Carolyn Lazard (MFA’19) is one of 75 people from across the country selected to represent what American artists are working on right now in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. The exhibition is meant to encompass the big-picture collective of US art in one exhibition, taking “the pulse of the contemporary artistic moment,” according to the museum’s website. It’s the longest-running exhibition in the country that deals with the developing art world, dating to 1932.

“It’s the preeminent metric for getting the sense of contemporary art,” said Ken Lum, professor and chair of Penn’s fine arts department. “I don’t think there’s any comparable large-scale, museum-sited exhibition of that ambition in the US, outside of the Whitney. It’s looked upon by other curators in other countries as a model.”

Mr. Lum described Mx. Lazard as a “hard-working, super-talented artist” who has a remarkable degree of focus on their work, which addresses—among other topics—discourses of health, care, dependency and the body’s relationship to capitalism. “They have this way of being able to look at what they do as a long game, and not just for the immediate gain,” Mr. Lum added. “And so, they see their work as a kind of path, and that’s rare as well.”

The piece for the Whitney is inspired by hospital rooms. “It’s a video installation and a sculpture, and I’m making a piece that uses a hospital TV monitor and a hospital TV mount—the kinds of personal TVs you would find inside a chemotherapy infusion suite—and I’m having the museum wire itself for cable TV, and developing a program that will allow the TV to surf channels autonomously,” said Mx. Lazard. The idea, said the artist, is for museum patrons to consider cable as infrastructure in a city that simultaneously connects them to people inside of hospitals across New York City. And to provide a place of respite inside of the gallery space.