Members met at the Whitney Museum for a private tour of the 2022 Whitney Biennial: Quiet As It’s Kept.

“Quiet as It’s Kept—a colloquialism typically said before the statement of something obviously meant to be kept a secret—was selected as the title after the co-organizers, curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, were inspired by the usage of the phrase in a Toni Morrison novel and as the title of a Max Roach album. ‘The 2022 biennial arrives at a time haunted by a global pandemic and plagued by ongoing racial and economic inequities and polarizing politics,’ says Adam D. Weinberg, the museum’s Alice Pratt Brown director. ‘The artists in the exhibition challenge us to consider how these realities affect our senses of self and community and offer one of the broadest and most diverse takes on art in the United States that the Whitney has offered in many years.’”

– Pili Swanson, Gotham Magazine

The Whitney Biennial is the longest-running survey of American art, and has been a hallmark of the Museum since 1932. Initiated by the Museum’s founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney as an invitational exhibition featuring artwork created in the preceding two years, the biennials were originally organized by medium, with painting alternating with sculpture and works on paper. Starting in 1937, the Museum shifted to yearly exhibitions called Annuals. The current format—a survey show of work in all media occurring every two years—has been in place since 1973. More than 3,600 artists have participated in a biennial or annual.