"The Whitney Biennial is here. That would be the Whitney Museum's big curated show which every two years brings together dozens of artists, always closely watched by critics and public as a statement about what is important now in art. Hot on its heels, next month, MoMA PS1 is staging "Greater New York." That event happens every five years, bringing together dozens more artists to take the temperature of art in New York."
"For the Whitney, she is even, in a way, the face of the show: a work by Cruz, a green-tinged close-up painting of a grinning child, called I Saw the Future and It Smiled Back, is blown up on a billboard outside the museum in the Meatpacking District. This is a lot of attention for an artist who is relatively young, born in 1998, and just getting her MFA from the famed Yale School of Painting last year."
"She's worked in a variety of media, but is known now for paintings, often featuring images of Black female figures with a moody, woozy, sometimes unsettled or unsettling atmosphere. Sometimes Cruz works in suggestions of African American and Caribbean folklore, or intimations of horror and fantasy. Sometimes, she's played on the images of celebrities like Halle Berry or Tyra Banks."
Taína H. Cruz is a recently graduated Yale School of Painting MFA student receiving significant recognition by being featured in two major contemporary art exhibitions simultaneously: the Whitney Biennial and MoMA PS1's Greater New York. Her work on the Whitney's billboard—a green-tinged painting titled I Saw the Future and It Smiled Back depicting a grinning child—signals her prominence in current artistic discourse. Cruz works across multiple media but is primarily known for paintings featuring Black female figures rendered in moody, atmospheric styles. Her artistic practice incorporates elements of African American and Caribbean folklore, horror and fantasy aesthetics, celebrity imagery, and personal photographs of New York neighbors, establishing her as an important emerging voice shaping contemporary art.
Read at Artnet News
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