Anna Tsouhlarakis & Native Visibility at the Whitney Biennial

Photo by Anna Tsouhlarakis IT MUST BE A MARRIAGE (2023), a sculpture of a white horse with pointed arms and spears perched on a bed of inflatable condoms, is a unique and full-on comic intervention among six Native artists in the 2026 Whitney Biennial. The sextet—Tsouhlarakis, Raven Halfmoon, Teresa Baker, Nani Chacon, Kimowan Metchewais, Kekahi Wahi—comes from various ethnic groups and Hawaii, and its biennial exhibition that coincides with the 250th anniversary of the US shows the respect of American artists. At the members’ night of the Biennial, Tsouhlarakis’ work had gravitas—attracting a tight circle of influential Native artists and cultural figures, including composer Raven Chacon, designer Brian Polymode and co-curator Rachel Martin of the Gochman Collection. Their presence is not for enjoyment but for recognition, as these artists navigate spaces where institutional surveillance and political pressures shape what can be shown.

Tsouhlarakis’s spiked white horse sculpture stood apart in an exhibition that tended toward intellectual restraint. The contrast was brought into sharp relief earlier that day during a press preview when an Instagram post from ARTnews called the Biennial ‘non-divisive,’ a trait that quickly spread among artists attending the preview. Among them was past Whitney Biennial participant artist Demian DinéYazhi, who said the Biennial comes at a time when museums seem more wary of politics. “Many institutional areas are very conscious of the types of work and topics they present,” they told the Observer, expressing fears about funding pressures and political backlash. From photos circulating online, they say the show appears “very refined,” a quality that has raised questions about how institutions are handling political pressure at the moment. The art world can sometimes “feel detached from what happens in everyday life.”

Tsouhlarakis’s image approaches intervention through a different register, one that is more composed of humor and celebration than contradiction. “There’s a push and a pull,” he said of the topic. “One can say ‘she should be a matriarch’ in many ways, sometimes as praise, sometimes as derision.” The various parts of the figure—the reaching arms, the pointed spears, the base of the raised condoms and the galloping horse itself—are deliberately different. “How can I combine horses and condoms and make something unified?” he said with a laugh. “That’s how my mind works.”

Tsouhlarakis and Raven Halfmoon think alike about the memorial. Halfmoon bronze statues, Too Old To Be Neglected (2025-26) and The guards (2024), a nine-by-four foot tower. “The monument, for me, started with the things of our country—the Cahokia Mounds, the giant statue of Serpent Mound, the circular mounds in Oklahoma,” she said. “These were not activities for individuals, but for people to come together and celebrate.” Meanwhile, Tsouhlarakis’ monument to Tsouhlarakis serves a dual purpose: to laugh at and defy expectations of traditional art. IT MUST BE A MARRIAGEThe various resources ensure choice, as each and every one of them interacts with the life of the Native. At the same time, Tsouhlarakis explained, the title plays with the honorable “matriarch”, young Native women sometimes anoint themselves even before giving birth. Although he said qualifications had not previously been important, Tsouhlarakis pointed to an Aboriginal culture of giving: young Aboriginal women donating self-love and social welfare reserved for Aboriginal people. Tsouhlarakis looks at how his own perspective has changed: while titles used to be irrelevant, he now sees how naming can shape knowledge and expectations—a playful nod to determining designations in work, life, and art.

Collectively, the Biennial’s Indigenous collection asserts a shared presence, each artist negotiating memory and expression in ways that respect heritage and contemporary life. Harvest Melts On Our Tongue (2025) and In the Morning Light (2025) are Teresa Baker’s large-scale astroturf and thread-embellished works that touch on a reminder of geography and cosmology. Nani Chacon’s sixteen-foot-high triangle of metal geometric figures, Our Gods Walk Upon Us (2026), stands on the terrace and leaves the audience in awe. Chacon’s abstracted and fey figures remind one of the ancient Native and the mastery of taking things slow, showing life in its most basic touch. The bound figures confirm the power of polytheism and bind heaven and earth in a sacred weltanschauung that these artists see as being shared by humans and gods.

The collection of Native Hawaiians Kekahi Wahi, featuring Sancia Miala Shiba Nash and Drew K. Broderick, is the first of its kind to be recognized by the Whitney as American. Their work 20 minute workout [WIP] (2023/2026) adds a Hawaiian feel to the Native collection—but not without some limitations. The provocative, sensual film is interrupted by the staff of the Whitney, inserting an adult content warning before showing its irreverent queer-feminist scene, in which a Hawaiian man mocks the decorative iconography of the Washington Monument—an act that destroys a static, central colonial monument. This part of the work was planned during Trump’s first presidency when many colonial monuments were toppled, destroyed and archived while the Whitney, Met and MoMA issued statements of solidarity with Indigenous peoples. The work is also significantly revised, with annotations removed from the phrase “fuck the American Revolution,” which is the theme of the piece. Nearby, the late artist Kimowan Metchewais and his intimate portraits make the group an individual experience.

Beyond North America, the Biennial touches on global Indigeneity. Two from Cyprus and Massachusetts, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, presented the work Until we turned to fire and chased them awaycombining soundscape and three-channel high-definition video to document the Palestinian people during Israel’s ongoing genocide. Their work partially addresses DinéYazhi concerns about the disconnect between institutional reflection and lived reality. “The major problems of systemic injustice … institutions continue to dictate the ways in which we respond to difficult times, injustice and ongoing genocide,” they said. “However, indigenous artists are asserting themselves, working in these spaces despite everything.”

Ultimately, while the Biennial spans continents and histories, Tsouhlarakis’ sharp horse remains in memory, a testament to how one artist can center and perpetuate a collective Indigenous presence—even as these works negotiate the limits and caveats of institutional display.

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