Emilio Martínez Poppe, David L. Johnson & Ignacio Gatica | Regulatory Landscapes at the Whitney Biennial 2026

This conversation brings together three artists exhibiting in the 82nd Whitney Biennial. Hosted at Princeton’s School of Architecture by the Program in Latin American Studies and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the event invites Martínez-Poppe, Johnson, and Gatica to discuss how their works engage with financial, social, public and private urban infrastructures. Though unthemed, the curators of the Biennial probe a short list of connecting topics, and “infrastructural networks” makes a special appearance. The artists engage directly with this unifying term, which informs the cities they inhabit, work in, and often address.

As Thomas Zeller notes, infrastructure has gained prominence since the Cold War. While NATO defined infrastructure in 1949 as “static buildings and permanent installations,” including headquarters, airfields, communication systems, ports, and depots, the term expanded to encompass widespread notions of systems. American economists like Walt Rostow viewed infrastructure as a critical stage in a linear progression from traditional to modern societies. By intersecting their practices with these layered systems of regulation, Martínez Poppe, Johnson, and Gatica shed light on how infrastructures shape identity, memory, urban rights, and the contested meanings of American art today.

ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKERS

Emilio Martínez Poppe is an artist who is concerned with the right to the city and the struggle of public memory. Through a social and research-led practice spanning photography, sculpture, text, and installations, he explores the spatial mechanisms and ideological conditions that reproduce state and capital infrastructures. His current work explores the potentials of cultural organizing within the public sector as in his public art commission “Civic Views” in Philadelphia and his role managing the Public Artists in Residence Program in New York. Recent commissions and exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of the City of New York, Queens Museum, Abrons Art Center, New York; Mural Arts, Icebox Project Space, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia; Petrine, Paris; and De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam.

David L. Johnson is an artist and educator based in New York City. Johnson makes work attuned to the streets of the city, pinpointing moments of slippage between public and private property. His practice utilizes photography, video, found and stolen objects, and installation to consider the politics, histories, aesthetics, and forms of use that define contemporary urban space. Johnson received a BFA from the Cooper Union in 2015 and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020. He is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program and is a part-time faculty member in the Fine Arts MFA program at the Parsons School of Design.

Ignacio Gatica lives and works between Santiago, Chile and Brooklyn, NY. Gatica deploys drawing, installation, sculpture, video, and text to reveal unsuspected connections between signs and signifiers of  economic and social structures. Gatica pays special attention to the languages of currency, finance, retail culture, and the global technologies and systems that shape our cities. Through various media, Gatica’s research is articulated through responses to the mechanisms that dictate the civic and economic infrastructures. Gatica's recent exhibitions include The Whitney Biennial 2026, Playa Privada at Galería Patricia Ready in Santiago, Chile (2025); Sujeto Cuantificado at Von Ammon Co. in Washington, D.C. (2023). His work has been featured in group exhibitions at institutions such as SculptureCenter in New York City (2022), the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, New York (2022), and El Museo del Barrio in New York, NY (2017).

MODERATOR

Rubén Gallo, Walter S. Carpenter Jr. Professor in Language, Literature and Civilization of Spain, Princeton University