Whitney Museum of American Art
Hyundai Terrace Commission: Marina Zurkow
Hyundai Terrace Commission: Marina Zurkow
Whitney Museum of American Art
About the Project
The second Hyundai Terrace Commission, Hyundai Terrace Commission: Marina Zurkow: The River is a Circle is on view on the Whitney’s fifth-floor terrace from April 9, 2025, through early 2026.
Created in collaboration with James Schmitz and Blake Goble, the work builds on Zurkow’s prior investigations of the Hudson River (Hudson Follies, 2022, and Does the River Flow Both Ways?, 2022), which offer a split view of the Hudson River, allowing visitors to simultaneously observe the world above and below the water. Shown on a large-scale video wall, Hyundai Terrace Commission: Marina Zurkow: The River is a Circle is an animation and installation that uses custom software to depict a complex river ecosystem of fluctuating social and biological groups, such as references to hyperlocal community history, barges with historical scenes traveling along the water, schools of fish and oyster reefs. The dynamic elements of this ecosystem are driven by algorithmic probability. The software system responds to real-time weather patterns, ensuring that the work shifts and evolves with New York’s changing conditions and seasons.
Focusing on the Meatpacking District surrounding the Whitney Museum, The River is a Circle explores river ecosystems, blending local history, algorithmic probability, and real-time environmental data, researched with the help of Hudson River Park Trust. Zurkow’s work transforms the Whitney’s fifth-floor terrace into a poetic meditation on the Meatpacking District’s layered past, from Lenape trade to industrial shifts, while speculating on sustainable futures. The site-specific work alludes to significant moments that have impacted the Manhattan neighborhood’s evolution, such as the Lenape trading post located nearby, the meatpacking industry, the illicit nightlife of the 1970s, gentrification, and the adjacent installations by artists Gordon Matta-Clark and David Hammons. The artist intends to speculate on a circular economy and a potentially positive return to more modest strategies of maintaining ecosystems.
Hyundai Terrace Commission: Marina Zurkow: The River is a Circle is organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art, with David Lisbon, Curatorial Assistant.
About the Artist
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, and is represented by bitforms gallery, and teaches at NYU.
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.
Take a Closer Look
Editorial Article
Circular Flows: Marina Zurkow Plumbs the Depths of the Hudson River
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