The Whitney Biennial has long asked what it means to be American. As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, this year’s exhibition refuses easy answers. Instead, 56 artists explore grief, belonging, and interspecies kinship in New York’s most talked about and hotly debated exhibition.
Several works give the Whitney Biennial 2026 its emotional weight. Kelly Akashi’s Monument (Altadena) is among the most affecting. Reconstructing the chimney from her Altadena home, destroyed in the Eaton Fire, in cast glass, Akashi transforms a domestic remnant into a quiet memorial.
Andrea Fraser’s sculptures of sleeping babies, cast in microcrystalline beeswax, similarly invite reflection, questioning the art world’s relationship with objects, value, and care.
Loss takes another form in Emilie Louise Gossiaux’s installation, which fills a fifth-floor gallery with ceramic chew toys and drawings dedicated to her guide dog, London. Widely described by critics as one of the exhibition’s most moving works, it transforms personal grief into a meditation on companionship and memory.
The exhibition’s political concerns emerge more directly in Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s three channel video and sound installation, Until we became fire and fire us. Following a journey in search of ten of the more than 500 Palestinian villages depopulated or destroyed during the Nakba, it is among the biennial’s most overtly political works, yet has received comparatively little critical attention.
Questions of power and exclusion continue elsewhere. Precious Okoyomon’s wall sculpture, fusing a blackface doll with a stuffed rabbit, hangs near Andrea Tsouhlarakis’s reinterpretation of a 1919 monument, replacing its exhausted warrior with a horse draped in condoms and menstrual cups.
Nearby, David L. Johnson’s Rule assembles warning signs collected from public and private spaces across New York. Directives such as “No Lying Down” and “No Camping” challenge viewers to reconsider who public space is actually designed for, and who is permitted to occupy it.
Critics remain divided. Lauren O’Neill-Butler found the exhibition curiously muted for such a politically charged moment, reading its restraint as a symptom of broader exhaustion on the left. Travis Diehl reached the opposite conclusion, calling it the Whitney’s least didactic biennial in a decade. Its emphasis on family and animals even earned it the nickname “the kids and pets biennial.”
Ania Szremski offered a third perspective, describing the exhibition as deeply political precisely because of its emotional intensity, with moments that resonate through accumulation rather than declaration.
