The Whitney Biennial Homes In on American Precariousness
This year’s survey of 75 artists and collectives is quiet and suffused with anxiety.
(2019), Janiva Ellis’s contribution to the latest biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is a painting of a border: fence, river, palm trees, storm on the horizon, and figures making their treacherous way across. The landscape—something of a departure for Ellis, who often paints surrealist portraits—captures a woman, partially dressed, carrying a child as she wades through the stream at a break in the fence. With a third hand, the woman is peeling back the skin from her face, revealing an expression that falls somewhere between fatigue and resolve. The child she bears is an animal, a bizarro canine creature. Another woman lies stretched out on the riverbank, possibly dead. Her lower half is a messy red pattern that
