We have been a very busy people over the decades. We have been coming out, falling in love, breaking up, raising children, going to school, establishing careers, celebrating gay marriage, and mainlining double-shot lattes with 2% low-foam. Somehow, while all that living was distracting us, we slipped into a dystopian state in which oligarchs and corrupt politicians mortgage the long-term future of humanity to line their own pockets.   

While some of us, like lobsters unaware of our collective fate, rubbed CBD oil into our burning muscles and binged watched episodes of “Queer Eye” on borrowed Netflix accounts, many LGBTQ and other activist artists were honing their craft, taking risks, and getting noticed. A few of those artists were included in this year’s Whitney Biennial, a fairly accurate barometer of the current state of contemporary art in the United States.

Measured in terms of racial, gender, emerging artist, and LGBTQ diversity, the 75 artists represented in the exhibition made for one of the most heterogeneous Biennials since the Whitney began hosting these showcases in 1932. The curators, Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley with Ramsay Kolber, have received great kudos for creating space for the new youthful majority minority, but that is not to say they achieved full inclusivity. 

The most glaring imbalance in the Biennial was geographic. Wisconsin artists did not receive a single life preserver from the mother ship during the 2019 voyage. But we were not alone, most landlocked states were entirely overlooked by the curatorial team.

Flyover country sour grapes aside, it doesn’t take a futurist to understand that despite its claims of being about what’s happening now, interest in the Biennial is more about the legacy it leaves and how will impact the art world. “Political, diverse, queer, humorous, serious, angry, anxious, collective, liberating, covert, subversive, resigned, and futile” describe my first impressions last May when I spent two full days absorbing the dense exhibition. But by September 22, the day the show ended, I conceded to remove futile from the list, because in a relatively short time, these artists proved they could change the world—a little bit.

The devotion and attention this Biennial paid to liberty and justice for all was touchingly patriotic. Take, for example, Kota Ezawa’s 2018 video National Anthem depicting NFL players taking a knee to protest police violence against African-American men. Ezawa’s piece brilliantly reflects the elegance of Colin Kaepernick’s non-verbal gesture in a poignant two-minute watercolor animation. Or consider Daniel Lind-Ramos’s, Maria-Maria (2019), in which the artist used objects he found in his neighborhood in Puerto Rico, after hurricane Maria, to create a Virgin Mary sculpture memorializing the 3000 Americans who were killed in the deadliest hurricane to hit the United States.

There were many works in this year’s Whitney Biennial that registered as an unapologetic presence, a kind of witnessing, as if to say, “We are here. We are (insert intersectional identities). We are not going anywhere. And we brought our friends.” And in that casual contemporary way, just by authentically showing up, reflecting what they have seen, too brave to cheat or lie or cower in intimidation, their work is inherently activist.

Take the work of Paul Mpagi Sepuya, who has become known for his fragmented homoerotic photographs. For the Biennial, Sepuya invited friends to share the Whitney’s limelight. An image titled, Darkroom Mirror Portrait (1000510) 2018, by the artist and A. L. Steiner, shows a topless, reclining Steiner reaching for the camera while Sepuya’s arm enters the frame and also reaches towards the camera, emphasizing communal production over the elevation of the individual creator.

Martine Syms, People Who Aren’t Friends or Lovers or Exes (2019) includes her video Intro to Threat Modeling (2017). From within a monitor, placed into a frame about the size of a 1980’s arcade cocktail table, Syms’s avatar says, “If this were a reality show, I would definitely be the person who was like, ‘I’m not here to make friends.’ Because there has to be that person, and I’m that person. Once you understand your threat model, what you wanna keep private, and who you want to protect it from, you can start to make decisions about how you live your life. You’ll find yourself empowered, not depressed. What do I want to protect? My image.” In this piece, the artist, who has previously identified herself as black, female, and lesbian, hints at what it might take to protect oneself from all who seek to deny, exploit, and prevent one from having a thriving existence in racist, sexist, and homophobic America.

