After Two Controversy-Plagued Editions, the Whitney Museum Appoints Two ‘Acutely Attuned’ Curators to Organize Its 2021 Biennial

Adrienne Edwards and David Breslin will curate the 80th edition
of the Whitney Biennial, which will take place in spring 2021, the
museum announced today.

The museum is once again tapping its own in-house talent for the
task. Edwards was named curator of performance at the museum in
2018, while Breslin joined the Whitney in 2016 and was
recently named director of curatorial initiatives.

“David and Adrienne will be a great team,” museum director
Adam Weinberg said in a statement. “They are inquisitive, curious,
and are acutely attuned to the art of the current moment. No doubt
they will bring fresh outlooks to this historic exhibition and
reinvent it for these complex and challenging times.”

Before joining the museum, Edwards was a curator of Performa
since 2010 and curator at large for the Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis. Her first show at the Whitney is the recently opened
exhibition of work by Jason Moran, which traveled from the Walker
to ICA Boston and then to the Wexner Center for the Arts before
landing in Manhattan. She also assembled a series of performances
for the Whitney called “Moved by the Motion: Sudden Rise,”
featuring artists Wu Tsang, boychild, and Fred Moten.

In his role at the museum, Breslin focuses on
collection-centered exhibitions that take a longer view of the
museum’s history vis-a-vis its permanent holdings. He co-curated
the 2018 retrospective “David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake
at Night” and “An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from
the Whitney’s Collection 1990–1960.” Before joining the Whitney,
Breslin was an associate curator at the Clark Institute in
Williamstown and oversaw the catalogue raisonné for Jasper
Johns’s drawings at the Menil Drawing Institute, where he worked on
public programs and scholarly events.

The pair has a daunting task ahead as the biennial is notorious
for generating controversy. In the 2017 edition, co-curators
Christopher Lew and Mia
Locks were faced with a public outcry stemming from their
inclusion of Dana Schutz’s portrait of Emmett Till, Open
Casket.

At the next edition, which is closing later this month, curators
Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley were outspoken about the “anxiety” they felt
curating the show, which was the first biennial to open since
President Trump’s inauguration. But even though they said the work they chose “did not feel
exceptionally strident or solely about being angry or examples of
agitprop,” the exhibition was still mired in controversy as
a group of artists
called for the removal of their work from the show in protest
of the museum’s then board member Warren Kanders, who has since resigned.

The post After Two Controversy-Plagued Editions, the Whitney
Museum Appoints Two ‘Acutely Attuned’ Curators to Organize Its 2021
Biennial appeared first on artnet News.