The Press Release:
Upcoming exhibitions include Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night and Amy Sherald: American Sublime
New York, NY, July 17, 2024 — The Whitney Museum of American Art announces updates to its advanced exhibition schedule through summer 2025. Highlighting the Whitney’s commitment to an inclusive and representative view of American art, these exhibitions focus on various mediums, from painting and sculpture to photography, dance, performance, and digital art.
NEWLY ANNOUNCED EXHIBITIONS
Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night – February 8–July 2025
Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night is the artist’s first major museum survey. Co-organized by the Whitney Museum and Walker Art Center, the exhibition foregrounds how Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980, Orange County, California; lives and works in Berlin, Germany) utilizes sound, language, and the complexities of communication in her wide-ranging approach to artmaking. All Day All Night brings together works spanning 2011 to the present and features drawings, site-specific murals, paintings, video installations, and sculptures. Using musical notation, infographics, and language—both in her native American Sign Language (ASL) and written English—Kim has produced a body of work that is perceptive, poetic, humorous, and political. Inspired by similarly named works made at different moments in her career, the exhibition’s title, All Day All Night, points to the energy Kim brings to her artistic practice; she is relentlessly experimental, iterative, and dedicated to sharing her lived experiences with a broad spectrum of audiences.
Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, where it will open in March 2026. The organizing curators are Jennie Goldstein, Jennifer Rubio Associate Curator of the Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art; Pavel Py?, Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy, Walker Art Center; and Tom Finkelpearl, independent curator; with Rose Pallone, Curatorial Assistant, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Walker Art Center.
Amy Sherald: American Sublime – April 9–August 2025
Amy Sherald: American Sublime brings together some fifty paintings by one of the foremost artists of our time. In her first major museum survey, Amy Sherald (b. 1973, Columbus, Georgia; lives and works in the New York City area) presents work from 2007 to the present, from her poetic early portraits to the incisive and moving figure paintings for which she is best known. Iconic portraits of First Lady Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor—two of the most recognizable and significant paintings made by an American artist in recent years—are joined by early works, never or rarely seen by the public, and new work created specifically for this presentation. American Sublime, Sherald’s first solo exhibition at a New York museum, considers the powerful impact of her paintings on contemporary art and culture while positioning her squarely within the art historical tradition of American realism and figuration. In her intentional privileging of Black Americans as her subjects, she extends that tradition to include a population who has historically been omitted from portraiture and representation. Sherald has described her paintings of everyday people as a more expansive vision of interiority and selfhood. The resulting body of work is a profoundly resonant ode to the multiple facets of American identity, and a convincing testament, as Sherald believes, that “imagination is image in action.”
Amy Sherald: American Sublime is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and curated by Sarah Roberts, SFMOMA’s former Andrew W. Mellon Curator and Head of Painting and Sculpture. The presentation at the Whitney Museum of American Art is organized by Rujeko Hockley, Arnhold Associate Curator.
Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation – August 24, 2024–January 5, 2025
Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation features new and recent black-and-white photographs by Mark Armijo McKnight (b. 1984, Los Angeles, California; lives in New York, New York) and focuses on his ongoing body of work, “Decreation.” The concept, originated by the French philosopher, activist, and mystic Simone Weil (1909–1943), describes an intentional undoing of the self, a process Armijo McKnight explores in images of bodies and landscapes in intermediate states, such as anonymous nude figures engaged in erotic play amidst harsh environments. These photographs convey a sense of both ecstasy and affliction. A new 16mm film in the gallery plays a cacophonous symphony of gradually unwinding metronomes set within the dramatic geological formations of the Bisti Badlands/De-Na-Zin Wilderness in New Mexico. Two large limestone sculptures, which double as seating, suggest the forms of a pair of ancient sundials. As a whole, Decreation simultaneously evokes tumult and quietude, darkness and light, isolation and togetherness.
This exhibition is on view in the Lobby gallery, accessible to the public free of charge as part of the Whitney Museum’s enduring commitment to supporting and showcasing emerging artists’ most recent work. Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation is organized by Drew Sawyer, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, with Nakai Falcón, Curatorial Assistant.
What It Becomes – August 24, 2024–January 12, 2025
What It Becomes is an exhibition of new and rarely seen works from the Whitney’s collection that encourage us to think expansively about what drawing is and can be. Featuring the work of 11 artists, including Darrel Ellis, David Hammons, Ana Mendieta, Catherine Opie, and Wendy Red Star, What It Becomes explores how artists have turned to drawing as a way to reveal the unseen and make the familiar unrecognizable. The exhibition takes its title from the words of artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, who, describing how the act of drawing transforms the source imagery she works from, remarks, “What it becomes is what I’m interested in.” The processes and techniques inherent to drawing play a fundamental role in the creation of the works presented here, whether they take shape on paper, in photography, or through video. Some artists employ maneuvers like inscription and erasure to alter or reclaim existing images. Others emphasize the tactility of the medium by using their bodies as drawing tools or surfaces, transforming their likeness in the process. Harnessing drawing’s relationship to touch and its ability to convey change, the artists explore the malleable nature of identity and the possibility of shaping and redefining oneself.
What It Becomes is organized by Scout Hutchinson, Curatorial Fellow.
