Barbara Hammer
Barbara & Terry, 1972
Gelatin silver print on board
10 1/2 × 10 1/4 × 1/8 inches
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Director’s Discretionary Fund, 2018.149
© Barbara Hammer

Trust Me imagines the reparative possibility of shared emotional experience, bringing together works by eleven intergenerational artists from the Whitney’s permanent collection: Laura Aguilar, Genesis Báez, Alvin Baltrop, Jenny Calivas, Moyra Davey, Lola Flash, Barbara Hammer, Muriel Hasbun, Dakota Mace, Mary Manning, and D’Angelo Lovell Williams.

Working against photography’s documentary impulse and the drive toward conceptual rigor, the images in the exhibition offer intuition and indeterminacy as viable creative modes and explore vulnerability as a fruitful ground from which to make and communicate meaning. Within and beyond the image, representations of familial and ancestral bonds, friendship, romantic partnership, and networks of influence and exchange establish connectivity—and therefore vulnerability—as an artistic and human imperative. Through intimate personal reflection and poetic attention to everyday objects, the artists in Trust Me ultimately reach out to an audience they cannot predict, gambling on the viewer’s openness to the experience at hand and the capacity of the image to carry it.

The exhibition is organized by Kelly Long, Senior Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art.