When Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, the curators of the 81st Whitney Biennial, traveled around America seeking works to include in the show, they discovered the realities of the post-COVID world. Of the 69 artists and two collectives they chose, many grapple with our epoch, meditating on themes such as global warming and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. At the same time, the curators wondered how to present this large body of work. Iles (who is in her 60s and joined the Whitney in 1997) and Onli (who is in her 30s and most recently directed and curated the Underground Museum, in Los Angeles) wanted to form a group diverse in race, gender, nationality, and age. In the end, according to the journalist Siddhartha Mitter, they decided that “a kind of multipronged retort to the culture wars over what is ‘real’” would best represent the artists. —Jeanne Malle