Controversial Installation by Precious Okoyomon Finally Unveiled at Whitney Biennial
NEW YORK — Visitors to the 2026 Whitney Biennial are encountering one of the exhibition’s most provocative works on the museum’s eighth floor: Precious Okoyomon’s site-specific installation Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid (2026).
The Nigerian-American artist, poet, and chef has transformed the entire gallery into an immersive environment blending tenderness with brutality. Dozens of worn stuffed animals and discarded dolls dangle from the rafters, some reassembled with taxidermy bird wings to form hybrid, angel-like figures. Elements of racist dolls, including caricatured forms, appear both suspended and placed in corners, forcing direct confrontation.
Originally planned for the museum’s lobby, the piece was delayed shortly before the Biennial’s press preview. Curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, working with Okoyomon, relocated and adapted it for the eighth-floor space. An expanded version draws from the artist’s 2025 presentation at Austria’s Kunsthaus Bregenz, where similar motifs explored vulnerability and historical violence.
Okoyomon, born in 1993 in London and raised across the UK, Nigeria, and the United States, often repurposes childhood objects and found materials. Their practice merges sculpture, installation, and poetry to examine the entanglement of beauty and pain, innocence and racial caricature. “The soft animal body, a sign of childhood innocence and comfort, serves as a silent host to racial caricature,” notes the Whitney’s description of the work.
Reactions have been visceral. Some viewers describe the hanging figures—evoking nooses in earlier iterations—as deeply unsettling, while others praise the work’s unflinching engagement with America’s legacies of racism and the persistence of harmful imagery in everyday objects. The installation’s relocation has only heightened discussion about institutional caution and artistic intent in surveying contemporary American art.
The 82nd Whitney Biennial, running through August 23, features 56 artists and collectives. Okoyomon’s contribution stands out for its raw emotional charge and formal ambition.
Visitors can experience the work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.
Okoyomon’s piece continues their exploration of ecological and social themes, inviting viewers into spaces of reckoning where comfort and discomfort collide. As the Biennial unfolds, this work is already generating the kind of dialogue that defines the exhibition’s role in American art discourse.
