Sula Bermúdez-Silverman embraces the fun and danger of Dadaism—for instance, when she encloses one of her glass sculptures in iron sheep shears in “blister iii” (2025).Art work by Sula Bermúdez-Silverman / Courtesy the artist / Hoffman Donahue; Photograph by Paul Salveson
Although Sula Bermúdez-Silverman’s simultaneously austere and sensual handblown glass sculptures—which are light-bulb-shaped and affixed to steel rods—bear no visual resemblance to Machado’s softer edges, she also knows something about art history and the humor to be found in the grand narrative. A thirty-three-year-old Los Angeles-based artist, Bermúdez-Silverman embraces the fun and danger of Dadaism—for instance, when she encloses one of her glass sculptures in iron sheep shears, in “blister iii” (2025). (Her work is especially effective because Guerrero and Sawyer have given it, and everything else in the show, plenty of space.) Bermúdez-Silverman knows something about texture as well, pairing the fragile with the hard, and making comic use of the latter word and concept throughout. Her work is partly fuelled by the fact that she is a female artist dealing with male-centric art history; it’s a kind of intellectual and visual romp around such work as Marcel Duchamp’s “50 cc of Paris Air” (1919) and Jasper Johns’s unforgettable “Light Bulb I” (1958). Johns’s light bulb is molded from Sculp-metal, and the mark of the artist’s hand is visible in the roughly sculpted base that it rests on, like a body in a coffin. Bermúdez-Silverman’s glass pieces can be similarly anthropomorphic. They resonate because—like the work of the Hawaii-born Sarah M. Rodriguez, whose otherworldly, elongated aluminum sculptures in the Biennial remind one of the stripped trees, shattered structures, and devastated people seen in newsreels about Hiroshima, life poking through devastation—they are evidence of what happens when artists don’t make art synonymous with a desire for capital.
I don’t buy it when folks say that, given the number of artists and works included in the Whitney’s Biennials, curators can’t make a cohesive statement about contemporary American art. In 2022, the Biennial’s curators, David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, proved that wrong by, among other things, challenging the museum’s traditional way of displaying work. They removed many walls and had film and video cheek by jowl with painting, while sculptures were scattered in unexpected places. In this way, they showed us that an exhibition doesn’t have to be one stationary thing—that it can move, and be many things at once.
Guerrero and Sawyer’s Biennial, which includes the work of fifty-six artists, duos, and collectives, comes to us at a terrible time in American history, when rhetoric is used to distort reality and to evade the complications of subjectivity and nuance in narrative. One afternoon, as I was taking notes at the Whitney, I wondered why, although there were some terrific paintings and drawings by young artists in the show—Johanna Unzueta’s unusual color sense and fascinating biomorphic shapes are the real thing—I kept returning to the sculptures. Kainoa Gruspe’s small, exquisite objects made with materials—stones, fabric scraps, fishhooks, nails, cowrie shells, and so on—that he gathered from military bases, resorts, and the like in Hawaii, his home state, are particularly effective. That afternoon, I realized that it was in the sculptures that I saw, most glaringly, the vast divide between the artists who had worked to find a new vocabulary and those who were centered squarely in a language that was not their own.