Jeffrey Gibson’s bright sculptural garments, rooted in pop and Native American materials and culture, proudly hung like flags above the rest of the exhibition. One piece, included the words, “people like us,” turns a phrase, which is often an offensive generalizing insult, into a celebration of comradery. Gibson’s work, often endeavors to reclaim his culture and proclaim his self-acceptance, a theme across many works in this Biennial. (His solo show at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, from June 8–September 15 was reviewed in the May/June issue of Our Lives.)

Works such as Elle Pérez’s Dahlia and David (fag with a scar that says dyke) 2019 and Mae (three days after) 2019 honors the artist’s queer and Latinx community in New York. Though their work is too staged to categorize as documentary, the photographs testify the intimacy and trust between them and their gender-fluid community in this strong-yet-vulnerable series.

Nicole Eisenman’s absurdist sculptural installation, Procession (2019), received great critical acclaim. Occupying the entire outdoor deck on the sixth floor of the Whitney, this installation depicted dejected and apathetic individuals created out of fiberglass, clothing, bronze, plaster, metal, wood, and wax. The sculptures appear to be exhausted, yet cooperative, serfs burdened by the drudgery of existence. One character, sporting colorful bright blue and red knee-high socks, is pulled on a cart with square wheels. The figure genuflects on both knees so deeply that they release gas from their protruding behind. The piece seems to ask, who is the cruel oppressor who imposes such misery on the downtrodden masses? Technology? Trump? Capitalism? The Art World? How stupidly unaware are these subjects? Though typically dismissive of scatological humor, I found myself paradoxically amused by the fog machine farts, both identifying with, and wishing to distinguish myself from, the fools depicted in Eisenman’s larger than life tableau.

Another of the most powerful works in the exhibition is Alexandra Bell’s No Humans Involved: After Sylvia Wynter, (2018–19) a series of prints based on newspaper pages from 1989 when a group of black and Latinx teens were falsely imprisoned for rape and battery of a woman jogging through Central Park. The images reveal the racism and bias that dominated the media and fed the cultural imagination of the time. Potently, the last image in the series is a reproduction of the advertisements that Donald Trump took out in four major U.S. newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty so that the teens could be executed.   

Nothing defined this year’s Biennial more than the piece Triple-Chaser (2019), which led Artforum to dub the exhibition, “The Tear Gas Biennial.” The 10-minute work infamously exposed Warren Kanders, who was then co-chair of the museum’s board and CEO of Safariland Group, a company that produces tear gas grenades and other weapons. Safariland’s tear gas grenades were used against asylum seekers at the U.S. border and in other attacks against civilian populations around the globe. The film’s narration explains, “While tear-gas is banned from use in war, governments use it to suppress the right of civilians to collectively protest in public space.” Not only did the artists, an architect-led research group called “Forensic Architecture,” demonstrate a new arts-based method of critical inquiry and analysis, but brazen curators and museum staff included this film in spite of the financial benefits Mr. Kanders’s board position offered the museum, an unusual move in today’s climate of corruption and greed.

Much like the film’s subject, the sting of Triple-Chaser stayed in the eyes long after it was over. By delivering an acrid fact bomb with an indisputably articulate visual argument, the piece connected dots in complex systems, encouraging viewers to imagine that a “public truth” is possible. Mr Kanders initially seemed unmoved by the film’s critique of his direct enabling and profiting from crimes against humanity or the resulting publicity he received. On July 19 eight Biennial artists, including Forensic Architecture and Nicole Eisenman, asked to have their work withdrawn from the exhibition in protest. By July 25, Mr. Kanders announced his resignation from the Whitney’s Board of Directors.

If this year’s Whitney Biennial foretells anything, it is not that a diverse army of underdog artists with slingshots are on the way to knock out giants for us, but that America’s diverse artists have the power and competence to create the art that will elicit the facts, empathy, human connection, and empowerment that we all need to knock out these giants together.

Karin Wolf is the Arts Program Administrator for the City of Madison Department of Planning and Community and Economic Development and the Madison Arts Commission. She manages the City’s public art program, arts grants, and helps facilitate cultural planning.