The 2026 Whitney Biennial trades identity for infrastructure.

This year’s Whitney Biennial focuses on “Greater America”—historian Daniel Immerwahr’s term How to hide an empire. It describes not only the country’s 50 states, but also the countries, dependencies, military bases, and territories it occupies. Strategically speaking, officials have shied away from using words like “colonial” and “empire” since World War II, Immerwahr argued, but that’s just semantics.

On the occasion of America’s 250th anniversary, the 2026 Whitney Biennial—the storied pulse of American art—looks beyond “iconic maps,” another of Immerwahr’s terms for the geographical shape that most people picture when they think of “America.” Curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer include artists from U.S.-occupied Okinawa, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; from Chile, where the U.S. conducted covert interventions; from current and former territories such as Puerto Rico and the Philippines; and Palestine, where the U.S. continues to fund genocide. The gesture is both timeless and timely: As I write this review, my phone rings, informing me that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in an airstrike orchestrated by Israel and the United States.

But lest we make the same mistake, I should clarify from the outset that this edition of the Whitney Biennial is about much more than the birthplace of the artist. Shifting the topic of conversation from identity politics to infrastructure is a second necessary intervention, because identity is most politically useful when it leads to organizational and material change. Hope the Democrats take note.

Artists throughout the exhibition explore economic systems (Ignacio Gatica, Joshua Citarella), belief systems (Zach Blas), family systems (Andrea Fraser and her mother Carmen de Monteflores), ecosystems (Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Kainoa Gruspe, Erin Jane Nelson, Kelly Akashi), energy systems (Ash Arder, Akira Ikezoe), global supply chains (CFGNY, Aziz Hazara), healthcare systems (Cooper Jacoby), institutional systems (Maia Chao, Andrea Fraser, the duo of Nile Harris and Dyer Rhoads), legal systems (Jordan Straver) Strafer), value systems (Kimowan Metchewais), and civic infrastructure (David L. Johnson, Emilio Martínez Poppe, and Mo Costello).

Spoiler alert: all of these systems are breaking down.

Two, however, have persisted like cockroaches: Algorithmic System (Zach Buras, Michelle Lopez, Cooper Jacoby) and Imperial System (Ignacio Gatica, Aziz Hazara, Mao Ishikawa and another duo, Aki Onda and Jose Maceda). The imperial system is actually the backbone of the exhibition, connecting geographical and infrastructural threads. Gatika’s documentary video Sanhattan (2025) takes us through the financial district of Santiago, Chile—a funhouse mirror version of Manhattan called Sanhattan, complete with its own Statue of Liberty, a replica of the Chrysler Building, and a spiraling Guggenheim-esque shopping mall. These structures are clear traces of the American intervention that made Chile the birthplace of neoliberalism.

Aziz Hazara’s “Moon Viewing” (2024) – a series of streaky, blurry green-purple photos taken with a night-vision camera – promises a photo of the moon. But I could find no trace of the famous unphotographable celestial sphere. What did the night vision goggles introduced during Desert Storm actually see, and what did it cover up? This ambiguity enables plausible deniability, which Hazara calls in the catalog a classic American tactic that has proven devastatingly effective in his native Kabul.

Art is uniquely suited to showing us infrastructure unfolding on an imperceptible scale—systems we mostly only notice when they stop working. In the exhibition, the artists translate the above systems into sensations. To Sung Tieu, what sounded like red flags from fracking wells across the United States translated into vibrations you could feel in your bones. For Basel Abbas and Rouan Abu-Rahem, this looks like an immersive, emotive video installation that tells the story of the genocide in Gaza not through statistics but through individuals (although it must be said that, with Israel killing more than 240 Palestinian journalists, personal stories are increasingly the most accessible genre). Systems imply cold rationality, but this Biennale emphasizes how they feel and live.

