Inheritance
Opens June 28, 2023
Inheritance traces the profound impacts of legacy and the past across familial, historical, and aesthetic lines. Featuring new acquisitions and rarely-seen works from the Whitney collection by forty-three leading artists, the exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, videos, photographs, and time-based media installations from the 1970s to today. This diverse array of works consider what has been passed on and how it may shift, change, or live again.
Drawing inspiration from Ephraim Asili’s 2020 film of the same title, Inheritance reflects on multiple meanings of the word, whether celebratory or painful, from one era, person, or idea to the next. The exhibition takes a layered approach to storytelling by interweaving narrative with documentary and personal experiences with historical and generational events. A group of works examining the cycle from birth to death opens the exhibition, while other galleries take up different kinds of lineages, such as how artists borrow from and remake art history or unspool legacies of racialized violence and their recurrences.
The poet Rio Cortez speaks of being “framed by our future knowing”—even as we sit in this moment, we slide backward and forward in time, between our foremothers and the descendants we will never know. Rather than passively accepting our current state, the artists whose work is on view here ask: How did we get here, as individuals and as a society, and where are we going?
This exhibition is organized by Rujeko Hockley, Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art with David Lisbon, curatorial assistant.
En Español
Esta exposición traza la idea de herencia (lo que nos queda o lo que hemos recibido del pasado) a través de líneas familiares, históricas y estéticas. Presentando en su mayoría nuevas adquisiciones y obras rara vez vistas de la colección permanente, la muestra explora las nociones de repetición y referencia, nacimiento y renacimiento, generación y regeneración, mediante una variada selección de obras desde 1970 hasta hoy.
Inspirándose en la película The Inheritance de Ephraim Asili de 2020, Herencia se acerca al relato desde diversos niveles, entrelazando narrativa con documentales y experiencias personales con eventos históricos y generacionales. La exhibición considera múltiples significados de herencia, ya sean celebratorios o dolorosos, de una era, persona o de una idea a otra. Un grupo de obras que abre la muestra, examinan el ciclo del nacimiento hasta la muerte, mientras que otras galerías exploran diferentes tipos de linajes, como las maneras en que los artistas toman prestada de la historia del arte y la reescriben, o revelan legados de violencia racial y sus recurrencias.
La poeta Rio Cortez habla de estar “enmarcados por nuestro conocimiento futuro”, incluso mientras nos ubicamos en este momento temporal, nos desplazamos hacia atrás y hacia adelante, pensando no sólo en nuestras antepasadas, sino también en los descendientes que nunca vamos a conocer. Las pinturas, esculturas, videos, fotografías e instalaciones aquí reunidas plantean preguntas sobre lo que nos fue transmitido y cómo podría desplazarse, cambiar o vivir de nuevo. Más que una aceptación pasiva del estado actual de las cosas, los artistas en la exposición nos piden ponderar qué ideas y experiencias pueden estar detrás de lo que vemos o creemos saber. Fundamentalmente, ¿cómo llegamos aquí, como individuos y sociedad, y hacia dónde nos dirigimos?
Ancestral Memory
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The relatively short span of an individual human life exists in parallel with the inheritance of ancestral memory across generations. Focusing primarily on the global South and Indigenous communities across the world, where the dual forces of colonialism and imperialism have often disrupted cultural practices and continuity across generations, the works in this gallery tap into this deeper, and perhaps nonlinear, sense of time, looking at some of the origins of culture and belief through geography, history, and ideology. Whether examining the retention of African iconographies and artistic traditions in diasporic communities, goddess archetypes, or Indigenous creation myths and mythological figures from the Americas, these artists consider their continued presence and impact in the contemporary world. The works on view here collectively tell a story of a resilient and shared human past, which reverberates into the present.
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Andrea Carlson, Red Exit, 2020. Oil, watercolor, opaque watercolor, ink, acrylic, colored pencil, ball-point pen, fiber-tipped pen, and graphite pencil on paper, sixty sheets, 115 × 183 in. (292.1 × 464.8 cm) overall. Collection of the artist; courtesy Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis. Photograph by Rik Sferra
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David Hartt, Archive at The Johnson Publishing Company Headquarters, Chicago, Illinois, 2011, printed 2013. Inkjet print mounted on aluminum, with frame, overall: 59 1/4 × 79 × 2 in. (150.5 × 200.7 × 5.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Photography Committee 2014.11a-b. © David Hartt
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Clarissa Tossin, A cycle of time we don't understand (reversed, invented, and rearranged), 2017. Silicone, walnut, faux terracotta (dyed plaster), dimensions variable. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee 2019.35a-e. © Clarissa Tossin
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John Outterbridge, The Elder, Ethnic Heritage Series, 1971–1972. Wooden hat forms, fabric, wooden beads, twine, metal, paint, and human hair, overall: 28 1/4 × 11 7/8 × 11 3/8 in. (71.8 × 30.2 × 28.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from David Cancel and an anonymous donor 2022.189. © Courtesy the Estate of the artist and Tilton Gallery, New York
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Events
View all-
Sun,
Feb 4Weekend Member Mornings for Harold Cohen: AARON
9:30–10:30 am
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Sat,
Feb 3Weekend Member Mornings for Harold Cohen: AARON
9:30–10:30 am
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Mon,
Jan 29Virtual Tour: Highlights from the Whitney Collection, 1900–Now
12 pm
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Fri,
Jan 26Deep Listening and Light Dancing with Ephraim Asili
5:30–9:30 pm
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Sun,
Jan 14Community Self-portraits
11 am–3 pm
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Sun,
Jan 14Autorretratos Comunitarios
11 am–3 pm
Audio guides
![A monument of a man riding a horse behind a translucent banner hung between two columns on a grassy street island](https://staging.whitneymedia.org/assets/image/828943/large_RS67754_2018_86_cropped.jpg)
An-My Lê, Monument, General P.G.T. Beauregard, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2016, from the series The Silent General, 2015-2017. Inkjet print, 39 1/4 × 55 13/16 in. (99.7 × 141.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Photography Committee 2018.86. © An-My Lê, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery
![A monument of a man riding a horse behind a translucent banner hung between two columns on a grassy street island](https://staging.whitneymedia.org/assets/image/828943/large_RS67754_2018_86_cropped.jpg)
Hear directly from artists and curators on selected works from the exhibition.
View guideIn the News
“The thematic content of the show is ambitious, ranging from slavery and the Great Migration to Covid, African religious traditions, the human lifespan, colonization and the sources of artistic creativity.” —The Guardian
“The show considers some of the painful and difficult legacies that have shaped our society…” —Aesthetica Magazine
“...a captivating group show at the Whitney” —Whitewall
“This is an exhibition that raises a number of questions about how we as individuals respond to our world…” —Highbrow Magazine