Beer jug, Eastern Tibet, circa 1940s. Copper with brass, decoration, iron handle.

NEW YORK CITY – Maxwell L. Anderson, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, announced plans February 8 for the museum’s 2002 Biennial, which will open in March 2002.

Lawrence Rinder, the Whitneyís Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator of Contemporary Art, is to be the exhibition’s chief curator. Chrissie Iles, the Whitney’s curator of film and video, will select works to be shown in the Museum’s Kaufman Astoria Studios Film and Video Gallery. Performance and sound art will be selected by Debra Singer, the Museum’s associate curator of contemporary art.

“The Biennial is the Whitney’s defining tradition and our way of introducing the public to new work by established and emerging American artists,” Anderson stated. “Throughout its history of fostering the development of American art, the Whitney has supported artistic freedom and diversity. Among the primary vehicles for achieving this mission have been the museum’s Annual and Biennial exhibitions, which have always inspired artistic innovation and debate. I am excited at the prospect of the talent, wisdom and energy that Larry Rinder will bring to the 2002 edition of the Biennial.”

Lawrence Rinder was one of six curators of the 2000 Whitney Biennial. Since coming to the Whitney in the spring of 2000 as Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator of Contemporary Art, he has selected the contemporary works on continual view in the Museum’s second floor Permanent Collection galleries. He is also responsible for curating, with Debra Singer, BitStreams, the Museum’s groundbreaking exhibition on the impact of digital technology on contemporary art, opening March 22, 2001.

Before his arrival at the Whitney, Rinder was director of the CCAC Institute at the California College of Arts and Crafts, San Francisco and Oakland, California. Prior to this, he was curator for Twentieth Century art and MATRIX curator at the Berkeley Art Museum.

His MATRIX exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum include Jochen Gerz: The Berkeley Oracle (1997); Richard Tuttle: Folded Space (1994); and Group Material: the AIDS Timeline (1989). Some of his other exhibitions include Louise Bourgeois: Drawings (1996); In a Different Light (1995); and Andrea Fraser: Aren’t They Lovely? (1992), all at the Berkeley Art Museum; and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Other Things Seen, Other Things Heard (1992) at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He received a M.A. in Art History from Hunter College. Rinder was also an advisor to the 1991 and 1993 Whitney Biennial exhibitions.

Chrissie Iles has been curator of film and video at the Whitney since 1997. Her projects at the Museum have included the film and video series for Part II of The American Century, Art and Culture 1900-2000; The Color of Ritual, the Color of Thought: Women Avant-Garde Filmmakers in America 1930-2000; and Flashing into the Shadows-The Artist’s Film after Pop and Minimalism 1966-1976 (currently on view through April 2001). Her upcoming projects include Into the Light: The Projected and Interactive Image in American Art, 1965-78 (Fall 2001). From 1988 to 1997 Iles was Head of Exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England.

Debra Singer, associate curator of contemporary art, was until recently the Branch Curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, where she was responsible for curating contemporary exhibitions and commissioning new work, including Lee Boroson: Underpass (1999-2000), Shahzia Sikander: Acts of Balance (2000), Pastoral Pop! (2000), and Expanding Horizons: Landscape Photographs from the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is also the producer of the Performance on 42nd series.

The 2002 Biennial is the 71st in the series of Annuals and Biennials inaugurated by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1932.