Whitney Biennial 2026 Artist List: A High-Level Data Analysis & Subjective Thoughts

A few weeks ago, the artist list for the 2026 edition of the Whitney Biennial was released. When I was studying art history, the Whitney Biennial was framed to me as a “temperature check” for American art — I like this framework and I’ve kept it in mind, because I think it helps us avoid the trap of thinking that the biennial is supposed to be good or some sort of definitive statement, and allows it to be the messy, imperfect, highly subjective thing that it is.

For the 2024 edition, I made the point of going to one of the preview days and not reading any of the reviews or hot takes on the artist list ahead of time and allowing myself to have as unmediated an experience as possible. I kind of mostly liked it, though I think a lot of what I connected with in the work was what critics and the general public took issue with. (Yes, ok, there was too much text and too much work that required a textual explanation).

So, for the 2026 edition I decided it would be a fun thought experiment to do something resembling the exact opposite thing: what if I did deep high-level research on each of the included artists, to see what kind of interesting groupings, patterns, and (hopefully proven incorrect) assumptions emerged? How cool would it be to be armed in advance with all the information to assault whatever poor friends get dragged along with me to this silly thing? How might being armed with more information — in the broad sense of “67% of these artists are millennials” and other things to that effect — give me and others better critical tools for assessment?

A line from Jackson Arn’s (terrible) review of the 2024 edition kept rattling around in my mind: “More than a quarter of the artists on display, by the way, went to one of three schools.” (The three schools being, from my best research efforts Columbia, Cooper Union, and Yale). Where (and if) artists obtained their BFA and MFA from, as well as their age, and country / city of residence seemed like easy enough information to find out. I was also curious to see if I could map out some framework of the included artists being “emerging” vs. “established” and also decided to seek out information about whether the artists had gallery representation (and if so, with what gallery), if / when they had a solo exhibition, and if they had any kind of institutional record (recent solo institutional shows, or otherwise shown up in other biennials).

The fun thing about doing these kinds of projects is that there’s almost always some piece of information worth tracking that makes itself known as I go, and the interesting thing that happened here is that I found several of the first few artists who I looked up were in the Whitney’s collection already, and decided to track that information as well.

When were they born?
So I chunked this data a few different ways. I was interested in tracking birth year, birth decade, and generation.

— The average age of all living artists who I was able to find age data on is 43, and the median age for living artists is 38. The youngest participant is 27, while the oldest is 92. The largest number of artists were born in 1989, with 1987, 1991, and 1993 in a tie for second.

— This is very much a millennial biennial, with 36 of the artists having been born between 1981 and 1995. Breaking it down by decade, slightly more — 40 — were born in the 1980s and the 1990s, with much smaller percentages for every decade prior.

Where were they born?

— As this is the Whitney Biennial, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, I’m a little bit surprised over one third of the artists were born outside of the United States. (For geographic purposes here, I’m grouping United States and United States Indigenous together — but please tell me if that seems wrong!)

— Outside of the U.S., 3 artists each were born in Japan and the Philippines followed by 2 in Columbia and 2 in Chile, and then all other countries are one-offs.

— New York is the city where the largest number of artists (7) were born, with a few other cities including Manila, Miami, Santiago, and perhaps most oddly Portland, Maine claiming 2 each. Otherwise it is quite geographically spread out! (Should I make a map?)

Where do they live?

— New York is home to 26 artists, followed by Los Angeles which is home to 8. I think this actually roughly aligns proportionally with how many galleries there are in NYC vs. L.A.

— 11 artists have a secondary city of residence, and of those 10 are outside of the United States

— 5 do not reside in the U.S

Where did they go to school and what level of education do they have?

— This actually proved to be a little tricker than I expected to track, largely because a good number of the artists included are more in the performance circuit and haven’t really shown in galleries, and therefore don’t have the kinds of easily readable CVs typically found on artist / gallery websites. But of the artists that I was able to determine had a BFA (or equivalent undergraduate degree), 64% (29) also had an MFA. Only one has a PhD.

— Cooper Union is the most represented undergraduate program which 5 artists attended and Yale is the most represented graduate program which 4 artists attended. Emilie Louise Gossiaux claims the distinction of being the the only artist to have attended both programs, having gone to Cooper Union for undergrad, and Yale for graduate school.

— One of the more interesting — though probably ultimately meaningless — facts I derived from this part of the analysis was that two artists — David L. Johnson and Emilio Martínez Poppe both attended Cooper Union for their undergraduate degree, University of Pennsylvania for their graduate degree, and attended the Whitney Independent Study program. (I did a triple take and triple checked because of how improbable it seemed!)

Do they have gallery representation?

— Last biennial, I got really fixated on the courtesy lines and how it was surprising to me that many of the artists seemed to not have gallery representation, even in the case of some of the more established names. I’m a bit surprised that just over half of the artists included are represented by a gallery (according to my research), and I think this speaks to the divide between the institutional and commercial art worlds.

— I’m in some ways also not surprised, because a solid number of artists seem to come from the performance world which is its own thing a bit apart from both the commercial and institutional art worlds, so I think that’s skewing it a bit.

