Driven by a shared commitment to presenting the most relevant art and ideas of our time, Hyundai Motor’s multiyear partnership with the Whitney includes support for both the Hyundai Terrace Commission and the Whitney Biennial, the museum’s landmark exhibition of contemporary American art, presented every two years.

Hyundai Terrace Commission is an annual, site-specific project on the Whitney Museum’s fifth-floor outdoor gallery. The commission offers an expansive platform for artists to experiment at scale and to engage the museum’s terrace as an interface between art, the built environment, and the surrounding city.

This year’s Biennial, the 82nd edition of the exhibition series, offers a vivid, atmospheric survey of fifty-six artists, duos, and collectives shaped by a moment of profound transition. The work on view examines varied forms of relationality, from interspecies and familial kinships to geopolitical entanglements, technological affinities, shared mythologies, and the infrastructures that support and constrain contemporary life. Rather than offering a definitive answer to life today, the exhibition foregrounds mood and texture, inviting visitors into environments that evoke tension, tenderness, humor, and unease, while proposing imaginative, unruly, and unexpected forms of coexistence.

*Whitney Biennial 2026 is co-organized by Whitney Museum curators Marcela Guerrero, DeMartini Family Curator, and Drew Sawyer, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, with Beatriz Cifuentes, Biennial Curatorial Assistant, and Carina Martinez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow.

**Accompanied images are approved only for publication in conjunction with the promotion of the Whitney Biennial 2026 and the Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi. Each image must not be cropped, bled off the page, colorized, solarized, overlaid with other elements (e.g., tone, text, another image, etc.), or otherwise altered, except in terms of overall size. Reproductions must include the full caption information adjacent to the image. Use of images for front covers may incur a fee and will require prior authorization from the owner and copyright holder of the work. Please contact the Whitney Press Office for such use at pressoffice@whitney.org.

Image Credit

– Image 1-3: Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi, 2026. Photo: Timothy Schenck.

– Image 4-5: Installation view of the Whitney Biennial 2026 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 8–August 23, 2026). Photo: Steven Probert.