Five artists at this year’s Whitney Biennial have very close Philly ties

The Whitney Biennial has always risen to the moment. For 81 years, American artists, provoked by a theme, have responded to the world around them and created works that have found place in the annual exhibition at New York City’s Whitney Museum of American Art.

Three cultural events served as the touchstones of this year’s theme — “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” Biennial co-organizer Meg Onli said. “Two of these were around ideas of body integrity and thinking about body autonomy — the overturning of Roe v. Wade [and the] ways in which legislation has been limiting gender-affirming care for adults and children. The third is the increase of artificial intelligence in ways that are altering our ideas of truth and history.” A lot of the artists, she said, used their art to think about the interior self. “It’s a show that talks a lot about the body, an implied body, while also not being very figurative some times.”

Onli, who was previously the Andrea B. Laporte Associate Curator at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art, said the curatorial team kept coming back to the idea of real. “We were thinking about a different idea of the real and that’s for me, thinking about the multidimensionality of oneself, the ways in which we as people of color are often sort of monolithic and often sort of thought in these one-dimensional ways.”

Breaking those boundaries are 71 artists and collectives — the majority of whom are queer, trans, or artists of color — whose works are on display at the Biennial. Five of them have honed their art in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia is one of Onli’s favorite cities. “One thing that I’ve really learned in the process of touring all of these studios, traveling around the world, is you have to have art schools and centers in which people study art in order to keep an active arts community.”

In 2026, Onli, with Camden-born Philadelphian artist Alex Da Corte, will co-curate the first Roy Lichtenstein retrospective in New York in more than 30 years.

The Biennial, with its art, film program, and performances, spans four floors and presents a field survey of the state of American art today. Here are the Philadelphia artists whose work you shouldn’t miss.

Sharon Hayes, professor and chair of fine arts at UPenn’s Weitzman School of Design, has spent decades making art focused on sexuality and gender. In the video installation Ricerche: four, she speaks to different groups of people — one of them being a group of queer elders gathered in the Gayborhood’s John C. Anderson Apartments.

Philadelphia, for Hayes, is “singularly positioned inside of LGBTQ genealogies, or queer and trans genealogies. This has to do with its situatedness between D.C. and New York — there was a set of queer activists in D.C. for whom the threat of losing their jobs was really strong. But there was this really active, vibrant, and engaged community across the Eastern Seaboard. And that meant that, in some ways, Philly was a very special and dynamic site.”

In the video, probed by Hayes’ questions, older LGBTQ Philadelphians “reflect on their lives, loves, and identities.” Around the screens is a circular arrangement of chairs which invites visitors to the Biennial to move forward and take a seat. Outside, one can see Ruins of Empire II or The Earth Swallows the Master’s House, Newark, N.J., native Kiyan Williams’ crumbling facade of the White House.

Hayes studied under the artist Mary Kelly, whose Lacunae hangs in the same gallery as Ricerche: four. Also in the same gallery is UPenn alum Carolyn Lazard’s Toilette. “It’s just a total pleasure to be able to be in the same room as Carolyn, another fantastic Philly-based artist,” said Hayes.

MacArthur “genius grant” winner Carolyn Lazard grew up all over Southeastern Pennsylvania and spent a lot of their “adolescence running around Philly.” Their Toilette — a sculpture made of medicine cabinets filled with Vaseline — sits between Kelly’s and Hayes’ works. It, Lazard says, “is inspired by the everyday acts of care that keep me and I assume, you too, alive. I’m interested in how this box on the wall indexes some changes in how we relate to care as something that we do for ourselves, in the privacy of our home, as opposed to something more collective.”

The artist, who remembers being slathered in Vaseline as a child, considers Philadelphia to be an important site for “histories of biomedical care and harm,” and as someone who is interested in those histories, the city remains an inspiration. “From Pennsylvania Hospital being the first hospital in the country, the Holmesburg Prison experiments, the Morton Collection at the Penn Museum, to the Mütter Museum: This is one of the most important cities in the history of the development of race science ideology in the United States,” they said.

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich grew up in New York City’s East Village with artist parents, in an apartment full of books. “A part of my background is Jamaican, and there was a real emphasis on writers from the Caribbean,” she said. “I had a sense growing up that all those writers were men, whether it was like Derek Walcott or V.S. Naipaul or C.L.R. James or Aimé Césaire [or] Frantz Fanon.”

She was always aware of Suzanne Césaire’s existence but started to revisit her work in her 20s. “What I discovered is that she was kind of the most important voice of them all.” So Hunt-Ehrlich, who studied film at Temple, bought a ticket to Martinique, sat in the family’s living room, and asked her daughter, “How could your mother have been such an incredible writer, but we have so little of her writing?”

