Whitney Museum of American Art

Upcoming Events

Ilana Savdie: Radical Contractions

Ilana Savdie (b. 1986, raised in Barranquilla, Colombia and Miami, Florida; based in Brooklyn, New York) explores themes of performance, transgression, identity, and power in her vibrant, large-scale paintings. Her canvases assemble fragments into finely detailed, fluid compositions that pulsate wit... [ + ]h flamboyant color. Abstracted forms conjoin, merge, and blend to create riotous excess. At their core, Savdie’s paintings aim to dismantle ideas of binary or fixed identity and embrace performance as a transformative tool.
For this exhibition, Savdie presents some of her latest work, including paintings and drawings, as well as new works produced for the Whitney. Drawing on a range of subjects and environments as source material, such as the Carnival celebrations that take place in Baranquilla, Colombia, Savdie explores variable textures and forms of mark-making across each of her expansive canvases. Combining areas of stained and blurred color with swaths of thick visible brushwork or smooth, hard-edged marks, she employs acrylic, oil, and beeswax into paintings characterized by their dreamlike illusion yet grounded in the physical body.
This exhibition is on view in the Museum’s Lobby gallery, which is accessible to the public free of charge, as part of the Whitney Museum’s enduring commitment to support and showcase the most recent work of emerging American artists.
Ilana Savdie: Radical Contractions is co-curated by Marcela Guerrero, DeMartini Family Curator, and Angelica Arbelaez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Trust Me - Photographic Works from the Whitney Collection

Drawn from the Whitney’s collection, Trust Me brings together photographic works that invite shared emotional experience. The artists in the exhibition embrace intuition and indeterminacy as part of their creative process and recognize that vulnerability, usually associated with powerlessness and ex... [ + ]posure, can play a role in forging connection. Depicting familial and ancestral bonds, friendship, romantic partnership, and other networks of influence and exchange, these photographs make such connection visible—in the image and often beyond it—by evoking the overlapping lives and loves of the works’ creators, viewers, and caretakers.The exhibition features an intergenerational group of artists: Laura Aguilar, Genesis Báez, Alvin Baltrop, Jenny Calivas, Moyra Davey, Lola Flash, Barbara Hammer, Muriel Hasbun, Dakota Mace, Mary Manning, and D’Angelo Lovell Williams. Many of their images do not include people but instead offer reflections on everyday surroundings and experiences, with objects often representing intimate aspects of the artists’ lives. Precisely staged or in response to chance encounters, these images encourage careful attention. As artist and writer Lydia Okrent has said about Manning’s photographs, such work “emboldens available tenderness,” kindling through the image something already present in the viewer.In addition to taking up themes of vulnerability, the artists in the exhibition have chosen a precarious medium. Photographs emerge through combinations of light, chemicals, time, and chance, and yet these same elements can also push an image past legibility. Many of the artists draw parallels between material and emotional contingency, and welcome accidents, imperfections, and the unexpected. Gambling on the power of images to carry deep feeling, the works in Trust Me ultimately offer space for expanded capacity, reciprocity, and learning.

Ilana Savdie: Radical Contractions

Ilana Savdie (b. 1986, raised in Barranquilla, Colombia and Miami, Florida; based in Brooklyn, New York) explores themes of performance, transgression, identity, and power in her vibrant, large-scale paintings. Her canvases assemble fragments into finely detailed, fluid compositions that pulsate wit... [ + ]h flamboyant color. Abstracted forms conjoin, merge, and blend to create riotous excess. At their core, Savdie’s paintings aim to dismantle ideas of binary or fixed identity and embrace performance as a transformative tool.
For this exhibition, Savdie presents some of her latest work, including paintings and drawings, as well as new works produced for the Whitney. Drawing on a range of subjects and environments as source material, such as the Carnival celebrations that take place in Baranquilla, Colombia, Savdie explores variable textures and forms of mark-making across each of her expansive canvases. Combining areas of stained and blurred color with swaths of thick visible brushwork or smooth, hard-edged marks, she employs acrylic, oil, and beeswax into paintings characterized by their dreamlike illusion yet grounded in the physical body.
This exhibition is on view in the Museum’s Lobby gallery, which is accessible to the public free of charge, as part of the Whitney Museum’s enduring commitment to support and showcase the most recent work of emerging American artists.
Ilana Savdie: Radical Contractions is co-curated by Marcela Guerrero, DeMartini Family Curator, and Angelica Arbelaez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Trust Me - Photographic Works from the Whitney Collection

Drawn from the Whitney’s collection, Trust Me brings together photographic works that invite shared emotional experience. The artists in the exhibition embrace intuition and indeterminacy as part of their creative process and recognize that vulnerability, usually associated with powerlessness and ex... [ + ]posure, can play a role in forging connection. Depicting familial and ancestral bonds, friendship, romantic partnership, and other networks of influence and exchange, these photographs make such connection visible—in the image and often beyond it—by evoking the overlapping lives and loves of the works’ creators, viewers, and caretakers.The exhibition features an intergenerational group of artists: Laura Aguilar, Genesis Báez, Alvin Baltrop, Jenny Calivas, Moyra Davey, Lola Flash, Barbara Hammer, Muriel Hasbun, Dakota Mace, Mary Manning, and D’Angelo Lovell Williams. Many of their images do not include people but instead offer reflections on everyday surroundings and experiences, with objects often representing intimate aspects of the artists’ lives. Precisely staged or in response to chance encounters, these images encourage careful attention. As artist and writer Lydia Okrent has said about Manning’s photographs, such work “emboldens available tenderness,” kindling through the image something already present in the viewer.In addition to taking up themes of vulnerability, the artists in the exhibition have chosen a precarious medium. Photographs emerge through combinations of light, chemicals, time, and chance, and yet these same elements can also push an image past legibility. Many of the artists draw parallels between material and emotional contingency, and welcome accidents, imperfections, and the unexpected. Gambling on the power of images to carry deep feeling, the works in Trust Me ultimately offer space for expanded capacity, reciprocity, and learning.

Ilana Savdie: Radical Contractions

Ilana Savdie (b. 1986, raised in Barranquilla, Colombia and Miami, Florida; based in Brooklyn, New York) explores themes of performance, transgression, identity, and power in her vibrant, large-scale paintings. Her canvases assemble fragments into finely detailed, fluid compositions that pulsate wit... [ + ]h flamboyant color. Abstracted forms conjoin, merge, and blend to create riotous excess. At their core, Savdie’s paintings aim to dismantle ideas of binary or fixed identity and embrace performance as a transformative tool.
For this exhibition, Savdie presents some of her latest work, including paintings and drawings, as well as new works produced for the Whitney. Drawing on a range of subjects and environments as source material, such as the Carnival celebrations that take place in Baranquilla, Colombia, Savdie explores variable textures and forms of mark-making across each of her expansive canvases. Combining areas of stained and blurred color with swaths of thick visible brushwork or smooth, hard-edged marks, she employs acrylic, oil, and beeswax into paintings characterized by their dreamlike illusion yet grounded in the physical body.
This exhibition is on view in the Museum’s Lobby gallery, which is accessible to the public free of charge, as part of the Whitney Museum’s enduring commitment to support and showcase the most recent work of emerging American artists.
Ilana Savdie: Radical Contractions is co-curated by Marcela Guerrero, DeMartini Family Curator, and Angelica Arbelaez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art.