Art & Museums
CRITIC’S PICK
WHITNEY BIENNIAL
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.
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 fifth and sixth floors of the Whitney Museum of American Art, is literally split between shadow and light.
