
The Whitney Biennial is back, its latest edition big, beautiful, bold and occasionally bonkers. There’s Pope.L’s “Claim,” which is basically a box adorned with 2,755 slices of rotting, curled-up bologna (yes, it smells!), and Jon Kessler’s “The Floating World” sculptures, featuring iPhone-wielding mannequins in snorkel gear caught mid-selfie. And then there are out-of-this-world videos, like Anicka Yi’s “The Flavor Genome.” With its 3-D, microscope-enhanced molecules, transporting tropical landscapes and slithering slimy creatures, it manages to be both geeky and sensuous.
All told, this new survey of contemporary American art is as diverse, complex and fascinating as America itself.
Curators Christopher Lew and Mia Locks say they wanted to put together a show focused on “humanity.” That focus gives the 2017 Biennial its heart, but doesn’t strip it of its vitality or urgency. The show opens with a bang in the lobby, where Chicago-based artist Cauleen Smith’s punchy silk banners, embroidered with symbols of black resistance, solidarity and pain, fly overhead. Elsewhere are beautiful portraits of undocumented immigrants.
This is the first Biennial to unfurl in the Whitney’s Meatpacking digs, and its pieces fill the museum’s spacious fifth and sixth floors, spilling out onto terraces, and into third-floor conference rooms and stairwells. So after puzzling over art collective KAYA’s collage-filled, industrial-sized body bags, or weeping over African-American artist Lyle Ashton Harris’ photographic meditation on loss and identity, you’ll find some serenity in Larry Bell’s giant rose-colored glass cubes.

Some works hit you hard from the get-go: Raul de Nieves’ parade of elaborately beaded figures and floor-to-ceiling stained-glass-like panels, or Torey Thornton’s “Painting,” with its painted rocks affixed to an industrial saw blade.
But many more sneak up on you. The artist known as Porpentine Charity Heartscape came up with some strangely absorbing video games in which you are asked to play, among other things, a traumatized inventor fated to perform endless tasks for a cruel empress.
Perhaps the biggest crowd-pleaser is Asad Raza’s “Root sequence. Mother tongue.” For this installation, the New York-based artist transformed the sixth-floor gallery overlooking the terrace into a forest of 26 live young trees. As you stroll through the space, the trees’ caretakers — the artist’s friends and some volunteers — will point out a birch tree or cherry tree’s unique bark or flowers, and tell you about the diaries, soda bottles and plastic figurines you’ll find along the forest path. It’s a peaceful oasis, a world away from everything else.
Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort St.; whitney.org