‘Every Woman Biennial’ Fills Pen + Brush With a Carnivalesque Counterpoint to the Whitney

On a gray Sunday afternoon in March, brass horns and snare drums cut through the traffic on East 22nd Street as a line of dancers in sequined jackets and glittered boots wound toward a 130-year-old townhouse in Manhattan’s Flatiron district.

Inside, every inch of wall space at Pen + Brush was packed with paintings, photographs, neon, video screens and small robotic sculptures. More than 400 women and nonbinary artists are taking part in “Every Woman Biennial: SPECTALiA,” a sprawling exhibition and performance program that opened March 8, International Women’s Day, and runs through April 11.

Timed to coincide with the opening of the Whitney Biennial 40 blocks uptown, the show is being billed by organizers and the host venue as the world’s largest women and nonbinary art biennial.

A “punk rock revival of the carnivalesque”

The sixth edition of the Every Woman Biennial, SPECTALiA is framed by the organizers as a “punk rock revival of the carnivalesque” that sets painting and sculpture alongside creative coding, extended reality works, performance, music and film. The aim, they say, is to explore how artists marginalized by gender in the mainstream art world are using spectacle and technology to imagine new forms of community.

“If we don’t like the paradigm we’re in, we rebuild it,” executive director and co-curator Molly Caldwell said in an interview. She described SPECTALiA as “a world-building spell” and added, “We don’t have to buy into dystopia.”

Founded in 2014 by artist C. Finley as the Whitney Houston Biennial, the project began as a one-night, salon-style exhibition in New York. It was conceived as a tongue-in-cheek response to that year’s Whitney Biennial, which featured less than one-third women, and was intended, Finley has said, to supplement opportunities for women artists rather than replace the museum’s show.

Since then, the biennial has rebranded and expanded to Los Angeles and London, presenting work by more than 1,200 female-identifying and nonbinary artists across its editions, according to its organizers. The 2026 New York edition marks the first time it has taken over Pen + Brush for a monthlong run, a step up from earlier, shorter pop-ups.

A historic venue with a long women-led lineage

Pen + Brush, founded in 1894, started as a women’s professional club for artists and writers. Early leaders included suffragist Grace Gallatin Seton, who oversaw its incorporation in 1912, and investigative journalist Ida Tarbell. Over the decades, the organization has counted among its members authors such as Marianne Moore and Pearl S. Buck.

Today, the nonprofit describes its mission as creating “equitable opportunities” for women and gender-expansive artists in the visual and literary fields. In a statement about SPECTALiA, Pen + Brush said it was partnering “with the largest all-women and non-binary biennial in the world” in what it called “a powerful show of collective institutional strength.”

The claim to be the world’s largest is the biennial’s own characterization and has not been independently verified. But by any measure, the scale is unusual. Organizers say an open call drew more than 800 applicants for the 2026 edition, with over 400 ultimately selected. The exhibition includes emerging creators showing publicly for the first time alongside established names such as Mickalene Thomas, Swoon, Patricia Cronin, Karen Finley, Lola Flash, Michele Pred, the duo Hilma’s Ghost and musician and visual artist Nona Hendryx.

Cabaret, Dada and Surrealism—updated with code

The works reflect the theme of SPECTALiA, which the curatorial team links to cabaret, Dada and Surrealism—avant-garde movements that arose amid political turmoil after World War I. “What are we creatively building in a troubled world that’s moving at a speed we can hardly grasp?” an open-call prompt asked prospective participants.

In one gallery, nine-foot-tall robotic figures loom above visitors. Titled “Three Wise Monkeys” by the artist SEVINCY, the sculptures are assembled from plastic components and discarded electronics. The piece “reflects on AI, morality, and environmental conditions,” the organizers say, using upcycled “data waste” to question who benefits from artificial intelligence and at what cost.

Nearby, Yingxi Adelle Lin’s “Soft Upload” invites visitors to sit, type anonymous “confessions” into a console and receive ritual-style responses. The work compiles these into what the artist calls a “living archive of collective reflection,” merging fortune-telling aesthetics with data collection.

A few steps away, a monitor flashes cartoonish avatars in high heels and armor. “Fashionistas: Battle of the Babes,” a camp, turn-based multiplayer video game by artists Tassneen Bashir and Camron Gonzalez, lets players outfit and pit characters against one another, exaggerating and scrambling gender signifiers.

