Kelly Akashi Announced for Whitney Biennial 2026, New York, NY, USA
3 March 2026
From 8 March – 23 August 2026, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents the Whitney Biennial 2026 featuring Kelly Akashi.
Hyundai Motor Company and the Whitney Museum of American Art announced the opening of Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi, a site-specific presentation by Los Angeles-based artist Kelly Akashi on Whitney’s fifth-floor outdoor gallery. This marks the third Hyundai Terrace Commission since the 10-year partnership between Hyundai Motor and the Whitney was established in 2024. The Whitney Biennial 2026 commission brings together a new sculptural installation, steel relief, works on paper, and an outdoor-screen animation across the Whitney’s terrace and adjacent spaces.
Anchoring the presentation is Monument (Altadena) (2026), a chimney and walkway installation that takes shape as both reconstruction and memorial. After Akashi’s home and studio burned in the Eaton Fire in January 2025, the chimney was the only structure left standing. For the Hyundai Terrace Commission, the artist has worked with a mason to reconstruct the chimney piece by piece alongside a reconstruction of her home’s pathway, rendered in luminous cast glass brick. Installed on the terrace, the work transforms the Whitney’s outdoor gallery into a charged site of witness and a meditation on survival, rupture, and the fragile permanence of what remains.
Also on the terrace, Inheritance (Distressed) (2026) is installed on the bulkhead south of Monument (Altadena). The work draws from a personal archive, Akashi’s grandmother’s doilies, which the artist rescued from a family garage sale and later lost in the same fire. Combining images generated from pre-fire scans with weathering steel (Cor-Ten), a material historically associated with Minimalist sculpture and coded masculinity, the work brings two histories into contact: one intimate and one cultural which reflects on the struggle to know what to do with what we inherit.
Inside the museum, Imprints (2026) comprises five framed works on paper. On the terrace’s outdoor screen, Remnants (Constellations) (2026) extends the presentation into moving image, offering an animated counterpart to the exhibition’s material investigations of trace, memory, and aftermath.
Find out more via Whitney Museum of American Art.
Image: Portrait of Kelly Akashi © Kelly Akashi, Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery. Photo by Brad Torchia
