Whitney Biennial

This year’s expansive view of American art includes two Indigenous artists from Canada.

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The Whitney Biennial – which the New York City museum describes as “the longest-running survey of American art” – has always had a definition problem: what exactly does “American” mean? As the art world became more global in the 1990s, did it make sense to adhere to a narrow sense of nationality? As curators began to pay more attention to the work of Indigenous artists, what were the ethics of using settler colonial borders? Given that the Americas is a region that extends both south and north, shouldn’t our idea of “American art” do the same?

For the show’s 2022 iteration, Quiet as It’s Kept, curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards opted for a more expansive notion of the term, most pointedly with the inclusion of Mexican artists based in Tijuana (Mónica Arreola and Andrew Roberts) and Ciudad Juárez (Alejandro “Luperca” Morales). Canada is also represented, with the affecting paintings of carceral spaces (prisons, slave ships) by Trinidad-born, Canada-raised, and until her death in 2012, U.S.-based artist Denyse Thomasos, and by the work of Duane Linklater (Omaskêko Cree) and Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe), two of a number of Indigenous artists included in the show.

The exhibition, which continues until Sept. 5, spans two floors. The fifth floor, organized around ideas of flexibility and mobility, is designed with an open plan and is flooded with light, while the sixth floor is a warren of dim galleries. Taken together, they function as a kind of binaristic analogue for what the curators see as America’s starkly divided political landscape. In general, the exhibition moves away from figuration and representation towards a politically and socially engaged abstraction – this is art that points to the complexities of the world and its injustices without necessarily painting a picture of it.

Linklater’s two works – wintercount_215_kisepîsim and mistranslate_wolftreeriver_ininîmowinîhk – (both 2022) are installed on the fifth floor. Linklater describes them as non-functional teepee covers, made not from animal hides but linen covered with natural pigments, like sumac, charcoal and cochineal – all important in the history of Indigenous art – as well as others, including orange pekoe tea and blueberry dye.

The mark-making here – delicate veils of color that seep into the fabric as organic pours – might be at home beside the later modernist paintings of Helen Frankenthaler or Morris Louis, but is a reminder, on the contrary, that while canonical art history would like to imagine abstraction as a Euro-American invention, it has been a deeply important element of Indigenous art for millennia, and that many of those Euro-American “pioneers” of abstraction were, in fact, looking to such traditions for inspiration. (The nearby glass bugle bead-encrusted geometric composition Wopila|Lineage, 2021, by Lakota artist Dyani White Hawk, makes a similar point.) Like some other works on the fifth floor, Linklater’s pieces will be moved periodically during the exhibition, adding a nomadic dimension to the display.

Upstairs, Rebecca Belmore’s ishkode (fire), from 2021, is a striking, spot-lit, silent, human-like presence in a space dominated by video and sound. Cast from a sleeping bag draped over a life-sized mannequin, surrounded by a pool of bullet casings arrayed like intricately embroidered porcupine quills, the piece evokes the emptiness produced by gun violence – both the literal loss of life, and also the evacuation of the collective soul that occurs in its aftermath.

But there is another kind of emptiness at play here, too: the sleeping bag, shaped like a person but not containing one, and the casings that no longer hold bullets are like chrysalises left after a profound transformation. Belmore’s piece, although fully encapsulating the profound grief of gun violence, opens space to imagine a different future. As the United States reels from two recent mass shootings – at a grocery in Buffalo, N.Y., and a school in Texas, where dozens of people, including many children, were killed – Belmore’s work is a tragically timely challenge to find a way out of such devastating cycles of destruction. ■

Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City from April 6 to Sept. 5, 2022.

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