Whitney Biennial 2024, featuring Isaac Julien

The eighty-first edition of the Whitney Biennial – the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States – features seventy-one artists and two collectives grappling with many of today’s most pressing issues. 

Unfolding across five screens, Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) reflects on the life and thought of Alain Locke (1885–1954), philosopher, educator, and cultural critic of the Harlem Renaissance (played by André Holland) who urged members of the African diaspora to embrace African art in order to reclaim their cultural heritage. 

Reviewing the exhibition in the New York Times, Martha Schwendener writes, ‘Isaac Julien’s masterful video and sculpture installation is a highlight of the show. It remakes the dialogue between the Harlem Renaissance philosopher Alain Locke and the collector-philanthropist Albert C. Barnes, and there is an absorbing discussion of how Europeans and Americans viewed African sculpture — and the responses of Black versus white artists and collectors to such objects.’

Previews from 14 March 2024; public dates 20 March–11 August 2024.

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Image: Isaac Julien, Iolaus / In the Life (Once Again... Statues Never Die), 2022