THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART AND HYUNDAI MOTOR PRESENT THE WORK OF MARINA ZURKOW AS THE NEXT HYUNDAI TERRACE COMMISSION
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The Whitney Museum of American Art and Hyundai Motor Company present the next Hyundai Terrace Commission by Marina Zurkow. Presented on the Whitney’s fifth-floor terrace, Zurkow’s The River is a Circle marks the Museum’s second Hyundai Terrace Commission, part of a 10-year partnership between Hyundai Motor and the Whitney, and will be on view from April 9, 2025 through early 2026.
Created in collaboration with James Schmitz and Blake Goble, this innovative work by Zurkow comprises an animation and accompanying installation. The River is a Circle builds on the artist’s previous pieces, Hudson Follies (2022) and Does the River Flow Both Ways? (2022), which offer a split view of the Hudson River, allowing visitors to simultaneously observe the world above and below the water. Shown on a large-scale video wall, The River is a Circle is an animation based on custom software that depicts a complex river ecosystem of fluctuating social and biological groups, such as references to hyperlocal community history, barges with historical scenes traveling along the water, schools of fish, and oyster reefs. The dynamic elements of this ecosystem are driven by algorithmic probability. Responding to real-time weather, the software system continuously reflects New York City’s current conditions and seasons.
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Focusing on the Meatpacking District surrounding the Whitney Museum, The River is a Circle explores a combination of local history and river ecology, researched with the help of Hudson River Park Trust. This site-specific work alludes to significant moments that have impacted the Manhattan neighborhood’s evolution, such as the Lenape trading post located nearby, the meatpacking industry, the illicit night life of the 1970s, gentrification, and the adjacent installations by artists Gordon Matta-Clark and David Hammons. The artist intends to speculate on a circular economy and a potentially positive return to more modest strategies of maintaining ecosystems.
“Marina’s work has consistently engaged with the complexities of ecosystems in a poetic way, and the Whitney Museum’s fifth-floor terrace is a prime location for her site-specific exploration of local waterways and history,” said Whitney Curator of Digital Art Christiane Paul. “Her installation will invite visitors to see the Museum in the multilayered context of its environment.”
“We are at a crucial moment in which we must devise an integrated approach to exploring sustainable futures in the environmental, economic, and social domains,” said DooEun Choi, Art Director of Hyundai Motor Company. “Hyundai Terrace Commission: Marina Zurkow: The River is a Circle will introduce us to an ever-changing ecosystem that our interconnected surroundings generate in real time, triggering us to take collective action for a shared future.”
Hyundai Terrace Commission: Marina Zurkow: The River is a Circle is organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art, with David Lisbon, Curatorial Assistant.
The Hyundai Terrace Commission enables annual site-specific installations on the Museum’s largest outdoor gallery, offering an innovative platform for artists to experiment, respond to the space and the neighborhood, and showcase their work to the world. The commissions will encompass installations, sculpture, performances, and multimedia projects. In addition to the Hyundai Terrace Commission, Hyundai Motor also supports the Whitney Biennial, presented every other year, aligning the brand with the Whitney’s most groundbreaking and signature presentation of the leading contemporary American art of our day.
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Marina Zurkow
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Marina Zurkow (b. 1962) invites people to explore ways of knowing and feeling nature-culture tensions and environmental messes. By engaging research, speculation, and technologies, she fosters intimate multispecies and geophysical connections. Zurkow works as a founding member of the collaborative initiatives More&More (Investing in Futures), Dear Climate, and Climoji. Recent exhibitions include WHAT IF? at MoMA’s Creativity Lab (New York); Antroposcenes, Lo Pati Centre d’Art (Amposta); The Breath Eaters, Wolfsonian Museum (Miami); Underfoot/Overhead, Wasserman Projects (Detroit); and Can the Substrate Speak? at Festival Art Souterrain (Montreal). Her work has also been shown at SFMOMA; Walker Art Center; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the National Museum for Women in the Arts. Zurkow was a 2022 fellow at the Environmental Media Lab, Princeton University; and received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Rice University, NYFA, NYSCA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She resides in the Hudson Valley, New York, is represented by bitforms gallery, and teaches at NYU.
