Art Faculty Featured in Whitney Biennial

Works by Assistant Professor Dionne Lee, a still from whose 2019 video Deep Challenger is shown above, and Associate Professor Carmen Winant were included in the 2024 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial. One of the most prestigious contemporary art exhibitions in the country, if not the world, the Biennial presents the work of artists working across media and disciplines, representing evolving notions of American art. Winant holds the Roy Lichtenstein Chair in Studio Art in the Department of Art. Lee, jointly appointed in Art and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, joined the faculty in 2023; previously she was a Post-MFA Fellow in the Department of Art at Ohio State.

Dana Renga, dean of arts and humanities, was delighted to learn that Lee and Winant were chosen for inclusion in the Biennial. “Both professors have highly productive and exceptional careers and this well-deserved honor celebrates two extraordinary artists whose work is at the center of important conversations about power, autonomy, and gender (Winant) and landscape, memory, and history (Lee),” said Renga.

Organized by curators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, the 81st edition of the show, titled Even Better Than the Real Thing, focuses on ideas of “the real” to acknowledge that, today, society is at an inflection point, in part brought on by artificial intelligence challenging what we consider to be real, as well as critical discussions about identity. Though the biennial survey has historically focused mainly on American artists, this year about 28 percent of the cohort hails from outside the United States.