Advance Exhibition Schedule

Every Ocean Hughes: Alive Side
Jan 14–Apr 2, 2023

Using humor, intimacy, and direct address with distinct visual and sculptural forms, Every Ocean Hughes’s (formerly known as Emily Roysdon; b. 1977, Easton, MD; lives and works between Easton and Stockholm) current series of works are connected by the artist’s interest in transitions, thresholds, kinship, legacy, and queer life.

This four-part presentation at the Whitney includes a new commission for the Museum, a performance that tells a mythic story of a community of characters who have the ability to make round-trip crossings to the underworld. The commission is the third part in a multidisciplinary series inspired by the artist’s training in death care. Prior works include Help the Dead (2019), a sixty-minute musical that mimes the form of a workshop, and One Big Bag (2021), a forty-minute single-channel video installation that uses a mobile corpse kit—a bag filled with everyday objects that death doulas carry to care for the newly dead. With a matter-of-fact demeanor and intense physicality, the performer guides the viewer into the largely uncharted waters of corpse care—practical, political, and spiritual. Featured alongside the performances and video is The Piers Untitled (2009–23), a photographic series that captures the piers on the west side of Manhattan as an unmarked memorial to the marginalized communities and underground cultures that once occupied this unregulated waterfront.

This exhibition is organized by Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with CJ Salapare, Curatorial Assistant.

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Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map
Apr 19–Aug 2023

This exhibition is the first New York retrospective of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940, citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), an overdue but timely look at the work of a groundbreaking artist. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map brings together nearly five decades of Smith’s drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures in the largest and most comprehensive showing of her career to date.

Smith’s work engages with contemporary modes of making, from her idiosyncratic adoption of abstraction to her reflections on American Pop art and neo-expressionism. These artistic traditions are incorporated and reimagined with concepts rooted in Smith’s own cultural practice, reflecting her belief that her “life’s work involves examining contemporary life in America and interpreting it through Native ideology.” Employing satire and humor, Smith’s art tells stories that flip commonly held conceptions of historical narratives and illuminate absurdities in the formation of dominant culture. Smith’s approach importantly blurs categories and questions why certain visual languages attain recognition, historical privilege, and value.

Across decades and mediums, Smith has deployed and reappropriated ideas of mapping, history, and environmentalism while incorporating personal and collective memories. The retrospective will offer new frameworks in which to consider contemporary Native American art and show how Smith has led and initiated some of the most pressing dialogues around land, racism, and cultural preservation—issues at the forefront of contemporary life and art today.

This exhibition is organized by Laura Phipps, Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, with Caitlin Chaisson, Curatorial Project Assistant.

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Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century
Apr 19–Aug 2023

Josh Kline (b. 1979, Philadelphia, PA; lives and works in New York, NY) is one of the leading artists of his generation. Kline is best known for creating immersive installations using video, sculpture, photography, and design to question how emergent technologies are changing human life in the twenty-first century. 

In spring 2023, the Whitney will present the first U.S. museum survey of the artist's work. Kline often utilizes the technologies, practices, and forms he scrutinizes—digitization, data collection, image manipulation, 3D printing, commercial and political advertising, productivity-enhancing substances—aiming them back at themselves. Some of his most well-known videos use early deep fake software to speculate on the meaning of truth in a time of post-truth propaganda. At its core, Kline’s prescient practice is focused on work and class, exploring how today’s most urgent social and political issues—climate change, automation, disease, and the weakening of democracy—impact the people who make up the labor force.

The exhibition will survey over a decade of the artist’s work, including new installations and moving image works that address the climate crisis. Presented for the first time at the Whitney, these new science-fiction works approach the hotter, more dangerous future on the horizon from the perspective of essential workers who will inevitably be left to pick up the pieces. In an era defined by escalating crises, Kline’s work offers a visceral warning and calls for a more human future.

This exhibition is organized by Christopher Y. Lew, former Nancy and Fred Poses Curator at the Whitney and current Chief Artistic Director at the Horizon Art Foundation, with McClain Groff, Curatorial Project Assistant.

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