But not everything in this exhibition is doom and gloom. Playful, irreverent, even “wild” (to borrow Guerrero’s term), the work disarms and delights the mind and body throughout. Consider Pat Olezsko’s carnival court jester-style inflatables, or Precious Okoyomon and CFGNY’s adorable brain toys. The effect is an emotional jolt that feels familiar to online life, where images of genocide and cute animals appear in rapid succession and people try to stay sane by remembering that these two registers coexist.

One moving through-line captured by Mo Costello, Agosto Machado, and Emilie Louise Gossiaux concerns networks of care. Gosioux has contributed a stunning series of affectionate tributes to her late guide dog London, using techniques she developed after she lost her sight to depict scenes from their lives caring for each other. She also built a play palace of 100 King Kong toys for her late dog: this is what it would be like if all dogs went to heaven. Machado, meanwhile, built his shrine after caring for friends who died of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. After inheriting their possessions—photographs, documents, etc.—he made beautiful reliquaries for them. As an orphan and a queer person, Machado understands better than most the importance of care beyond the nuclear family or country, and the desire to be remembered and matter to someone—the ways in which art can leave traces of life.

Elsewhere in the exhibition you will find one of the most touching family portraits I know. Andrea Fraser is an icon of institutional criticism, and her work exists alongside the exquisite paintings of her mother, Carmen de Monteflores. De Monteflores’ vibrant cut canvases, locked in storage for decades, reveal intertwined figures and faces. Here, we learn how Fraser examined institutions so radically: The obstacles DeMonte Flores faced as a brown woman in the art world eventually led her to give up painting altogether. What a tragedy. Her work is extraordinary and a strong contender for Best in Show.

Fraser said her entire career may have been “revenge” for her mother’s treatment in the catalog. In addition to de Monteflores, she also showed sculptures of young children sleeping in glass cases. For conceptualists, they are rare art objects that exemplify Fraser’s recent revelations about why she aspires to make something that sells. She admitted that what she wanted was “to be wanted, to be valued, to be cared for” and to have “unconditional love.” But does she want the market, or a mother?

And therein lies the crux of the current Whitney Biennial: the problem is scale. In our private lives, most of us know a little bit about how to care for each other (narcissists notwithstanding). When it’s scaled and systematized, cruelty and dehumanization often ensue—as seen in Cooper Jacoby’s hauntingly surreal Clock . They are reminiscent of biological age tests offered by insurance companies to reward “fitter” individuals with lower premiums. Layers of bureaucracy and technology alienate patients from their humanity. Some employees charged with charging patients might care and might even be helpful, but the system will do whatever it takes to keep them functioning within the company machine. Yet when too many caregivers go unpaid and those with less social capital lack opportunity, private caregiving becomes all too easy to romanticize. Nursing is also a systemic problem—feminized, racialized, classed, and exploitative—and has little capacity to combat fracking, genocide, and imperialism.

So what can we do about these harmful systems? For Daniel Chew, a member of the fashion-forward collective CFGNY, “Everyone recognizes that everything is more or less co-opted.” Power, he adds, “is not about destroying the system, it’s about surviving within it and navigating it.” Their survival strategy, in a nutshell: collaboration.

I’d love to, but I can’t call their proposal the strongest. I heard a sense of compromise and pragmatism in Chew’s statement. Privatizing our problems may help survive, and this is crucial. But I find myself more inspired by works that scale and imagine revolution. The silver lining of crumbling infrastructure is this: their failure is a reminder that empires do fall.

Take Emilio Martínez Poppe, for example, who captured the civic dimension of care. His graphic installations include working portraits of Philadelphia’s blue-collar civil servants (bus drivers and sanitation workers) who, once they had some agency, saw and shaped their city differently.

But David L. Johnson took infrastructure intervention to its most logical and liberating conclusion: He made the system contradict itself until the foundations began to crack. For the Biennale, he removed rule signs from various private public spaces across New York: ^{_{No skateboarding, no smoking, no begging, no camping, no sleeping}}. The signs, on display at the Whitney Museum, draw attention to the city’s quiet privatization while also rendering the rules obsolete. If such instructions are not conspicuously posted, they cannot be legally enforced. While the system wants you to believe automation is your only option, Johnson emphasizes agency.