Alex Da Corte, ROY G BIV, 2022. Performance, Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, April 6–September 5, 2022), March 29, 2022. Photograph © Matthew Carasella

As part of the evolving critically acclaimed survey, the Museum presents live performances by artists Raven Chacon, Terence Nance, Julie Tolentino, and Ivy Kwan Arce

The Whitney Museum of American Art announces additions to its performance program presented in conjunction with Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept. A series of original performances by Raven Chacon, Terence Nance, Julie Tolentino, and Ivy Kwan Arce showcase music, dance, and multimedia immersive design July 16 to October 7.

The series of single performances and durational projects are presented in the 2022 Whitney Biennial galleries and the Susan and John Hess Family Theater.

“Performance is fundamental to how we imagined this changing Biennial. We see the exhibition as having a metabolism; the artists engaged in performance raise crucial questions about presence, duration, representation, and abstraction, all ideas central to our times and this Biennial,” said co-curators David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives, and Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs.

For Zitkála-Šá, thirteen musical scores drafted by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, performer, and installation artist Raven Chacon (Diné), will be performed by the American Indian, First Nations, and Mestiza women who inspired their creation in two concerts on July 16. Performers include Autumn Chacon, Carmina Escobar, Joy Harjo, Candice Hopkins, Suzanne Kite, Koyoltzintli (performing For Barbara Croall), Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Ange Loft, Laura Ortman, Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk, Olivia Shortt, and Jacqueline Wilson. Lithographs of each musical score are currently on view in the 2022 Whitney Biennial.

Fourth Dimension Trigger, Fifth Dimension Trauma, a new immersive installation and healing ceremony by American filmmaker, writer, director, actor, and musician Terence Nance, will have performances in the Susan and John Hess Family Theater September 10–17. Developed and produced by Nance, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Superblue, the interactive performance merges elements of motion capture and 360-degree projections with live song and dance to address intergenerational trauma by speaking to wounding, Black cosmology, healing, migration, and grief.

On October 7, artist-activist duo Julie Tolentino and Ivy Kwan Arce present HTG: Hold Tight Gently, a continuous eight-hour performance in the Susan and John Hess Family Theater. The performance explores how the overlapping institutions of gender, race, HIV status, class, and nationality are defined and stigmatized.

This series of new works join ongoing performance-related gallery installations by Alex Da Corte and Jason Rhoades.

Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept features works by sixty-three intergenerational artists and collectives working across disciplines and media. The exhibition is the eightieth edition of this flagship series and highlights the most relevant art and ideas of our time.

Upcoming Performances
For Zitkála-Šá
Raven Chacon
Saturday, July 16, 4 pm and 7:30 pm ET
Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, performer, and installation artist Raven Chacon (Diné) organizes a performance featuring the American Indian, First Nations, and Mestiza women musicians who inspired the thirteen musical scores he drafted as part of the installation featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial.

From 2017 to 2020, Chacon created a series of thirteen lithographs, titled For Zitkála-Šá. These graphic musical scores are dedicated to different contemporary American Indian, First Nations, or Mestiza women working in music performance, composition, or sound art. Chacon envisioned the scores as portraits, representing how these women navigate the twenty-first century. The artist drew on a range of symbols, including Western music notation, tribal geometries, symbology, and numerology, among more ambiguous designs. Each of Chacon’s scores will be activated in this live performance and are also on view in the sixth-floor galleries of Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept, along with the artist’s video, sound, and photography works.

Performers include Autumn Chacon, Carmina Escobar, Joy Harjo, Candice Hopkins, Suzanne Kite, Koyoltzintli (performing For Barbara Croall), Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Ange Loft, Laura Ortman, Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk, Olivia Shortt, and Jacqueline Wilson.

