Shifting Landscapes

Hiram Maristany, Hydrant: In the Air, 1963, printed 2021. Gelatin silver print, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Photography Committee 2022.61. © Hiram Maristany

New York, NY , Shifting Landscapes, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art on November 1 and will be open until January of 2026.  The exhibition explores how evolving political, ecological, and social issues motivate artists and their representations of the world around them. While the traditional art historical landscape genre has long been associated with picturesque vistas and documentary accounts of place, artworks drawn from the Whitney’s collection for this exhibition, most on view at the Museum for the first time, suggest a more expansive interpretation.

Shifting Landscapes features 120 works by more than 80 artists, including Firelei Báez, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jane Dickson, Teresita Fernández, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Purvis Young, spanning the 1960s to the present. Photographs, installations, films, videos, sculptures, paintings, drawings, prints, and digital artworks depict the effects of industrialization on the environment, grapple with the impact of geopolitical borders, and give shape to imagined spaces as a way of destabilizing the concept of a “natural” world. Organized in thematic sections, these works bring the many meanings embedded in land and place into focus, foregrounding how we shape and are shaped by the spaces around us.

Alison Saar, Fall, 2011. Bronze, 134 × 48 × 42 in. (340.4 × 121.9 × 106.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Robert E. Hayden and Richard Silver 2024.335. © Alison Saar. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

“Shifting Landscapes reflects the Whitney’s ongoing commitment to telling diverse stories in American art, ” said Jennie Goldstein, Jennifer Rubio Associate Curator of the Collection; Marcela Guerrero, DeMartini Family Curator; and Roxanne Smith, Senior Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney. “Landscape—in its formal, social, and political implications—feels like a particularly dynamic and urgent subject today, and we are excited that over half of the works in this exhibition are new to the collection and on view at the Museum for the first time.

John Ahearn, Miss Kate, 1982. Acrylic on plaster, 26 1/2 × 30 × 8 1/4 in. (67.3 × 76.2 × 21 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee 2019.326. © John Ahearn, courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York

”Shifting Landscapes is on view from November 1 through January 2026 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition is organized by Jennie Goldstein, Jennifer Rubio Associate Curator of the Collection; Marcela Guerrero, DeMartini Family Curator; Roxanne Smith, Senior Curatorial Assistant; with Angelica Arbelaez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow; with thanks to Araceli Bremauntz-Enriquez and J. English Cook for research support.

Exhibition Overview – Shifting Landscapes

Spanning the Museum’s entire sixth floor, Shifting Landscapes is organized according to distinct thematic sections. Some groupings are inspired by materials and approaches: sculptural assemblages formed from locally sourced objects, ecofeminist approaches to land art, and the legacies of documentary landscape photography. Others are tied to specific geographies, like frenzied cityscapes of modern New York and the experimental filmmaking scene of 1970s and 1980s Los Angeles. Others show how artists invent fantastic new worlds where humans, animals, and the land become one.

Altered Topographies

The exhibition opens with an examination of the term “New Topographics, ” which describes the stark style of landscape photography that debuted in the 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. Documenting the effects of industrialization and suburbanization in America, Robert Adams’s Outdoor Theater, Colorado Springs, Colorado (1968–71), for example, records the residential sprawl along the Rocky Mountains in a straight-on and detached style. Recent photographs of the North American landscape by contemporary artists such as LaT oya Ruby Frazier, An-My Lê, and Piliāmo’o carry on this aesthetic tradition with more pointedly political undertones. These works center on the impacts of colonization, war, and pollution to invoke the lived consequences of these intrusions on the body and the land, serving as ethical acts of resistance through documentation.

Salman T oor, Man with Face Creams and Phone Plug, 2019. Oil on canvas, 43 × 35 ¾ in. (109.2 × 90.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee 2020.121. © Salman Toor

New York Cityscapes

New York City serves as a subject in this section where works range from the early 1970s to 2020. Artists document and reflect on how the city has changed in the aftermath of significant economic, political, and catastrophic events. Examples of artistic experimentation amid the economic decay and social turmoil of the 1970s include Hiram Maristany’s photograph Hydrant: In the Air (1963, printed 2021) and Anita Steckel’s painting Skyline on Canvas #1 (Woman Pressing Finger Down) (c. 1970–74). In the 1980s and 1990s, as New York became more globalized, works such as John Ahearn’s sculpture Miss Kate (1982) and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting Untitled (1980) depict neighbors and the theater of daily life. A final group of works considers the unsettling images of tragedy and alienation in the wake of the September 11 attacks and COVID-19 pandemic: Keith Mayerson’s painting 9-11 (2007), Salman Toor’s painting Man with Face Creams and Phone Plugs (2019), and Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s video 2 Lizards (2020), among others.

Leslie Martinez, A Sublime Concealment of Time, 2023. Paint rags, studio clothes, dried paint chips, charcoal, coarse sawdust, pumice, acrylic on canvas, 60 × 75 × 8 in. (152.4 × 190.5 × 20.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; promised gift of Avo Samuelian and Hector Manuel Gonzalez P .2024.2. © Leslie Martinez. Image courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photograph by Paul Salveson

Borderlands

Rather than accepting the border between the U.S. and Mexico as a fixed and immutable geopolitical line, artists working in the region, whose works are displayed in this section, propose that this part of the American landscape is an herida abierta, or open wound, where loss and regeneration coexist. Enrique Chagoya, for example, employs a satirical approach in his codices, made in the tradition of ancient Mesoamerican manuscripts to tell the history of Western civilization from the perspective of the colonized. Leslie Martinez draws inspiration from the rugged geography of their native south Texas by sewing rags and other recycled materials to their canvas A Sublime Concealment of Time (2023), evoking a landscape marked by pain but also healing. The works gathered here, including those by Laura Aguilar, Teresita Fernández, and James Luna, consider political, cultural, and spiritual borderlands as manifestations of a landscape straddling two realities at once, revealing the creative forces that can grow from the grief of historical trauma, erasure, and omission.

