Shifting Landscapes

Through Jan 25

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Two people with bags stand closely together, looking at a large, colorful abstract painting with flowers and textures.
Two people with bags stand closely together, looking at a large, colorful abstract painting with flowers and textures.

Installation view of Shifting Landscapes (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, November 1, 2024-January 2026). Firelei Báez, Untitled (Tabula Anemographica seu Pyxis Navtic), 2021. Artwork © Firelei Báez. Photograph by Filip Wolak

On view
Floor 6

Open: Nov 1, 2024–Jan 25, 2026

While the landscape genre has long been associated with picturesque vistas, Shifting Landscapes considers a more expansive interpretation of the category, exploring how evolving political, ecological, and social issues motivate artists as they attempt to represent the world around them. Drawn from the Whitney’s collection, the exhibition features works from the 1960s to the present and is organized according to distinct thematic sections. Some of these coalesce around material and conceptual affinities: 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, such as the frenzied cityscape of modern New York or the experimental filmmaking scene of 1970s Los Angeles. Still others show how artists invent fantastic new worlds where humans, animals, and the land become one. Whether depicting the effects of industrialization on the environment, grappling with the impact of geopolitical borders, or proposing imagined spaces as a way of destabilizing the concept of a “natural” world, the works gathered here bring ideas of land and place into focus, foregrounding how we shape and are shaped by the spaces around us.

Shifting Landscapes 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.

Review accessibility information before visiting Shifting Landscapes.

Major support for Shifting Landscapes is provided by Judy Hart Angelo, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Whitney’s National Committee.

Significant support is provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Generous support is provided by The Keith Haring Foundation Exhibition Fund.

Audio

Chelsey Pellot, Assistant Manager of Foundation & Government Relations, writes about the perfect soundtrack for Shifting Landscapes.

With its themes of cultural resistance, reclamation, and preservation, Bad Bunny’s 2025 album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, is the perfect soundtrack to Shifting Landscapes. Song by song, it directly overlaps with the exhibition’s core issues, offering a unique sonar and visual experience when paired together.  

The album’s opening track, NUEVAYoL, pays homage to New York City’s influence on Puerto Rican culture, a history explored in Shifting Landscapes’s New York Cityscapes section, which features Nuyorican artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Miguel Luciano, Hiram Maristany, Sophie Rivera, and Rigoberto Torres. These artists demonstrate that the influence goes both ways—Puerto Rico has had an immense impact on how we experience the Big Apple or la gran manzana.  

The song LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii draws parallels between Hawai’i and Puerto Rico’s complex relationships to the United States. It provides a somber soundtrack to Piliāmo‘o’s photographs depicting how the multiyear construction of the H-3 Interstate in O‘ahu, initiated by the U.S. government, impacted local communities. 

PERFuMITO NUEVO captures the essence of the other-worldly figure portrayed in Dalton Gata’s painting I Don’t Need You To Be Warm with its ethereal sound and dreamlike lyrics. Wearing a billowing furry coat, shiny black stiletto boots, and a crown of fire atop flowing blond hair, “The figure in Gata’s painting fashions a sense of self-confidence that is alluring,” the exhibition’s curator, Marcela Guerrero, observes. “She might very well be who Bad Bunny is singing about when he says ‘No parece leo ni escorpio; Pa mí que ella tiene su propio signo; Fría, sentimental, está en temporada de portarse mal.’” (“She doesn’t look like a Leo or Scorpio; I think she has her own sign; cold, sentimental, she’s in the season of misbehaving.”)  The exploration of evolving political, ecological, and social issues, and how artists portray the world around them, is the crux of Shifting Landscapes, and mirrors Bad Bunny's similar inspirations and motivations behind his powerful work of art, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS.

Events

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On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whathappensontheship.space/artport

On the Hour projects can contain motion and sound. To respect your accessibility settings autoplay is disabled.