Trust Me: an intergenerational exhibition at the Whitney Museum

From August 19 to November 26, 2023, the Whitney Museum presents the exhibition “Trust Me”

Source: Whitney Museum · Image: Whitney Museum, photo by MusikAnimal, license Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

“Trust Me” imagines the reparative possibility of shared emotional experience, bringing together works by approximately twelve intergenerational artists from the Whitney’s permanent collection, including Moyra Davey, Lola Flash, Mary Manning, and D’Angelo Lovell Williams. Working against photography’s documentary impulse and the drive toward conceptual rigor, the images in the exhibition offer intuition and indeterminacy as viable creative modes and explore vulnerability as a fruitful ground from which to make and communicate meaning.

Within and beyond the image, representations of familial and ancestral bonds, friendship, romantic partnership, and networks of influence and exchange establish connectivity—and therefore vulnerability—as an artistic and human imperative. Through intimate personal reflection and poetic attention to everyday objects, the artists in “Trust Me” ultimately reach out to an audience they cannot predict, gambling on the viewer’s openness to the experience at hand and the capacity of the image to carry it.

The exhibition is organized by Kelly Long, Senior Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art.