Raque Ford: A little space for you right under my shoe – August 26, 2024–March 2025
Multimedia artist Raque Ford (b. 1986, Columbia, Maryland; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) presents a newly commissioned work on the building facade across the street from the Whitney and The High Line. Working within the traditions of Pop art and Minimalism, Ford remixes visual and linguistic symbols of popular culture to explore how social codes shape private subjectivity. The words “A little space for you / right under my shoe,” excerpted from an original poem by Ford, wave within a collage of shoe prints and graphic shapes. Noted for its layered use of text, images, and media, particularly commercial materials, Ford’s work plays with the scale of the billboard to address the pedestrians below, pairing the entreating words of the poem with the imposing image of stomping shoes to create a work that can be interpreted on multiple registers. This site-specific project will be Ford’s first work created entirely digitally.
A little space for you right under my shoe is part of a series of public art installations organized by the Whitney in partnership with TF Cornerstone and High Line Art. This project is organized by Roxanne Smith, Senior Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Shifting Landscapes – November 1, 2024–January 2026
Shifting Landscapes explores how evolving political, ecological, and social issues motivate artists’ representations of the world around them. While the art historical genre of landscape has long been associated with picturesque vistas and documentary accounts of place, the artworks gathered in this exhibition suggest a more expansive interpretation. The 120 works by more than 80 artists—including Firelei Báez, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jane Dickson, Gordon Matta-Clark, Amalia Mesa-Bains, and Purvis Young—depict the effects of industrialization on the environment, grapple with the impact of geopolitical borders, and give shape to imagined spaces as a way of destabilizing the concept of a “natural” world. Drawn from the Whitney’s collection, this exhibition features works from the 1960s to the present, most of which are on view at the Museum for the first time. The exhibition is organized in thematic sections that reflect the many meanings embedded in the idea of landscape. Together, these works bring concepts of land and place into focus, foregrounding how we shape and are shaped by the spaces around us.
Shifting Landscapes is organized by Jennie Goldstein, Jennifer Rubio Associate Curator of the Collection; Marcela Guerrero, DeMartini Family Curator; Roxanne Smith, Senior Curatorial Assistant; with Angelica Arbelaez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow; with thanks to Araceli Bremauntz-Enriquez and J. English Cook for research support.
PREVIOUSLY ANNOUNCED EXHIBITIONS
Previously announced presentations include Edges of Ailey, opening September 25, 2024, the first large-scale museum exhibition to reflect on the life, work, and legacy of visionary artist Alvin Ailey (b. 1931, Rogers, Texas; d. 1989, New York, New York). Widely recognized for the dance company he founded in 1958, Ailey imagined and cultivated a platform for modern dance through his innovative repertoire, interdisciplinary sensibility, and support of other dancers and choreographers. Presented in the Museum’s 18,000+ square foot fifth-floor galleries, this multifaceted presentation encompasses a multimedia exhibition, daily performance program, and scholarly catalogue to offer a richly layered experience for understanding the artist anew.
Current exhibitions include Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, on view through August 11, 2024; Wanda Gág’s World, on view through December 2, 2024; Survival Piece #5: Portable Orchard, on view through January 5, 2025; and the digital art commission Nancy Baker Cahill: CENTO.
ABOUT THE WHITNEY
The Whitney Museum of American Art, founded in 1930 by the artist and philanthropist Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), houses the foremost collection of American art from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Mrs. Whitney, an early and ardent supporter of modern American art, nurtured groundbreaking artists when audiences were still largely preoccupied with the Old Masters. From her vision arose the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has been championing the most innovative art of the United States for ninety years. The core of the Whitney’s mission is to collect, preserve, interpret, and exhibit American art of our time and serve a wide variety of audiences in celebration of the complexity and diversity of art and culture in the United States. Through this mission and a steadfast commitment to artists, the Whitney has long been a powerful force in support of modern and contemporary art and continues to help define what is innovative and influential in American art today.
Whitney Museum Land Acknowledgment
The Whitney is located in Lenapehoking, the ancestral homeland of the Lenape. The name Manhattan comes from their word Mannahatta, meaning “island of many hills.” The Museum’s current site is close to land that was a Lenape fishing and planting site called Sapponckanikan (“tobacco field”). The Whitney acknowledges the displacement of this region’s original inhabitants and the Lenape diaspora that exists today.
As a museum of American art in a city with vital and diverse communities of Indigenous people, the Whitney recognizes the historical exclusion of Indigenous artists from its collection and program. The Museum is committed to addressing these erasures and honoring the perspectives of Indigenous artists and communities as we work for a more equitable future. To read more about the Museum’s Land Acknowledgment, visit the Museum’s website.
VISITOR INFORMATION
The Whitney Museum of American Art is located at 99 Gansevoort Street between Washington and West Streets, New York City. Public hours are Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, 10:30 am–6 pm; Friday, 10:30 am–10 pm; and Saturday and Sunday, 10:30 am–6 pm. Closed Tuesday. Visitors eighteen years and under and Whitney members: FREE. The Museum offers FREE admission and special programming for visitors of all ages every Friday evening from 5–10 pm and on the second Sunday of every month.
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Piercing Ken Thoughts: Truth be told I’ve not yet managed to visit The Whitney for any of their very interesting exhibits but I hope to change that in the coming months. I love exploring museums and its one of the things that I tell any of the visiting bands that I talk about over on PiercingMetal to do should they find themselves here and with a few days off to explore. Have you readers been to The Whitney yet? What do you think of the place? Chime in down below in the comments and maybe even let me know which of the announced exhibitions excite you the most. See you next time. Keep safe out there.
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