— 32% (19) have gallery representation in New York, while 28% (17) have gallery representation in another city. Only 6 artists had representation with a gallery in New York plus a gallery in another city. (This kind of info can be extra tricky to verify, especially when galleries don’t have good SEO — but I really tried my best to be accurate!)

— My vibe about the galleries representing the artists being shown is that it skews heavily toward smaller and (in New York) mostly downtown galleries. David Peter Francis is the only NYC gallery with two represented artists showing (Pat Oleszko and Emilie Louise Gossiaux).

— Commonwealth and Council is the only Los Angeles gallery with two represented artists included — it’s also noteworthy that they had 3 artists (from my recollection) artists in the 2024 edition!

Have they had a gallery or institutional solo show?

— Of the included artists, 21 have had a solo show in a commercial NYC gallery, and half (29) have had a solo institutional show. “Institutional” is a little bit of a fuzzy and imperfect term here because it counts any small university museum the same as it counts large major museums, but I think regardless is useful in creating a framework that many of these artists are fairly established names. (Lots of scanning and Ctrl + F-ing in CVs, so also possibly this is not as accurate as I would like it to be).

Have they been in other biennials?

— I don’t have any charts for this one which was also pretty hard to track (again, lots of skimming and searching in artist CVs) but at least 16 of the artists have been in other major biennials. Highlights include 3 in previous iterations of the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A., and well as appearances in the Sao Paulo Bienal, the Berlin Biennal, the Gwangju Biennale, the Carnegie International, the Venice Biennale and Documenta.

— Andrea Fraser represented Austria in the 45th Venice Biennale alongside Christian Philipp Müller and Gerwald Rockenschaub. Sung Tieu will represent Germany with Henrike Naumann at the forthcoming 61st Venice Biennale. The interesting parallels here are that both are representing a country that they were not born in, and that they are the two artists of the entire list whose work is most easily categorizable as institutional critique.

— Aziz Hazara and Zach Blas stuck at to me as the two artists who have the largest biennale / institutional record, but whose seem to almost never appear in the commercial gallery circuit.

Are they in the Whitney’s collection?

— This was one of the more interesting pieces of information that made itself apparent to me throughout the research process! Several of the first few artists I looked up were in the Whitney’s collection, so I tracked this throughout. Artists already included in the Whitney’s collection are: Nani Chacon, Teresa Baker, Andrea Fraser, Martine Gutierrez, Agosto Machado, Erin Jane Nelson and Zach Blas.

Other thoughts, conclusions, vibes:
— When I did my data analysis for the ARTnews 100 Best Artworks of the 21st Century list, I categorized the works by medium. I had the thought to attempt to assign the primary medium for the artists on this list, but quickly realized it didn’t make much sense since, in classic biennial fashion, many of them are interdisciplinary or work in several mediums. However, I think I can confidently say that there will be very, very little painting in this edition.

— This biennial seems like it will be lens-based media heavy — though I didn’t formally track what mediums each artist was working in because it seemed too fuzzy and imperfect, I was struck by the number of photographer and filmmakers included. Please, please install it better than the 2022 edition with the cacophony of black boxes, though…

— It seems like there will be more digital art than the previous edition. Although “AI” was touted as one of the themes of the 2024 edition, it confusingly contained almost no works actually using AI, save for an exceedingly boring one by Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst. There are a few artists included in this edition whose work is pretty directly engaged with the digital world including Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Joshua Citarella, and Zach Blas.

— I fell down a really fun rabbit hole on Interstate Projects when trying to look up information Ignacio Gatica — what a really amazing gallery that I am so sad I never got to go to! I’m kind of mind blown by how many artists I know either personally or know the work of had a show there early in their career. I’ve been pretty diligently tracking the gallery openings and closure of the past couple of years, but I would love to dig back further and see what other era-defining programs I missed out on…

— My initial impression scanning the list of artists is that it felt like something resembling the right combination of names that were familiar to me, and ones that were new, with any of the usual suspect “next big thing” artists almost entirely absent. Upon first impression, I was familiar with the work of 17 of the artists offhand and could confidently picture what their work looked like and where I last encountered it.

— When doing a deep dive on all of these artists, I discovered that there were actually 4 more whose work I was familiar with and had seen in person, but I didn’t make the immediate association between their name and work when scanning the list.

Artists whose work I was familiar with and could quickly conjure up a mental image of / remember where I recently saw it from a glancing at the list: Kelly Akashi, Kamrooz Aram, Teresa Baker, Joshua Citarella, Ali Eyal, Andrea Fraser, Emilie Louise Gossiaux, Martine Gutierrez, Raven Halfmoon, David L. Johnson, Michelle Lopez, Isabelle Frances McGuire, Nour Mobarak, Erin Jane Nelson, Precious Okoyomon, Pat Oleszko, Julio Torres

Artists whose work I realized I was familiar with and had in fact seen once I looked them up: Zach Blas, Agosto Machado, Sung Tieu, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme

Alright — that’s all! I’ll be interested to see how my assessment and the information that I collected measure up against the actual exhibition. It opens on March 8th, which is in just over 2 months.

Once again, I tried very hard to get as complete a dataset as possible, and I am subject to human error so please do reach out with corrections, questions, etc.!

Should I do this for the Venice Biennale too once that list is released?!