NEW YORK, NY.- The Whitney Museum of American Art celebrates the final days of Survival Piece #5: Portable Orchard, Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation, and What It Becomes. Spanning the Museum’s eighth floor, Survival Piece #5: Portable Orchard examines the work of artists Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison that proposes a sustainable alternative to an existing food production system. On view in the free-to-visit Lobby gallery, Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition. What It Becomes features works from the collection that explore drawing as an act of transformation.

Survival Piece #5: Portable Orchard closes Sunday, January 5. Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation and What It Becomes are on view through Sunday, January 12, which is the last chance to experience the exhibitions during one of the Whitney’s Free Second Sundays.

Survival Piece #5: Portable Orchard marks the first standalone museum presentation of the fully realized indoor citrus grove conceived and designed in 1972 by artists Helen Mayer Harrison (1927–2018) and Newton Harrison (1932–2022). This project explores the need for a productive and sustainable food system in an imagined future where natural farming practices are obsolete and cannot be taken for granted. Stretching across the Museum’s eighth-floor gallery, this installation of eighteen live citrus trees rooted in self-contained planters with individual lighting systems reflects a survivalist alternative in the face of environmental decline.

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.

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. 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.