The 2014 Whitney Biennial will be the last such romp for the exhibition in the museum’s current Marcel Breuer-designer building. But, in so many ways, this year’s Biennial is more about looking forward that back. The work selected to represent the state of American art challenges how we see it, who can claim to be its creator, and sometimes if we can even locate it in a single space. Six New York artists on the roster are taking on the Biennial with a hometown advantage.

Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, New York, NY; Architect: Marcel Breuer and Hamilton Smith (1963–1966). Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson

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.

EI ARAKAWA & CARISSA RODRIGUEZ IN NEW YORK, JANUARY 2014. ON ARAKAWA: SHIRT: SANDRO. ON RODRIGUEZ: TOP: MILLY. STYLIST: VANESSA CHOW.
One of the most highly anticipated projects of this year’s Whitney Biennial is the collaboration between Ei Arakawa, the New York-based performance artist with a growing cult following, and Carissa Rodriguez, most familiar as a director of the Lower East Side gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art.

“Hawaiian Presence” , by EI ARAKAWA & CARISSA RODRIGUEZ

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.
The 2014 Whitney Biennial will take a bold new form as three curators from outside the Museum—Stuart Comer (Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at MoMA), Anthony Elms (Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia), and Michelle Grabner (artist and Professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago)—each oversee one floor, representing a range of geographic vantages and curatorial methodologies.

For the Biennial, Beasley plans to conflate his two practices, creating sculptures from concrete and fabric, each with a microphone buried within, so as to capture what he calls the object’s “internal architecture.”

Donna De Salvo, Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs at the Whitney, noted: “The 2014 Biennial brings together the findings of three curators with very distinct points of view. There is little overlap in the artists they have selected and yet there is common ground. This can be seen in their choice of artists working in interdisciplinary ways, artists working collectively, and artists from a variety of generations. Together, the 103 participants offer one of the broadest and most diverse takes on art in the United States that the Whitney has offered in many years.”

ABOVE: EMILY SUNDBLAD IN NEW YORK, JANUARY 2014. TOP: MIU MIU. STYLING: VANESSA CHOW. COSMETICS : CHANEL, INCLUDING SUBLIMAGE LA CRÉME. HAIR PRODUCTS: ORIBE, INCLUDING SMOOTH STYLE SERUM. HAIR: ANDRE GUNN FOR ORIBE/THE WALL GROUP. MAKEUP: KRISTI MATAMOROS FOR CHANEL/KATE RYAN INC. SPECIAL THANKS: TENTON STUDIO
For the Whitney Biennial, co-curator Michelle Grabner asked painter, gallerist, and musician Emily Sundblad to contribute a video.

This Biennial will be the last to take place in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s building at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street before the Museum moves downtown to its new building in the spring of 2015. This is the 77th in the Museum’s ongoing series of Annuals and Biennials begun in 1932 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.

You can see the full list of the exhibited artists by following this link.

The Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2014 Biennal includes Zoe Leonard’s camera obscura view of the street outside the museum.
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York times

“Aviarium, a sculpture series by Terry Atkins.

Clothing by Lisa Anne Auerbach

Detail of a wall of paintings by Keith Mayerson

An installation by Public Collectors with personal objects from Malachi Ritscher

via http://whitney.org/ and interviewmagazine.com