Location: Floor 3, Susan and John Hess Family Theater
Tickets: $25; Registration Required
Event link: https://whitney.org/exhibitions/2022-biennial/performances

Fourth Dimension Trigger, Fifth Dimension Trauma
Terence Nance
Saturday, September 10, 7 pm; Sunday, September 11, 4 pm; Monday, September 12, 7
pm; Thursday, September 15, 7 pm; Friday, September 16, 7 pm; and Saturday,
September 17, 4 pm ET

Artist Terence Nance presents an immersive installation and healing ceremony inspired by Malidoma Patrice Somé’s writings on Ifa healing rituals and community practice as part of his contribution to Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept.

This ritual is an interactive performance meant to be in communion with one’s past, present, and future-unfolding within a daring installation that blends emerging technologies with dramatic scenic design.

A confluence of live performance, motion-capture, puppetry, songs, and sculpture, this ceremony navigates agency across dimensions and timelines by employing ritual to work through intergenerational trauma.

Nance developed this project as part of his ongoing study of the late Elder Patrice Malidoma Some’s writings and teachings. Fourth Dimension Trigger, Fifth Dimension Trauma speaks to wounding, Black cosmology, healing, migration, and grief. Nance invites both performers and participants the chance to explore their own personal triggers and traumas with agency and play.

Fourth Dimension Trigger, Fifth Dimension Trauma was co-commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art and Superblue, co-produced by 2 Devils 1 Stone and Superblue, with partnership on Research & Development from Integrated Design & Media, NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

Location: Floor 3, Susan and John Hess Family Theater
Tickets: Details to be announced
Event link: https://whitney.org/exhibitions/2022-biennial/performances

HTG: Hold Tight Gently
Julie Tolentino and Ivy Kwan Arce
Friday, October 7, 1–9 pm ET
Julie Tolentino and Ivy Kwan Arce’s constellation of works in the 2022 Biennial represent many years of community practice and activism around the HIV/AIDS crisis as well as gender and identity justice. Featuring varied components, the artists’ sprawling project collectively outlines a vision of activism that reflects a wide philosophical worldview.

For this symbolic performance, the artists invite visitors to observe as Tolentino is suspended from the ceiling and navigates aerial space like a pendulum with the help of another performer. This work holds and transmits the many unseen people and efforts that resonate for Kwan Arce, who has been HIV+ since 1990. This work, along with their other installations, talks, and writings included in the Biennial, spans generations, borders, and identities of AIDS activism centering on women of color.

The performance explores how the overlapping institutions of gender, race, HIV status, class, and nationality are defined and stigmatized. They take up space to challenge art, activism, and ourselves and ask how we value the excesses, ruptures, and unruly shifts in our bodies, communities, health, politics, institutions, and relationships over time.

Location: Floor 3, Susan and John Hess Family Theater
Tickets: Free with Museum admission
Event link: https://whitney.org/exhibitions/2022-biennial/performances

Ongoing Performances
ROY G BIV
Alex Da Corte
Sunday, July 17, 10:30 am ET (Indigo); Monday, August 8, 10:30 am ET (Violet)
Alex Da Corte’s ROY G BIV is both a video installation and an ongoing performance piece. For the performance, the structure displaying Da Corte’s projected video work is painted in a series of colors by Americo Da Corte, the artist’s brother who is a professional house painter. The painting sequence—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet—mirrors the color spectrum and reflects the title of the work. The performance riffs on John Baldessari’s video Six Colorful Inside Jobs (1977), for which the artist painted the inside of a room one color per day for six days. Similarly, Da Corte’s performance functions as both a color study and a demonstration of craft.

Previous performances were held on April 20 (Red), May 12 (Yellow), June 3 (Green), and June 25 (Blue).

Location: Floor 5, Neil Bluhm Family Galleries
Tickets: Free with Museum admission
Event link: https://whitney.org/events/alex-da-corte-roy-g-biv

Sutter’s Mill
Jason Rhoades
Fridays through September 2, 12–8 pm ET
Jason Rhoades’s sculpture Sutter’s Mill (2000) is assembled and dismantled weekly by Museum art handlers over the course of the Biennial. Every Friday from April through September, aluminum components of the sculpture are removed and placed on an adjacent wooden framework, then reattached to the work in their original configuration. This durational performance symbolizes the constant tension between order and disorder, creation and destruction, that is involved in the process of making art.

