The Whitney Museum of American Art has joined with Aperture and the Institute of Fine Arts to engage in a series of conversations that center photography as a creative act and means of responding to urgent questions in the world around us.
This program brings together Kelly Akashi, Mo Costello, and Erin Jane Nelson, three artists in the 2026 Whitney Biennial who work with an expansive idea of photography, using photographic ideas and practices to make work that does not necessarily take the final form of a photograph. Together with Michael Famighetti, editor of Kimowan Metchwais: A Kind of Prayer (Aperture 2023), who will speak to the innovative multimedia work of Kimowan Metchewais (1963-2011), this program will consider how contemporary artists are engaging with photographic methods and histories. Following brief presentations, Biennial co-curator Drew Sawyer will moderate a conversation about these expanded photographic practices and artistic interventions that continue to reinvent the medium.
Speakers
Kelly Akashi is a Los Angeles-based artist whose visual language emphasizes the impermanence of the natural world, recording and indexing fragmented moments in time. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the MOCA Los Angeles Twelfth Distinguished Women in the Arts Award (2024), the LACMA Art + Technology Grant (2022), and the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize (2019).
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.
Michael Famighetti is editor in chief of Aperture magazine and the editorial program. He is currently a visiting critic at the University of Hartford’s MFA program and a participant in the School of Visual Arts’ Mentors program. His writing has appeared in Frieze, Bookforum, and Aperture, among other publications.
Erin Jane Nelson is a Santa Fe-based artist whose practice is grounded in photography sourced from her personal archive of found and original images. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, DOCUMENT, and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, among others, and she is a recipient of the 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.
Drew Sawyer is the Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has previously held curatorial positions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Columbus Museum of Art and received a 2020 Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators.
