WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2026: LATIN AMERICAN IMAGINARIES IN A TIME OF TRANSITION
The 82nd edition brings together 56 artists and collectives in an exhibition that privileges atmosphere, sensibility, and contemporary forms of coexistence. Within this framework, Latin American artists play a key role, weaving together memory, technology, body, and territory.
Opening to the public on March 8, 2026, with member previews from March 4–7, the Whitney Biennial 2026 offers a vivid survey of contemporary American art shaped by a moment of profound transition. Rather than proposing definitive answers, the exhibition foregrounds mood and texture, inviting visitors into environments charged with tension, tenderness, humor, and unease.
Co-organized by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, with Beatriz Cifuentes and Carina Martinez, the Biennial embraces relational forms that explore interspecies kinships, geopolitical entanglements, technological affinities, and shared mythologies, proposing unruly and unexpected ways of imagining coexistence.
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Leo Castañeda, PAMM 2024. Courtesy of the artist
Within this landscape, the participation of Latin American artists emerges as especially significant. Through situated perspectives and diverse practices, their works address questions of identity, history, perception, and cultural memory.
Colombian artist Leo Castañeda (born 1988 in Cali), based in Miami, presents a practice that merges digital art, video games, and immersive installation. Drawing on Latin American Surrealism and contemporary technologies, his work creates episodic narrative worlds where painting, video, mixed reality, and sculpture converge, rethinking the boundaries between fiction, memory, and digital culture.
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Carmen de Monteflores, Four Women, 1969. Collection of the artist. ©Carmen de Monteflores. Photo by Philip Maisel. Courtesy of the artist
Carmen de Monteflores (born 1933 in San Juan, Puerto Rico) brings a singular, multivalent trajectory to the Biennial. Crossing visual art, literature, psychology, and activism, her work reflects on exile, sexuality, language, and intimacy, expanding autobiographical practice as a political and affective space.
Chilean artist Ignacio Gatica (born 1988 in Santiago), based in New York, investigates systems of knowledge and technologies that shape urban, historical, and personal experience. His work examines how social landscapes are constructed and translated into cultural forms that challenge dominant narratives.
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Ignacio Gatica. Courtesy of the artist
Born in Cartagena de Indias, Oswaldo Maciá (1960) develops sculptural compositions that integrate images, objects, sounds, and smells. His works operate as sensory scenarios that privilege subjective experience over objectivity, activating an expanded perception of space and environment.
Also contributing to this Latin American presence are Julio Torres (born 1987 in San Salvador), whose practice navigates humor, language, and performance, and Johanna Unzueta (born 1974 in Santiago de Chile), widely recognized for her work in drawing and sculpture that reflects on labor, materiality, and memory through manual processes.
Together, these artists underscore the relevance of Latin American perspectives within the Whitney Biennial 2026, enriching its exploration of the present with critical, poetic, and deeply embodied forms of artistic inquiry.
*Cover image: courtesy of Whitney Museum.
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