Image: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
The Whitney Museum of American Art is putting Taína H. Cruz at the center of a family-friendly artmaking program tied to its Whitney Biennial 2026 presentation. ‘All Ages Artmaking with Taína H. Cruz’ is scheduled for July 12, 2026, from 11 am to 3 pm at the museum’s Susan and John Hess Family Theater on Floor 3, and it is part of the museum’s Free Second Sundays initiative.
According to the Whitney’s event listing, the program is open to all ages and invites visitors to make their own works of art. The museum says the activity is inspired by Cruz’s paintings and drawings, including works she created on-site on one of the Whitney’s fifth-floor gallery walls for the 82nd edition of the Biennial. The listing also identifies her billboard work, ‘I Saw the Future and It Smiled Back,’ on Gansevoort Street.
The event places a current Biennial artist in direct conversation with the museum’s public-programming platform. In the exhibition text for ‘Whitney Biennial 2026,’ the museum describes the survey as a space for considering the shifting currents of art in the United States and asks what it means to name something “American” at all. The exhibition brings together 56 artists, duos and collectives and is co-organized by Whitney curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, with Beatriz Cifuentes and Carina Martinez.
Cruz’s work appears in the Biennial among a cluster of pieces shown in installation photography on the Whitney site, including ‘A Wall That Plays Along,’ ‘Continuing Anyway,’ ‘Passage,’ ‘This Counts,’ ‘Rest, Cast’ and ‘Studio Notes.’ The museum’s event description says graffiti is a major inspiration for her paintings and drawings, and notes that ‘I Saw the Future and It Smiled Back’ reflects a “child-like sense of newness and anticipation.”
‘All Ages Artmaking with Taína H. Cruz’ is one of several free public offerings the Whitney is presenting around the Biennial. The museum’s July programming includes Free Friday Nights, Free Second Sundays, and West Side Fest-related events. For the July 12 Second Sunday, the Whitney lists additional activities including poster-making with Rich Tu, guided tours, and Spanish and English Storytime.
The July 12 artmaking program is one of two Cruz-related exhibition references on the museum’s event page. Under Related, the Whitney links to both ‘Whitney Biennial 2026,’ which is on view through Aug. 23, and ‘Taína H. Cruz: I Saw the Future and It Smiled Back,’ listed through September 2026. The event page also notes that the theater is equipped with an induction loop and infrared assistive listening system, with accessible seating available.
