Hardly a Tweet had been sent after the Whitney Museum of American Art released the names of the 55 artists selected for its 75th biennial before it was already known as "the women's biennial." "That's crazy," says Francesco Bonami, the chief curator of the exhibition, now on view through the end of May. "To be the women's biennial, 55 of the artists would have to be female."

Nonetheless, more than half the artists represented are women, a record for the Whitney's marquee exhibition. Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari, his associate curator, say the number was happenstance. They intend their survey, titled simply "2010," only to reflect the tenor of American art right now, which they see as "somber and intimate." Not feminine.

- "Woman's Work" by Linda Yablonksy for T Magazine



Kerry Tribe fits this year's Whitney Biennial by its title alone, 2010. For over a decade her film and video works have dealt with the significance of time and how it is remembered: in other words, memory. Typically her projects match personal and cultural constructions of memory against ones rooted in fact and neurology, weaving a cinematic effect that forces viewers to simulate and analyze cognitive experiences at the same time.

Working between Los Angeles and Berlin, Tribe has staged a talk show in which she and old friends revisit intensely ambiguous event; recreated filmic depictions of a mid-blizzard car accident; and enlisted film theorist Peter Wollen to probe his then ten-year-old daughter Audrey on the metaphysical aspects of representation and identity. For the Biennial, Tribe presents H.M., a double projection of a single, 16mm film about "patient H.M.," a man whose long-term memory was cut to a maximum of twenty seconds as the result of an experimental brain surgery in 1953.  Exactly 20 seconds out of sync, the two side-by-side projections alternate between competing and dovetailing with each other as they recount the story of H.M.'s life.

- "Making Memories: Kerry Tribe at the Whitney Biennial" by Kevin McGarry for Interview Magazine