The design of the 2010 Whitney Biennial catalogue builds upon the history and logic of the exhibition series, in which a set of related frameworks is periodically applied as a means of representing recent contemporary American art.

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The book’s front section displays the work of the selected artists for 2010, typographically emphasizing each artist’s birth date as a means of extending the book’s theme of the temporal. The book’s back section provides a full list of artists included in each biennial and annual exhibition, also including every catalogue cover since the inception in 1932, in addition to a selection of installation photographs and press clippings.

Both transitioning between and complicating access between past and present, a series of textured, glossy, awkwardly heavy pages layer archival photographs of the Whitney’s successively more modern three buildings with odd photographs showing an American president per decade. While providing the visceral sense of a paper-and-ink time machine, complete with the effect of vertigo, the section (and the book’s cover) acknowledge the weight of American political realities as pervading the privileged space of exhibition.