Hunt-Ehrlich learned that Suzanne Césaire was always writing, but she also threw a lot of her writing away.

“That was like my first trip I took, and I left it a little confused. Maybe she didn’t want to be remembered,” Hunt-Ehrlich said. “But what I ultimately realized after some time was that actually it was an opening, it was a way to really think about things like refusal, her refusal to be remembered in the ways we’ve been trained in.”

The filmmaker’s deep dive into Césaire’s memories and work finds expression in the video installation, Too Bright to See (Part I). There are prevailing themes of impermanence and fragility heightened by the piece’s setting in the Caribbean, a place often affected by hurricanes and tornados. “So I wondered if it was also kind of like this idea of writing and throwing it away … what the world [around Césaire] does.”

Karyn Olivier, professor of sculpture at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture, grew up in Trinidad and Tobago. For many years, she has visited Matinicus Isle, 23 miles off the coast of Rockland, Maine, where her wife’s family has a home.

A piece of driftwood she had gathered 13 years ago now finds itself in Stop Gap. Olivier kept thinking about the wood and while she grieved her best friend’s death during the pandemic, she finally knew what she could do with it. She had clothing left over from a previous show at ICA. She took them and filled a large, center gap in the wood.

“I don’t know what made me do it, but I just started filling it in. It’s almost like suturing or filling in that gap,” Olivier said. “Of course, they’re fragments of clothing. [They could] signify my personal loss and like the losses that we’re all feeling [after George Floyd’s murder]. I could also think about the refugee crisis … These pieces of clothing are the stock filling in that space of, say, loss or sadness, or improvisation.”

Right by Stop Gap sits How Many Ways Can You Disappear. There’s a mesh of lobster traps no longer in use and above it hangs a bunch of buoys deemed unusable with age. They’re hung by what may seem to be a rope carved from marble, but it’s actually just salt.

When Olivier thought about casting the rope, she used different materials, even hair. “Then one night, I just thought, ‘What’s still here?’ Literally, ‘What is still here?’ It’s salt. It’s still embedded in the ropes. And if you think about it, salt now is just a crystallized sea.”

The Germantown resident, whose The Battle is Joined has stood in conversation with Battle of Germantown Memorial in Vernon Park, is worried about the closure of UArts and of PAFA shutting down its degree courses. “But I feel like Philly is at a critical mass, that artists are making Philadelphia as amazing of a city as it is, despite its bureaucratic shortcomings. Artists and creatives are making it happen. The city is still affordable … I feel as though Philadelphia is practically and pragmatically, an easier place to be an artist. I like that.”

A trained clown, Alex Tatarsky, in their own words, “moved to Philadelphia for the clowns,” where they found a “beautiful community of performers.” “It is a place with a rich, radical history of art making and political thinking. It’s also affordable for artists. And it’s possible to have space to move and experiment and collaborate. Philadelphia fosters the possibility of radical risk-taking art,” they said.

Unlike the other artists, whose art is largely rooted to one place, Tatarsky’s Biennial piece Material was a performance looking at the many ways in which one can interpret the word material.

The performance was improvised and “extremely terrifying because every time I do [this performance], it’s completely different.” Tatarsky exercised that muscle of improvisation at DIY venues all over Philadelphia over the past several months, including Vox Populi, the floor above the Ethiopian restaurant Abyssinia, and Space 1026.

But putting all of that in the context of an art museum — where unspoken codes of silence and propriety reign — was unnerving. “My only aim was to try to follow pleasure and impulse as my guiding principles, and to think about the many meanings of the word material.” There is comedic material “but there’s also the material conditions of our lives, which are often very difficult.” Then, they added, there “are physical materials that we bring into a room.”

Over three days at the Whitney, Tatarsky created an improvised show with museum visitors.

Wearing gloves, the artist collected different objects from the audience to create an installation that they then put inside a vitrine and surrounded with a stanchion. “That installation grew to contain all of these haunted, beautiful items that people brought, like a bloody handkerchief, a T-shirt that their mom threw in the garbage, a toothbrush from an old lover, like all of these items with a lot of memory, and so that was my way of playing with these categories, like, what do we consider art?”

The Whitney Biennial runs in its entirety through Aug. 11. Floor 6 of the Biennial, which includes works by Sharon Hayes and Carolyn Lazard, will remain on view through Sept. 29. Whitney Museum of American Art. 99 Gansevoort St., New York. 10:30 a.m.-6 p.m. (10 p.m. on Fridays). https://whitney.org/exhibitions/2024-biennial