Location: Floor 5, Neil Bluhm Family Galleries
Tickets: Free with Museum admission
Event link: https://whitney.org/events/jason-rhoades-sutters-mill

About the Whitney
The Whitney Museum of American Art, founded in 1930 by the artist and philanthropist Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), houses the foremost collection of American art from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Mrs. Whitney, an early and ardent supporter of modern American art, nurtured groundbreaking artists when audiences were still largely preoccupied with the Old Masters. From her vision arose the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has been championing the most innovative art of the United States for ninety years. The core of the Whitney’s mission is to collect, preserve, interpret, and exhibit American art of our time and serve a wide variety of audiences in celebration of the complexity and diversity of art and culture in the United States. Through this mission and a steadfast commitment to artists, the Whitney has long been a powerful force in support of modern and contemporary art and continues to help define what is innovative and influential in American art today.

Curatorial Credit
Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept is co-curated by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives, and Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Mia Matthias, Curatorial Assistant; Gabriel Almeida Baroja, Curatorial Project Assistant; and Margaret Kross, former Senior Curatorial Assistant.

Exhibition Support
Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept is presented by Tiffany & Co.

Generous support is provided by Sotheby’s.

Generous support is also provided by Judy Hart Angelo; The Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston; Elaine Graham Weitzen Foundation for Fine Arts; Lise and Michael Evans; John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation; Kevin and Rosemary McNeely, Manitou Fund; The Philip and Janice Levin Foundation; The Rosenkranz Foundation; Anne-Cecilie Engell Speyer and Robert Speyer; and the Whitney’s National Committee.

Major support is provided by The Keith Haring Foundation Exhibition Fund, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and an anonymous donor.

Significant support is provided by 2022 Biennial Committee Co-Chairs: Jill Bikoff, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Barbara and Michael Gamson, Miyoung Lee, Bernard Lumpkin, Julie Mehretu, Fred Wilson; 2022 Biennial Committee Members: Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons, Sarah Arison and Thomas Wilhelm, Candy and Michael Barasch, James Keith (JK) Brown and Eric Diefenbach, Eleanor and Bobby Cayre, Alexandre and Lori Chemla, Suzanne and Bob Cochran, Jenny Brorsen and Richard DeMartini, Fairfax Dorn and Marc Glimcher, Stephen Dull, Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Melanie Shorin and Greg S. Feldman, Jeffrey & Leslie Fischer Family Foundation, Cindy and Mark Galant, Christy and Bill Gautreaux, Debra and Jeffrey Geller Family Foundation, Aline and Gregory Gooding, Janet and Paul Hobby, Harry Hu, Peter H. Kahng, Michèle Gerber Klein, Ashley Leeds and Christopher Harland, Dawn and David Lenhardt, Jason Li, Marjorie Mayrock, Stacey and Robert Morse, Daniel Nadler, Opatrny Family Foundation, Orentreich Family Foundation, Nancy and Fred Poses, Marylin Prince, Eleanor Heyman Propp, George Wells and Manfred Rantner, Martha Records and Richard Rainaldi, Katie and Amnon Rodan, Jonathan M. Rozoff, Linda and Andrew Safran, Subhadra and Rohit Sahni, Erica and Joseph Samuels, Carol and Lawrence Saper, Allison Wiener and Jeffrey Schackner, Jack Shear, Annette and Paul Smith, the Stanley and Joyce Black Family Foundation, Robert Stilin, Rob and Eric Thomas-Suwall, and Patricia Villareal and Tom Leatherbury; as well as the Alex Katz Foundation, Further Forward Foundation, the Kapadia Equity Fund, Gloria H. Spivak, and an anonymous donor.

Funding is also provided by special Biennial endowments created by Melva Bucksbaum, Emily Fisher Landau, Leonard A. Lauder, and Fern and Lenard Tessler.

Curatorial research and travel for this exhibition were funded by an endowment established by Rosina Lee Yue and Bert A. Lies, Jr., MD.

New York magazine is the exclusive media sponsor.

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