While technology-focused pieces feature prominently, the exhibition also foregrounds ritual, resistance and art-historical lineages. In “Rebel,” Indira Cesarine reimagines the myth of Pandora’s Box as a red-neon cube lined with mirrors. The work, she has said, speaks to the “necessity and exhaustion of defiance” amid ongoing political and human-rights struggles, its endless reflections standing in for repeated acts of resistance.

On another wall, Ariana Leon’s “Happy Birthday, Sweetie” presents supersized mylar “party hats” that hang like a tasseled bra. The installation reframes familiar celebration rituals, probing the overlap of festivity, femininity, trauma and power.

Works by older and younger generations share the same crowded walls. Eighty-three-year-old painter Olga Spiegel, an early psychedelic artist, shows canvases that blend surreal and science-fiction imagery. Nearby, a piece from Mickalene Thomas’s “Tête de Femme” series refracts early 20th-century Cubism through African fractal patterns and a contemporary Black feminist lens. Photographs from Lola Flash’s “syzygy, the vision” series imagine the artist as a gender-fluid mythic figure amid Afrofuturist landscapes.

An ART-O-MAT machine, modeled after a vintage cigarette dispenser, stands against one column. Stocked with miniature works derived from pieces in the show, it allows visitors to purchase original art in small formats at relatively low prices. Organizers describe the installation as an effort to make collecting more accessible and to provide additional income streams for participating artists.

The access argument—and the numbers behind it

The focus on access also has a statistical backdrop. Multiple studies over the past decade have found that women remain underrepresented in museum collections, exhibitions and gallery rosters in the United States and Europe. A 2019 analysis of 18 major U.S. museums found that roughly 87% of artists in their collections were men and 85% were white. Separate research compiled by the National Museum of Women in the Arts reports that about 13.7% of living artists represented by galleries in Europe and North America are women, and that women artists working full time earn approximately 80 cents for every dollar earned by male artists.

Caldwell said the biennial’s scale was a deliberate response. “We wanted to put as many artists as possible in the room together,” she said. “The idea is that visibility and community happen at the same time.”

A procession, a singing cabinet, and street-band energy

The opening weekend pushed that idea into the street. The New York-based company Kinesis Project, led by choreographer Melissa Riker, created a site-specific dance procession that began near Pen + Brush and looped through the surrounding blocks, with performers weaving between onlookers and parked cars. They were accompanied by Hungry March Band, the Brooklyn brass-and-percussion ensemble long associated with parades, protests and the activist HONK! street-band movement.

Inside the gallery, Opera on Tap presented “The Singing Cabinet of Mathilde Lebeau,” part of a series by composer Kamala Sankaram and director Jerre Dye. Installed like a coin-operated arcade game, the cabinet features a mechanized 19th-century opera singer whose voice, in the creators’ description, channels stories of misogyny, occult practices and revenge.

Elsewhere, FOU FOU HA!, a performance group described by the organizers as a “fashionista trickster” troupe, drew crowds with drag-inflected clowning and neo-vaudeville routines.

A parallel opening to the Whitney Biennial

The Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2026 biennial, co-curated by Drew Sawyer and Marcela Guerrero, opened to the public the same day, featuring 56 artists and collectives in its survey of contemporary American art. The Every Woman Biennial’s founders have often emphasized that their project is intended as a complement rather than a replacement. Yet the timing and proximity—a short subway ride apart—highlighted a contrast in scale and structure between an institutional biennial and a largely open-call, community-driven counterpart.

“This grew out of a response to who was and wasn’t being seen,” Caldwell said. “Now it’s also about what kinds of futures we can picture when we’re in the same space.”

As the afternoon light faded on East 22nd Street, the last notes from Hungry March Band’s tuba and trumpets bounced off the brownstone facades. Inside Pen + Brush, the galleries remained crowded: a teenager feeding bills into the ART-O-MAT, an older painter studying a nearby video piece, performers still in costume making their way through the rooms.

For the next several weeks, the historic townhouse will serve as a dense, improvised map of how women and nonbinary artists are responding to the current moment—in neon and code, in protest imagery and party hats, in the quiet of small paintings and the noise of a marching band.