Whitney Biennial; Day for Night, First View Invitation
2006
The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser-known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC.
The Whitney's signature panoramic survey of the latest in American art was the seventy-third in the series of Annuals and Biennials inaugurated by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1932. The 2006 Biennial examined contemporary art-making in America at a moment of profound global change. The exhibition, titled “Day for Night” after François Truffaut's 1973 film, conjures a mood of dark intensity, shifting between beauty and degradation, doubt and conformity, the seductive and the strange. The Whitney's signature exhibition, the Biennial, has become the most important survey of the state of contemporary art in America today.
The curators’ objective for the 2006 Biennial was to invert accepted ideas and to present artwork that exists in a kind of liminal state between dialectics. Day for Night was the antithesis of the art fair; rather, it is dominated by installations that allowed each artist a context for radical narrative interventions.
Client: Whitney Museum of American Art, and Sotheby’s; Designer & Art Director: Tirso Montan; Creative Director: Sandra Burch; Event Managers: Michael Moore, Courtney Smith; Marketing Director: Amy Todd Middleton; Production Manager: Sotheby’s - Spire Richard Walton; Printers: Phoenix Lithography Keith Harrington; Soho Letterpress Anne Noonan
