6thoff, Thom Andersen, Charles Atlas, Lutz Bacher, Forrest Bess (paintings selected by artist Robert Gober), Michael Clark, Dennis Cooper and Gisèle Vienne, Cameron Crawford, Moyra Davey, Liz Deschenes, Nathaniel Dorsky, Nicole Eisenman, Kevin Jerome Everson, Vincent Fecteau, Andrea Fraser, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Vincent Gallo, K8 Hardy, Richard Hawkins, Werner Herzog, Jerome Hiler, Matt Hoyt, Dawn Kasper, Mike Kelley, John Kelsey, John Knight, Jutta Koether, George Kuchar, Laida Lertxundi, Kate Levant, Sam Lewitt, Joanna Malinowska, Andrew Masullo, Nick Mauss, Richard Maxwell, Sarah Michelson, Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran, Laura Poitras, Matt Porterfield, Luther Price, Lucy Raven, The Red Krayola, Kelly Reichardt, Elaine Reichek, Michael Robinson, Georgia Sagri, Michael E. Smith, Tom Thayer, Wu Tsang, Oscar Tuazon, and Frederick Wiseman.


In addition to the artists listed above, the 2012 Biennial will present two special curatorial collaborations with external arts organizations: Arika, a UK-based group that organizes festivals of experimental music, moving image, and sound will present their first North American program as part of the 2012 Biennial. The collaboration will take the form of a week of performances, workshops, and conversations that will capture interesting threads in North American listening, including contemporary poetry, noise, and music. As a curatorial programming partner of 2012 Biennial, Artists Space Books and Talks in Tribeca will be the site of a weekly program, curated by Artists Space, focusing on key concerns from the work of the exhibiting artists, as well as from the Biennial as a whole. The fourth floor performance events will involve the artistic collaboration of Bentley Meeker.

The Whitney Museum of American Art is the world’s leading museum of twentieth-century and contemporary art of the United States. Focusing particularly on works by living artists, the Whitney is celebrated for presenting important exhibitions and for its renowned collection, which comprises over 19,000 works by more than 2,900 artists. With a history of exhibiting the most promising and influential artists and provoking intense debate, the Whitney Biennial, the Museum's signature exhibition, has become the most important survey of the state of contemporary art in the United States. In addition to its landmark exhibitions, the Museum is known internationally for events and educational programs of exceptional significance and as a center for research, scholarship, and conservation. Founded by sculptor and arts patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1930, the Whitney was first housed on West 8th Street in Greenwich Village. The Museum relocated in 1954 to West 54th Street and, in 1966, inaugurated its present home, designed by Marcel Breuer, at 945 Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side. While its vibrant program of exhibitions and events continues uptown, the Whitney is moving forward with a new building project, designed by Renzo Piano, in downtown Manhattan. Located at the corner of Gansevoort and Washington Streets in the Meatpacking District, at the southern entrance to the High Line, the new building, which has generated immense momentum and support, will enable the Whitney to vastly increase the size and scope of its exhibition and programming space. Ground was broken on the new building in May 2011, and it is projected to open to the public in 2015.


As the preeminent institution devoted to the art of the United States, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents the full range of twentieth-century and contemporary American art, with a special focus on works by living artists. The Whitney is dedicated to collecting, preserving, interpreting, and exhibiting American art, and its collection—arguably the finest holding of twentieth-century American art in the world—is the Museum’s key resource. The Museum’s signature exhibition, the Biennial, is the country’s leading survey of the most recent developments in American art. Innovation has been a hallmark of the Whitney since its beginnings. It was the first museum dedicated to the work of living American artists and the first New York museum to present a major exhibition of a video artist (Nam June Paik in 1982). Such figures as Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, and Cindy Sherman were given their first museum retrospectives by the Whitney. The Museum has consistently purchased works within the year they were created, often well before the artists became broadly recognized. The Whitney was the first museum to take its exhibitions and programming beyond its walls by establishing corporate-funded branch facilities, and the first museum to undertake a program of collection-sharing (with the San Jose Museum of Art) in order to increase access to its renowned collection. Visit the museum's website at ... www.whitney.org

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