The Young Painter Curators Are Rushing to Work With

Taína H. Cruz· Guest0:00

[gentle music] I want that experience endlessly the whole time you're looking at my work, so duration matters in that way of how can I really capture and freeze the person in that time and sit with the moods that, like, may come up.

Ben Davis· Host0:15

[upbeat music] I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News. The Whitney Biennial is here. That would be the Whitney Museum's big curated show, which every two years brings together dozens of artists, always closely watched by critics and public as a statement about what is important now in art. Hot on its heels, next month, MoMA PS1 is staging Greater New York. That event happens every five years, bringing together dozens more artists to take the temperature of art in New York. Taina H. Cruz, my guest today, is featured in both of these shows at once. For the Whitney, she's even, in a way, the face of the show. A work by Cruz, a green-tinged close-up painting of a grinning child called I Saw the Future and It Smiled Back, is blown up on a billboard outside the museum in the Meatpacking District. This is a lot of attention for an artist who's relatively young, born in 1998, and just getting her MFA from Yale's famous School of Painting last year.