Nicholas Galanin by Will Wilson
ARTnews in Brief: Liverpool Biennial Names Artists—and More from November 6, 2019
By The Editors of ARTnews
November 4, 2019
Wednesday, November 6, 2019
Nicholas Galanin Gets New York Gallery Representation
One of the 2019 Whitney Biennial’s most talked-about artists, Nicholas Galanin, will now be represented by Peter Blum Gallery in New York. The artist, who is based in Sitka, Alaska, and is of Tlingit and Unangax̂ descent, frequently deals with themes related to Indigenous identity and the perception of it by non-Indigenous people in his work. At the Whitney Biennial, he showed a prayer rug resembling white noise on a television monitor, which Galanin said refers to the way that distractions are generated to ward off political strife. Earlier this year, he made headlines for being one of eight artists to request that their work be removed from the Biennial amid controversy over a Whitney board member—a topic he addressed in an essay for ARTnews. A show of his work will open at Peter Blum Gallery in 2020.