[2][3][4] The Biennial helped bring artists like Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and Jeff Koons, among others, to prominence.

[9] The Whitney Museum had a long history beginning in 1932 of having a large group exhibition of invited American artists every year called the 'Whitney Annual'.

The museum is leaving the Upper East Side for the meatpacking district, where it is scheduled to open its new building, designed by Renzo Piano, in 2015.

of a Hispanic family's living room and Daniel Joseph Martinez's metal buttons bearing the message "I can't imagine ever wanting to be white.

Vanessa Faye Johnson stated that despite intentions, the "lack of exchange and dialogue, the simplification of complex issues in the Biennial" effectively cast the artists largely as victims in the eyes of the public.

[14] The art historian Robert Hughes vehemently criticized lack of painting, and the "wretched pictorial ineptitude" of the artists, dismissed the abundance of text as "useless, boring mock documentation", and mocked the focus on "exclusion and marginalization ... [in] a world made bad for blacks, Latinos, gays, lesbians and women in general.

Eunsong Kim and Maya Isabella Mackrandilal criticized the piece: "The insertion of people of color into white space doesn't make it less colonial or more radical—that's the rhetoric of imperialistic multiculturalism, a bullshit passé theory."

[21] The 2019 Whitney Biennial was boycotted by a group of artists, in protest of the museum's vice chairman, Warren Kanders.

The United Nations released a report stating Israeli security forces may have committed war crimes and should be held individually and collectively accountable for the deaths of 189 Palestinian protesters in Gaza.

[22] The artists who withdrew from include: Korakrit Arunanondchai, Meriem Bennani, Nicole Eisenman, Nicholas Galanin, Eddie Arroyo, Christine Sun Kim, Agustina Woodgate, and Forensic Architecture.

The Forensic Architecture biennial submission, “Triple-Chaser” (2019), collected evidence, ammunition rounds, and eyewitness testimony that links Warren Kanders to the killings and maiming of Palestinians.