A Whitney Biennial of Shadow and Light

After a year’s Covid delay, the latest Whitney Biennial has pulled into town, and it’s a welcome sight. Other recent editions — this is the 80th such roundup — have tended to be buzzy, jumpy, youthquake affairs. This one, even with many young artists among its 60-plus participants, most represented by brand-new, lockdown-made work, doesn’t read that way. It’s a notably somber, adult-thinking show, one freighted with three years of soul-rattling history marked by social divisiveness, racist violence and relentless mortality.

Organized by two seasoned Whitney curators, David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, the Biennial’s title, “Quiet as It’s Kept” — a colloquial phrase, sourced from Toni Morrison, indicating dark realities unspoken of — suggests the show’s keyed-down tone. Its very look gives a clue to its mood: Its main installation, on the 5th and 6th floors of the Whitney Museum of American Art, is literally split between shadow and light.

For the occasion, the museum has removed nearly all the dividing walls on its fifth floor, opening its Manhattan space from end to end — from Hudson River to High Line — and spread out art in island-like units throughout. The arrangement isn’t beautiful; it has a jumbled, salesroom look. But it called to mind, for me, a quietly utopian art-world moment.

Read the full story, including images for Professor Daniel Joseph Martinez on The New York Times website.