On March 17, 2017, the Whitney Museum of American Art opened Whitney Biennial 2017, the seventy-eighth installment of its long-running survey of American art. Co-curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, it featured sixty-three artists and collectives across painting, installation, activism, video-game design, performance, film, photography, sculpture, and music. The museum emphasized that it was the first Biennial held in the Whitney's downtown Gansevoort Street building and the largest in gallery space to that point. The exhibition became especially visible for its political atmosphere and for debates around works such as Dana Schutz's Open Casket, turning the Biennial into a flashpoint for questions of representation, race, protest, and institutional responsibility in contemporary art.
The exhibition sharpened public debate over who may represent traumatic histories inside major art institutions.
