Biennial exhibitions are heavy, slow-moving things. Presenting a cogent picture of two years of contemporary art is a lofty goal, and it guarantees that almost no one is satisfied.
The Bronx Museum’s AIM Biennial sidesteps this problem almost entirely. Its ambitions are more modest, and arguably more essential to a functioning art industry, dialed less to artistry than to the nurturing of new voices.
Take the barely visible contours of Jennifer Teresa Villanueva’s elegiac cyanotypes of her grandmother’s home in Monterrey, Mexico, which are like watching a memory fade. Villanueva’s work deals with the Mexican American experience, a people’s dreams and sacrifices, and does so with uncommon nuance. She is less than three years out from earning her M.F.A., and her inclusion here is her institutional debut.
The biennial is the cap to a longstanding fellowship at the museum, Artist in the Marketplace, which for 45 years has provided emerging artists with a practical education in the workaday realities of being an artist. Unlike a conventional residency or studio program, which grants space or focuses on output, or the theoretical corners of artistic practices, the museum offers a yearlong professional development program that touches on dry but imperative things including financial literacy, archive maintenance, time management — things that artists (maybe) learn later, and often the hard way.
When the fellowship was conceived in 1980, a museum acting as a career incubator was essentially unheard-of. “Careerism” was effectively a dirty word. The fellowship and biennial could be seen as a kind of counterbalance to the splashier Whitney Biennial and its vaunted Independent Study Program, and has proved no less influential. Alumni include Glenn Ligon (1984), Polly Apfelbaum (1986), LaToya Ruby Frazier (2009), as well as Jacolby Satterwhite and Njideka Akunyili Crosby (both 2013). If the fellowship did not totally anticipate the art market’s big money turn, it was the only program preparing artists to meet its realities.
This seventh edition of the biennial, organized by Patrick Rowe and Nell Klugman, is titled “Forms of Connection.” It includes 28 artists, a pluralistic contingent with origins in New York, Florida, Israel, South Korea, Cuba, Peru and New Jersey. Compared with other repeating group exhibitions, which often reiterate formulas and reflect trends, the biennial does not propose a distilled response to its time. It is both the product and the promise of dialogue rather than a curatorial mood — a community generating in real time.
Still, many of its themes reflect the preoccupations of contemporary art of the last decade — identity and individualism remain a stubborn constant — but they’re processed in a way that feels less defensive than expansive. There are shared ideas about migration, resiliency, healing and diasporic memory, often affecting.
And there is the real, undergirding utility of artists learning how to communicate with a general public, and the public being exposed to new perspectives.
Accordingly, not all the work here is fully cooked. Before you even enter the museum, you can spot a mangled American flag through a window — a bad portent. Subversions of the flag can be obvious, too-easy shortcuts for political commentary. The 2024 Whitney Biennial also opened with one, by the scavenger artist Ser Serpas, the flag slumped on a sofa. If the heavy-handedness of that work was meant to telegraph the body politic’s collective sense of exhaustion, Asia Stewart’s piece in the Bronx, “the money is in the blades” (2025), wants to say something about how that body has since deteriorated, its nerves well and truly shredded.
The flag is a remnant of a performance, presented here on video, in which Stewart calmly lathers and rakes a disposable plastic razor over it on a summer day in a park in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. The gesture is less provocative than it wants to be (flag tampering seems to really perturb the Trump administration; a 2025 executive order aims to prosecute flag burning, though the order is unclear on drugstore shaving cream). Angry and unsubtle, it is undoubtedly a correct avatar for the state of the union. It stands apart — both in the floor plan and in temperament — the lone overtly political signifier of a turbulent moment.
Maybe that’s because we’ve been living through a turbulent moment for the last 10 years, or longer, or forever, depending on your tolerance. Perhaps as a result, these mostly young artists seem less interested in didacticism, favoring instead a sense of earnestness in the face of compounding calamity.
A visitor entering the museum is met with the less confrontational “Big Brother Obii Knows Best (Ft. Freddy & Shawn)” (2025), the Queens-born artist Piero Penizzotto’s sunny papier-mâché sculptures of a colleague and two students at the middle school in the Bronx where he teaches art. The trio, nearly life size and unbothered by the self-conscious currents of contemporary art, owes much to the loving plaster-cast portraits of Bronxites by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres.
Ahearn and Torres’s work came out of Fashion Moda, an experimental community art space also unconcerned with academic art, which operated in the South Bronx from 1978 to 1993. Penizzotto’s work makes the case that its model is still needed.
Bryan Fernandez’s “Beso a La Cámara” (“Kiss to the Camera”) (2025), at first glance a charming, Red Grooms-style street scene soon curdles into surveillance critique. Basic cameras, the kind marketed to anxious homeowners, perched in the canvas like peering pigeons, turn visitors into the subjects of surveillance. “Cámara” recalls “Zoom Pavilion,” from 2015, in which Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Krzysztof Wodiczko fragmented images of museum visitors in real time, reassembling them into a panopticon quilt of algorithmic control.
Fernandez’s intervention is simpler and less anxiety inducing, merely beaming a live feed to monitors at the entry desk a few paces away — something the museum was likely already doing elsewhere — but it still creates a potent awareness of the social dimension of observation.
Much of the work negotiates how the present is buffeted by the past. A diaphanous performance, on video, and ceramic wall relief by the Jamaican-born artist Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow channels the ghosts of Caribbean slavery and manages to evoke both Betty and Francesca Woodman. Motohiro Takeda’s “Nights in April (Ark)” (2025), a burned wood dinghy moored on a low concrete plinth carefully spread with ash, is suspended between life and death, catastrophe and deliverance.
Perhaps ironically, considering the market thrust of the fellowship, much of the work here exists in opposition to it. There’s plenty of ungainly sculpture, some self-destructing (Jordan Corine Cruz’s full-size park bench made of votive wax, liable to melt), found furniture and elaborately installed video.
Far less common are tidily salable art objects like the figurative painting that dominated galleries and other sales floors in recent years. Whether this cohort has internalized their program’s lessons, or been radicalized by them remains to be seen. Connection, the exhibition makes clear, is the point. It is more proof of concept than statement — the concept being the exchange.
The Bronx Museum AIM Biennial: “Forms of Connection”
Through June 29, 2026, the Bronx Museum, 1040 Grand Concourse, the Bronx; 718-681-6000, bronxmuseum.org.
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