Whitney Museum of American Art
Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi
Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi
Whitney Museum of American Art
About the Project
The third Hyundai Terrace Commission, Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi is on view on Whitney’s fifth-floor terrace from March 8 through August 23, 2026.
Artist Kelly Akashi presents this year’s Hyundai Terrace Commission that moves between personal history and collective aftermath. Anchoring the presentation is Monument (Altadena) (2026), a chimney and walkway installation that takes shape as both reconstruction and memorial. After Akashi’s home and studio burned in the Eaton Fire in January 2025, the chimney was the only structure left standing. For this Hyundai Terrace Commission, the artist has worked with a mason to reconstruct the chimney piece by piece along with a reconstruction of her home’s pathway, rendered in luminous cast glass brick. Installed on the terrace, the work transforms the Whitney’s outdoor gallery into a charged site of witness and a meditation on survival, rupture, and the fragile permanence of what remains.
Also on the terrace, Inheritance (Distressed) (2026) is installed on the bulkhead south of Monument (Altadena). The work draws from a personal archive, Akashi’s grandmother’s doilies, which the artist rescued from a family garage sale and later lost in the same fire. Combining images generated from pre-fire scans with weathering steel (Cor-Ten), a material historically associated with Minimalist sculpture and coded masculinity, the work brings two histories into contact: one intimate and one cultural which reflects on the struggle to know what to do with what we inherit. Inside the museum, Imprints (2026) comprises five framed works on paper.
On the terrace’s outdoor screen, Remnants (Constellations) (2026) extends the presentation into moving image, offering an animated counterpart to the exhibition’s material investigations of trace, memory, and aftermath.
Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi is presented as part of Whitney Biennial 2026. This year’s Whitney Biennial is an atmospheric survey of contemporary American art shaped by a moment of profound transition. Rather than seeking a definitive answer, the exhibition will foreground mood and texture, while proposing imaginative forms of coexistence. Hyundai Motor supports the Whitney Biennial, the museum’s landmark exhibition series and the longest-running survey of American art, as part of its 10-year partnership with the Whitney.
Whitney Biennial 2026 is co-organized by Whitney curators Marcela Guerrero, DeMartini Family Curator, and Drew Sawyer, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, with Beatriz Cifuentes, Biennial Curatorial Assistant, and Carina Martinez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow.
About the Artist
Kelly Akashi (b. 1983, Los Angeles) is a sculptor whose practice examines impermanence, temporality, and the material traces of human experience. Executed with rigorous conceptual intent and a deep reverence for process, her work spans glass, bronze, stone, and cast materials, and often uses the hand as a recurring motif. Akashi’s sculptures, which range from glass-blown flowers and towering weeds to cast hands, bodies, and extinct shells, offer a poetic yet unsentimental reflection on mortality and transience. She holds a BFA from Otis College of Art & Design and an MFA from the University of Southern California, studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, and recently completed an artist residency at Pilchuck Glass School in 2025.
About the Program
Hyundai Terrace Commission
The annual Hyundai Terrace Commission gives artists and curators a platform to present site-specific works on the museum’s fifth-floor terrace, as part of the Whitney’s 10-year partnership with Hyundai Motor. Artists are invited to create large-scale, experimental projects that enable them to test their aspirations, incubate their creativity, and respond to the space and the neighborhood. During the years of the Whitney Biennial (every two years), the fifth-floor terrace space will feature the commissioned work of an artist for the Hyundai Terrace Commission in conjunction with the larger Biennial exhibition.
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