Kelly Akashi Announced for Whitney Biennial 2026, New York, NY, USA
15 December 2025
From 8 March 2026, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents the Whitney Biennal 2026 featuring Kelly Akashi.
The eighty-second edition of the Whitney Biennial—the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States—features work of 56 artists, duos, and collectives that reflects the current moment and examines various forms of relationality, including interspecies kinships, familial relations, geopolitical entanglements, technological affinities, shared mythologies, and infrastructural supports.
Whitney Biennial 2026 offers a vivid atmospheric survey of contemporary American art shaped by a moment of profound transition. Rather than offering a definitive answer to life today, this Whitney Biennial foregrounds mood and texture, inviting visitors into environments that evoke tension, tenderness, humor, and unease. Together, the works capture the complexity of the present and propose imaginative, unruly, and unexpected forms of coexistence.
Whitney Biennial 2026 is co-organized by Whitney curators Marcela Guerrero, the DeMartini Family Curator, and Drew Sawyer, the Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography with Beatriz Cifuentes, Biennial Curatorial Assistant, and Carina Martinez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow.
Find out more via Whitney Museum of American Art.
Image: Portrait of Kelly Akashi. © Kelly Akashi, Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery. Photo by Brad Torchia.