NEW YORK, NY.- The Whitney Museum of American Art announces that 56 artists, duos, and collectives will participate in Whitney Biennial 2026. Opening March 8, 2026, this is the 82nd edition of the Museum’s landmark exhibition series, the longest-running survey of American art. A presentation of the most relevant art and ideas of our time, the artists featured in the Whitney Biennial showcase work across most of the Museum’s gallery space as well as through a robust series of performance and public programs available at the Museum and online. Co-organized by two Whitney curators, Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, the Biennial presents the work of contemporary artists working across media and disciplines, representing evolving notions of American art.

“Rather than coming to our research for the Biennial with a preconceived container, Marcela and I let our conversations with artists guide us. After more than 300 visits, we found that many of the artists we gravitated toward were exploring various forms of relationality with a particular emphasis on infrastructures,” said Drew Sawyer, the Whitney Museum’s Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography. “In addition to artists from across 25 states, we also invited artists from Afghanistan, Chile, Iraq, Okinawa, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, and elsewhere—places marked by the reach of U.S. power. Together, these artists’ work make space for forms of relation that are intimate, improvised, and contested.”

“Co-curating the Whitney Biennial offers a unique opportunity to think about the ways artists are entangled—formally and thematically—within this ecosystem we know as contemporary art. With this Biennial, we hope to foreground a network of kinships that gesture toward forms of coexisting in this world,” said Marcela Guerrero, the DeMartini Family Curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“I’m especially excited about this Biennial because it will be the first to appear since the launch of all three of our free admissions programs,” said Scott Rothkopf, Alice Pratt Brown Director at the Whitney Museum. “This is a show that is always full of emerging talents and new ideas about American art, so I can think of no greater gift to our younger audiences than a Biennial that is entirely free for everyone twenty-five and under from anywhere in the world.”

Whitney Biennial 2026 offers a vivid atmospheric survey of contemporary American art shaped by a moment of profound transition. The work of 56 artists, duos, and collectives reflects the current moment and examines various forms of relationality, including interspecies kinships, familial relations, geopolitical entanglements, technological affinities, shared mythologies, and infrastructural supports. Rather than offering a definitive answer to life today, this Whitney Biennial foregrounds mood and texture, inviting visitors into environments that evoke tension, tenderness, humor, and unease. Together, the works capture the complexity of the present and propose imaginative, unruly, and unexpected forms of coexistence.

Whitney Biennial 2026 is co-organized by Whitney curators Marcela Guerrero, the DeMartini Family Curator, and Drew Sawyer, the Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, with Beatriz Cifuentes, Biennial Curatorial Assistant, and Carina Martinez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow.

Artist information is available online.