Carlos Villa, My Roots, 1970-71. Acrylic and feathers on canvas, 93 1/2 × 94 1/4 × 7 ¾ in. (237.5 × 239.4 × 19.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Neysa McMein Purchase Award 72.21. © Carlos Villa Art Estate

Earthworks

Earth art and ecofeminism—artistic and philosophical movements of the 1960s and 1970s—proposed new frameworks for how we experience our shared planet. Works on view in this section explore the interconnectivity of the natural world and humanity’s place within it. While Earth art marked a conceptual turn toward engaging directly with the land, ecofeminism put forward ideas about appreciating and protecting the environment from anticolonial and feminist perspectives. Here, artists celebrate nature’s vastness and ephemerality in worksranging from the 1960s to the present day that stand as artistic counterpoints to human-centered thinking. Some artists, including Carlos Villa, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Michelle Stuart, deal directly with natural forms, using organic materials or the landscape itself in diverse ways. Nancy Holt offers more embodied ways of experiencing the world, while Carolina Caycedo and Maya Lin, among others, draw attention to regionally specific environmental concerns.

Suzanne Jackson, It is our woods, 1973. Acrylic on canvas, 60 3/8 × 60 1/2 in. (153.4 × 153.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee 2023.93a-b. © Suzanne Jackson

Southern Assemblage

Working with materials sourced from their local environments, the self- and community-taught Black artists from the southeastern U.S. featured in this section have produced hybrid collage paintings, complex sculptures, and abstractly patterned textiles derived from their lived experiences. Martha Jane Pettway, one of a group of quiltmakers from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, makes her art from functional remnants like scraps of relatives’ clothes and sugar sacks, as seen in Sweep (1980). Similarly, Joe Minter’s assembled sculpture The First Fireplace (1998) shares a visual vocabulary with the African Village in America, the immersive sculptural environment he began working on in his Birmingham, Alabama, backyard in 1989. In Angel, City, and Eye Assemblage (c. 1990–95), Purvis Young portrays the occupants of his historically segregated neighborhood in Miami on pieces of locally scavenged wood. Alabama artist and musician Lonnie Holley, who since the late 1970s has practiced what he calls “improvisational creativity, ” makes sculptures and installations out of salvaged objects, while Bessie Harvey credits her sculptures, made from found wood and branches, to divine inspiration. Through these artists’ visions, everyday materials are transformed into something enduring, carrying the stories of their origins forward.

Ulysses Jenkins, Without Your Interpretation, 1983. Video, color, sound, 13:53 min. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Film, Video, and New Media Committee 2014.105. © Ulysses Jenkins, "Without Your Interpretation", 1983

Los Angeles in Film and Video

Two works by Los Angeles film and video makers Melvonna Ballenger and Ulysses Jenkins depict complex representations of Black life in contrast to the film industry’s detrimental stereotypes. In the late 1960s, a critical gathering of African and African American students formed at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, loosely grouped under the moniker L.A. Rebellion. Their films—including Ballenger’s 1978 narrative short Rain (Nyesha)—centered Black stories and experiences. Made five years later, Jenkins’s Without Your Interpretation (1983) documents a performance staged along the LA River that used movement to critique American obliviousness to global societal ills.

Dalton Gata, I Don't Need You To Be Warm, 2021. Acrylic on linen and cedar frame, 83 × 70 in. (210.8 × 177.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Avo Samuelian and Hector Manuel Gonzalez 2022.221a-b. © Dalton Gata

Another World

Uncanny and imagined landscapes propose alternative geographies where humans, animals, and nature inhabit one another. Mundo Meza’s painting Merman with Mandolin (1984) and rafa esparza’s sculpture New American Landscapes. Self Portrait: Catching Feelings (Ecstatic) (2017) exemplify how some artists decenter an anthropocentric worldview by rejecting any traces of an identifiable landscape. In other artworks, like Dalton Gata’s painting I Don’t Need You To Be Warm (2021), shape-shifting figures appear in fellowship with their environments. On the nearby sixth-floor terrace, Alison Saar’s bronze sculpture Fall (2011) embodies a woman of the harvest with a head of branches bearing pomegranates, a symbolic representation of autumn. Together, these works signal ways of resisting hierarchical power structures to advance new visions of the future and the beings that populate it.

Hiram Maristany, Juan Gonzalez, Minister of Education of the Young Lords, at original storefront office headquarters, 1969, printed 2021. Gelatin silver print, 12 5/8 × 18 1/8 in. (32.1 × 46 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art; purchase with funds from the Photography Committee 2022.68. © Hiram Maristany

Free Public Programs A series of free in-person and virtual public programs will be offered in conjunction with Shifting Landscapes. More information about these programs and how to register will be available on the Museum’s website as details are confirmed.

For more information about this exhibition and others at the Whitney Museum of American Art, please visit their website. The museum can also be found on Instagram, YouTube, X, TikTok, Threads, and Facebook.