2014 Whitney Biennial
From the Brucennial: Antonia Marsh, Girls Only.
Photo: Marina Galperina, ANIMALNewYork.
but they would admit to seeing the
fruits of their labors. Ms. Grabner
explained her interest in female artists,
“I am focusing on a handful of women
artists who take on the authoity of
abstract painting — its history, its ambition, and its relationship to power and
gender. I wanted to put them together to
underscore how different the language
of abstract painting can be.” But at the
Brucennial down in the Meatpacking
District, women have quite literally stolen the show. This is the last Brucennial,
the non-curated, alter-ego of the Whitney Biennial that has run concurrently
with the last three Biennials. Organized
by the Bruce High Quality Foundation
and Vito Shnabel, the art-dealing son
of Julian Shnabel, this year’s Brucennial is showing only works by women.
COLLECTING COLLECTIVES
Members of HowDoYouSayYaminAfrican? (Yams)
in a studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn, surrounded
by hanging bead sculptures by Sienna Shields.
Photo: Karsten Moran for The New York Times.
110
PEACHY
Thirty-eight poets, musicians, thespians,
writers, and visual artists from across
the globe form Yams—shorthand for
HowDoYouSayYamInAfrican? The
members are mostly black and mostly
queer, by their own admission. They
have come together in New York to
collaborate on their contribution to the
Biennial, a filmed opera—spoken, sung,
chanted—which reveals how the specter of race haunts black identity.