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

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 is a visual artist who lives and works between New York City and Santiago. His multidisciplinary practice—spanning installations, sculpture, video, drawings, and text—critically examines economic systems, neoliberalism, global capitalism, and their impacts on urban life and everyday experiences. He often appropriates financial symbols, data, and architectural elements to highlight connections between places like Wall Street and Santiago's financial district.