The Whitney Biennial’s most talked-about installation has finally arrived. After a brief delay that left a void in the museum’s lobby earlier this month, according to artnews.com, Precious Okoyomon’s “Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid” (2026) is now open to the public on the eighth floor.
The relocation was a matter of artistic necessity rather than controversy. Okoyomon felt the initial lobby placement lacked the required intimacy for such an ambitious scale. Now bathed in natural light from a rarely exposed skylight, the work features approximately 50 stuffed animals and dolls suspended from rafters. The effect is a jarring juxtaposition of childhood innocence and visceral unease, a hallmark of the London-born artist’s rise to global prominence.
The installation repurposes the artist’s own childhood toys alongside “cursed” antiques sourced from Astoria. Spliced together and adorned with taxidermy feathers, these figures hang by nooses, evoking grim themes of lynching and suicide. Curator Drew Sawyer describes the work as a “sinister, dark narrative” masked by a “very tender” veneer of discarded, well-loved objects.
For Okoyomon, the suspension of these figures represents more than a visual shock; it is a meditation on the “everyday relational violence” of Blackness and the “abduction of gravity” caused by white supremacy. The 31-year-old artist, who previously gained acclaim at the Venice Biennale for a kudzu-filled garden, continues to explore the thin line between healing and horror.
While a companion piece at the New Museum features an animatronic figure surrounded by lethal fiberglass insulation, Okoyomon insists their work is not meant to provoke for the sake of it. Instead, they describe their practice as a “slow rearrangement of everyday desire,” inviting viewers to witness a state of arrested transcendence amidst a world of constant, subtle carnage.
•Featured image: Precious Okoyomon with the installation “Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid” (2026)/Christopher Garcia-Valle for ARTNEWS
