David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards will co-organise the 2021 Whitney Biennial, it was announced today. Both are curators at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Edwards having joined as curator of performance in 2018 and Breslin having recently assumed a new role as director of curatorial initiatives.
The museum’s director Adam D. Weinberg was quoted in a press release as saying that the pair will bring ‘fresh outlooks to this historic exhibition and reinvent it for these complex and challenging times’. Recent editions of the Whitney Biennial have been marked by controversy, with calls in 2017 for the withdrawal of a Dana Schutz painting accused of sensationalising violence against black people and the withdrawal of several artists from this year’s biennial over the presence on the museum’s board of Safariland CEO Warren B. Kanders (he has since resigned his position).
7 October