Curator Q&A: The Whitney's Gary Carrion-Murayari

A talk with the young curator of the Whitney Museum

At 29, Gary Carrion-Murayari is already an art-world veteran, having landed at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art fresh out of college six years ago. Now he’s been tapped to co-curate the museum’s most celebrated exhibition, the Whitney Biennial, which highlights up-and-coming and relatively obscure artists, many of whom go on to become big-time names. We sat down with the boyish auteur to ask what’s in store for this year’s eagerly anticipated show.

Has the artistic landscape changed over the course of the last six years?
Definitely. Artists are always responding to what’s happening in the world, and a series of drastic changes has happened since I started here in 2004. It’s partly politics, but economics play a role in it, as well. When there’s more money flying into the art world, there’s more money to do larger-scale projects. Things with higher production values were more characteristic of the earlier part of the last decade than now.

Tell us about the selection process for the Whitney Biennial.
Francesco Bonami and I were named curators in December 2008 and got under way immediately in the new year. We go in with a list of artists we’re interested in, but we also seek recommendations from other curators and colleagues that we respect. If we’re going to a new city, we’ll get in contact with artists we know there and ask them about their friends and students. It’s really through recommendations that we start doing studio visits.

Was there a theme that helped you when deciding the criteria necessary to be featured?
We didn’t want to go in with any particular theme in mind. The best part is visiting hundreds of artists and not knowing what you’re going to see. But certainly, themes emerged. There has been a return to abstraction, in both painting and even photography. Within film and video there’s a real engagement with the body again.

Are there any artists in particular whom you’re really excited about?
There are some young painters like Sarah Crowner and Tauba Auerbach who are really fantastic and are getting pretty big but aren’t really household names yet. Alex Hubbard, who works in video, is fantastic. Jesse Aron Green, an artist from Los Angeles, also does really interesting projects. Those are some of the ones I’m partial to.

How has the exhibition changed over the years?
The Biennial started two years after the museum opened in 1930, so it really shows the history of the museum. Edward Hopper was in many Biennials, and so were people like Milton Avery. The history of American art is certainly tied to the history of artists who have shown in the Biennial.