Photography Instructor and Guest Curator Mo Costello selected for 2026 Whitney Biennial

Photography and Expanded Media Instructor Mo Costello, who is guest curating the exhibition Beverly’s Athens at the Athenaeum with collaborator Katz Tepper this spring, has been selected for the 2026 Whitney Biennial.

About the Whitney Biennial

Open: Mar 8, 2026
Member Previews: Mar 4–7, 2026

The eighty-second edition of the Whitney Biennial—the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States—features work of 56 artists, duos, and collectives that reflects the current moment and examines various forms of relationality, including interspecies kinships, familial relations, geopolitical entanglements, technological affinities, shared mythologies, and infrastructural supports.

Whitney Biennial 2026 offers a vivid atmospheric survey of contemporary American art shaped by a moment of profound transition. Rather than offering a definitive answer to life today, this Whitney Biennial foregrounds mood and texture, inviting visitors into environments that evoke tension, tenderness, humor, and unease. Together, the works capture the complexity of the present and propose imaginative, unruly, and unexpected forms of coexistence.

Whitney Biennial 2026 is co-organized by Whitney curators Marcela Guerrero, the DeMartini Family Curator, and Drew Sawyer, the Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography with Beatriz Cifuentes, Biennial Curatorial Assistant, and Carina Martinez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow.

About the artist

Mo Costello is an artist and educator drawn to the social life of objects. Mo’s working practice revolves around the maintenance of small-scale, community supported infrastructure for the visual and performing arts. A recent recipient of residencies from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2022), Denniston Hill (2024) and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (2024), Mo lives in Athens, GA.