March 4th, 2026 — Member previews and an opening reception begin tonight for the eighty-second edition of the Whitney Biennial featuring José Maceda (CRF 1997) and Pat Oleszko (CRF 2011, DG 2019). The longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States asks what does America feels like and look like to artists right now. The answer was…”strange”. Scott Rothkopf, the museum’s director said in an interview with The New York Times, what the curators “have put together doesn’t try to simplify the strangeness of our times. It allows visitors to encounter the world as artists are sensing it, structurally unstable and emotionally charged yet also full of possibility.” Curator Marcela Guerrero said that the exhibition expands on the notion of what America and American art is.
Pat’s and José’s work is alongside work from 54 other artists, duos, and collectives, which, “rather than offering a definitive answer to life today, foreground mood and texture, inviting visitors into environments that evoke tension, tenderness, humor, and unease.” This year’s exhibition “examines various forms of relationality, including interspecies kinships, familial relations, geopolitical entanglements, technological affinities, shared mythologies, and infrastructural supports” (whitney.org).
José Maceda
José’s Ugnayan (1974) is a fifty-one-minute composition for twenty radio stations, consisting of twenty recorded tracks using various Filipino indigenous instruments that José augmented and abstracted. It premiered on New Years’ Day 1974, broadcasted through the thirty-seven radio stations in the metropolitan area of Manila, the Philippines, with the support of Ferdinand Marcos’ authoritarian regime. It was a participatory event that encouraged anyone with a transistor radio to gather at one of the 142 “Ugnayan Centers” established across the city; in one of the biggest centers, 35,000 people congregated, multiplying the original twenty tracks by the thousands. The resulting dense mass of sound created a musical atmosphere that covered the entire city—considered a symbol of national unity by the regime, but received by the public with apathy. Ugnayan is a culmination of José’s wide array of musical experimentation and usage of modern technology for sound diffusion. Within its sociopolitical context, the Whitney asks the question: how does one navigate the contradictions of an authoritarian regime being responsible for a substantial part of Filipino cultural production?
Pat Oleszko
Pat’s work includes a larger-than-life inflatable titled “Blowhard,” a clown head blowing fire through a trumpet, and the short film titled “Footsi” (1979), which Civitella screened at a 28 Hubert St. event in 2023. She explained during a tour with ArtTable on March 19th that her performance work started out with elaborate costumes and expanded to include “props” like “the inflatables turning the world into her “stooge”. On April 4th, “Pat Oleszko: Reel Life Performantz” will take place, a screening presenting a selection of Pat’s moving image works produced between the 1970s and the 2000s. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Pat, Jovanna Venegas, Co-curator of Pat Oleszko: Fool Disclosure, and Drew Sawyer the Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography. The event is presented in partnership with SculptureCenter on the occasion of Pat Oleszko: Fool Disclosure running until April 27th.
As an international artist residency with diversity at its core, Civitella is proud to recognize the contributions of the international artists featured in this year’s Biennial.
Whitney Biennial 2026 runs from March 8th to August 23rd, 2026. Tickets are free on Fridays nights from 5 to 10 PM, and on the second Sunday of every month. Reserve yours at whitney.org.
