WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART PRESENTS

THE WORK OF DIGITAL ARTIST MARINA ZURKOW

The Whitney Museum of American Art will present Marina Zurkow: Parting Worlds at the Museum this spring. Opening in April 2025, Parting Worlds features a selection of software-based works by artist Marina Zurkow, whose practice explores the intersection of nature and culture through various mediums, including animation, code, and participatory experiences like dinners and card games. Zurkow uses software that drives the interplay of the hand-drawn elements seen on screen and their ever-changing compositions to reflect on the complexity of ecological and social systems. The exhibition includes two works on view in the Museum’s fifth-floor gallery and the Hyundai Terrace Commission by Zurkow will be on view in the adjacent terrace.

The animations Mesocosm (Wink, Texas) (2012) and The Earth Eaters (2025) in the fifth-floor gallery both imagine the implications of environmental damage and the repeated extraction of raw materials. Mesocosm (Wink, Texas) is an animation that depicts the landscape surrounding Wink Sink 2, a large sinkhole that has been expanding steadily since it formed in 2002 on private oil company property in the small Texas town of Wink. The Earth Eaters is an animated, software-based “fairy tale” that depicts an endless cycle of floating islands, animal inhabitants, and miners who hack away at the land. Together, these works evoke impermanence and loss as environments change and disappear due to human intervention and natural evolution.

The next Hyundai Terrace Commission, The River is a Circle, will be on view on the Whitney’s fifth-floor terrace through early 2026. 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 traveling vessels, schools of fish, and oyster reefs. The animation, accompanied by an installation, offers a split view of the Hudson River, revealing the world above and below the water. Driven by algorithmic probability and real-time weather, the software system continuously reflects New York City’s current conditions and seasons.

This innovative work by Marina Zurkow, in collaboration with James Schmitz and Blake Goble, marks the Museum’s second Hyundai Terrace Commission, a newly imagined annual site-specific installation project supported by Hyundai Motor as part of a multiyear partnership. The 10-year partnership between the Whitney and Hyundai Motor expands a shared commitment to presenting the most relevant art and ideas of our time and opening up discussions for audiences worldwide.

Marina Zurkow: Parting Worlds is organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art, with David Lisbon, Curatorial Assistant.

The Hyundai Terrace Commission is an annual site-specific installation on the Whitney Museum’s fifth-floor outdoor gallery, and part of a multiyear partnership with Hyundai Motor.

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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.

THE WHITNEY

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.

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.

VISITOR INFORMATION

Image credit:

Marina Zurkow, Mesocosm (Wink, Texas), 2012. Custom software-driven hand-drawn animation, aspect ratio 16:9. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Digital Art Committee 2019.309. © Marina Zurkow. Animation in collaboration with Michelle Mayer. Sound in collaboration with Lem Jay Ignacio. Software Developer, Sam Brenner