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Hyundai Terrace Commission: Marina Zurkow: The River is a Circle is part of a multiyear partnership with Hyundai Motor in support of an annual site-specific installation on the Whitney Museum’s fifth-floor outdoor gallery.
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The Whitney Museum of American Art, founded in 1930 by the artist and philanthropist Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), houses the foremost collection of American art from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Mrs. Whitney, an early and ardent supporter of modern American art, nurtured groundbreaking artists when audiences were still largely preoccupied with the Old Masters. From her vision arose the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has been championing the most innovative art of the United States for ninety years. The core of the Whitney’s mission is to collect, preserve, interpret, and exhibit American art of our time and serve a wide variety of audiences in celebration of the complexity and diversity of art and culture in the United States. Through this mission and a steadfast commitment to artists, the Whitney has long been a powerful force in support of modern and contemporary art and continues to help define what is innovative and influential in American art today.
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Whitney Museum Land Acknowledgment
The Whitney is located in Lenapehoking, the ancestral homeland of the Lenape. The name Manhattan comes from their word Mannahatta, meaning “island of many hills.” The Museum’s current site is close to land that was a Lenape fishing and planting site called Sapponckanikan (“tobacco field”). The Whitney acknowledges the displacement of this region’s original inhabitants and the Lenape diaspora that exists today.
As a museum of American art in a city with vital and diverse communities of Indigenous people, the Whitney recognizes the historical exclusion of Indigenous artists from its collection and program. The Museum is committed to addressing these erasures and honoring the perspectives of Indigenous artists and communities as we work for a more equitable future. To read more about the Museum’s Land Acknowledgment, visit the Museum’s website.
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Established in 1967, Hyundai Motor Company is present in over 200 countries with more than 120,000 employees dedicated to tackling real-world mobility challenges around the globe. Based on the brand vision ‘Progress for Humanity,’ Hyundai Motor is accelerating its transformation into a Smart Mobility Solution Provider. The company invests in advanced technologies such as robotics and Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) to bring about revolutionary mobility solutions while pursuing open innovation to introduce future mobility services. In pursuit of a sustainable future for the world, Hyundai will continue its efforts to introduce zero-emission vehicles with industry-leading hydrogen fuel cell and EV technologies.
More information about Hyundai Motor and its products can be found at: https://www.hyundai.com/worldwide/en/ or Newsroom: Media Hub by Hyundai
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HYUNDAI MOTOR’S ART PROJECTS
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For over a decade, Hyundai Motor Company has deepened its partnerships with global museums and cultural organizations, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), Tate, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Most recently, Hyundai Motor announced Hyundai Translocal Series, a new partnership initiative that roots itself in fostering dialogues and exchanges among art institutions in Korea and across the globe. Hyundai Motor’s own art initiatives include open-call programs such as the VH AWARD, Hyundai Blue Prize+, and Artlab Editorial, a digital platform dedicated to art writing by transnational voices. Our ongoing collaborations embrace the complexities of the cultural landscape by exploring new ideas and perspectives within and beyond the art ecosystem.
Visit https://artlab.hyundai.com or follow @hyundai.artlab #HyundaiArtlab to learn more about our partnerships and programs.
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The Whitney Museum of American Art is located at 99 Gansevoort Street between Washington and West Streets, New York City. Public hours are Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, 10:30 am–6 pm; Friday, 10:30 am–10 pm; and Saturday and Sunday, 10:30 am–6 pm. Closed Tuesday. Visitors twenty-five years and under and Whitney members: FREE. The Museum offers FREE admission and special programming for visitors of all ages every Friday evening from 5–10 pm and on the second Sunday of every month.
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