Meet the 56 Artists Featured in the 2026 Whitney Biennial

The Whitney Museum of American Art in Chelsea, NYC. (Photo: Ajay Suresh via Wikimedia Commons, CC 2.0)

Since its founding in 1930, the Whitney Museum has sought to define the canon of American art. As part of that endeavor, the New York-based institution has staged iconic biennials every other year for nearly a century, seeking to capture the country’s cultural, political, and artistic undercurrents. Now, the Whitney has announced the 56 artists, duos, and collectives that will participate in the forthcoming Whitney Biennial 2026, opening on March 8, 2026.

To compile this selection of artists, curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer visited more than 300 artist studios across the world. Most participants have primary residences in New York or California, but the 82nd edition of the biennial will feature 21 artists born abroad, hailing from nations such as Afghanistan, Cyprus, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Palestine, and Vietnam. These inclusions emphasize how the Whitney Biennial has consistently reimagined the limits of “American art.” In other words, American art isn’t simply produced within the United States; rather, practices from territories historically impacted by American imperialism and influence are equally essential to the biennial’s narrative.

“There will be new discoveries, even for art-world insiders,” Sawyer told The New York Times, noting that many of the featured artists haven’t frequently exhibited in New York.

“Expanding the notion of what American art is—or even what America is—was fun,” Guerrero adds, “and not typically part of what we do.”

Japanese photographer Mao Ishikawa, for instance, was born in Okinawa under U.S. administration in 1953. For the upcoming biennial, Ishikawa will share images that document the lives of Black soldiers who were stationed in the country throughout the 1970s. Afghani artist Aziz Hazara, on the other hand, offers Coming Home, an ongoing project in which he ships garbage from a former American air base outside of Kabul to the U.S. Other international artists include José Maceda, from the Philippines; Johanna Unzueta and Ignacio Gatica, both from Chile; and Nour Mobarak, from Egypt.

Alongside its formidable roster of young artists (around 60% of participants were born after 1980), Whitney Biennial 2026 will also gather work by well-known talents like conceptual artist Andrea Fraser, Palestinian artist Samia Halaby, and Julio Torres, who previously worked on Saturday Night Live and produced the HBO series Los Espookys. Carmen de Monteflores, Fraser’s mother, will also make an appearance as the exhibition’s oldest artist. Curators discovered de Monteflores after Fraser shared a PDF featuring her mother’s psychedelic, shaped canvases of nude men and women.

“My preoccupation with value probably goes back to my experiences in my mother’s studio,” Fraser remarked. “When I became a conceptual artist, I saw my mother making all these objects that nobody wanted, and she had to store [them] for decades.”

As of this writing, the 2026 biennial has yet to receive a title, unlike previous years. That said, Whitney Biennial 2026 has revealed its theoretical and thematic framework, which will loosely revolve around relationships during a “moment of profound transition,” per the museum. These relationships encompass everything from interspecies kinships, familial relations, and technological affinities, to geopolitical entanglements, shared mythologies, and infrastructural supports.

“What Marcela [Guerrero] and Drew [Sawyer] have put together doesn’t try to simplify the strangeness of our times,” Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney’s director, told The New York Times. “It allows visitors to encounter the world as artists are sensing it, structurally unstable and emotionally charged yet also full of possibility.”

To see the full list of biennial artists, visit the Whitney’s website.