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The Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennal of 2012 is running from March 1st until May 27th this year. Located in the iconic Marcel Breur building on Madison Avenue in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, it is the seventy-sixth in an ongoing series of Biennals and Annuals presented by the Whitney since 1932. Despite being one of the less globally-renowned New York Museums, it has for some years been seen as something of a mecca for young and aspiring American artists. Encouraging avant-garde and experimental art and cultural ephemera, the museum has striven to include new and developing medias of artistic representation, and its exhibitions prioritize living American artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Biennal has long gained a reputation within American art for displaying the works of lesser known artists new to the international art scene. This year’s Biennal collection of artists and works have been selected by Elisabeth Sussman, Sondra Gillman and Jay Sanders. The whole of the Whitney’s 4th floor has been reserved for the Biennal, which features music, dance, theatre and other events to compliment the art on display. Alongside promoting younger artists, the Biennal will also feature innovative works from established international artists and film-makers. The Werner Herzog installation of 17th century Dutch artist Hercules Segers’ work promises to be one of the major draws of the Biennal. Vincent Gallo will also make an appearance at what The New York Times has already described as “one of the best biennals in recent memory.’ The Whitney has a long tradition of promoting the radical and subversive aspects of American culture and art. Tracing its heritage back to the dynamism of early American modernism, its founders in 1931 wanted to develop a studio space which focused on local artistic experimentation as opposed to the European-gazing preferences of the also recently opened Museum of Modern Art. Beginning in a humbly converted row of houses in Greenwich Village, the museum left its original site in 1954 to find a larger and more suitable arena for the growing body of American artists. Its current site on Madison Avenue was built by Marcel Breuer and Hamilton P. Smith between 1963 and 1966, and opended its doors at the height of the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s. Though remaining off the beaten track for most New York tourists, the Biennal is a must see for anyone interested in art and culture. The musuem’s granite, staircase-like facade alone will etch itself into the memory of visitors as much as more obvious New York attractions like the Empire State building of Statue of Liberty.
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