Civic Views
Whitney Museum of American Art2026
Polypropylene photographic print subsurface with aluminum frames and text panels mounted on acrylic, aluminum composite, and metal scaffolding
Civic Views is included in the Whitney Biennial 2026 curated by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer.
To produce Civic Views, Emilio Martínez Poppe visited more than twenty Philadelphia government agencies, interviewed employees, and took multiple photographs of the views from their office windows, which he has reproduced at a one-to-one scaleand installed at a height that replicates the experience of looking out of each window. The project was inspired in part by the oldest surviving photograph in the United States, taken in 1839 by a worker at the US Mint in Philadelphia from an office window.
From the Audio Guide:
Emilio Martínez Poppe: My name is Emilio Martínez Poppe and I'm an artist and an educator.
Narrator: This work first went on view in May and June of 2025, but Martínez Poppe initially conceived of it in late 2020.
Emilio Martínez Poppe: At the time, the Trump administration was already laying the groundwork for the mass federal layoffs which would mark the start of his second term. An executive order was made to reclassify tens of thousands of high level federal employees to Schedule F, a new employment designation which stripped workers of their civil service protections and pressured political allegiance to the executive branch.
Biden reversed Schedule F in his first few days in office. But at the start of his second term, Trump, along with the help of Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, reinstated Schedule F and its capacity was expanded. It’s estimated that 300,000 federal workers were dismissed in 2025.
I couldn't have imagined that this would be the political context in which Civic Views would be presented since all of the photographs were shot during the Biden years. But the fact of Schedule F’s publication provided a lens or a kind of framing for the way I approached my work. I considered the executive order’s absolute discrediting of the public sector, and the values at its core that were being systematically attacked—that is, that government should work on behalf of the people.
Narrator: The project was partly intended to give voice to the workers themselves. Martínez Poppe conducted interviews with municipal employees to make the work and hosted public conversations on the occasion of its installation in Philadelphia’s City Hall courtyard.
Emilio Martínez Poppe: It was clear from my conversations with the city employees that there is a shared sense of responsibility in empowering greater participation in the meaning-making of the city. By this I mean expanding the public capacity for decision-making on how the city spends its money, what kinds of services are needed or should be supported, and in what ways access to those resources can be made available. This is a commitment Philadelphia’s city workers feel in the way they model how city government should be advancing equity and justice, which stands in stark contrast to the growing authoritarianism in the United States today.
Installation view of Whitney Biennial 2026 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 8–August 23, 2026). Emilio Martínez Poppe, Civic Views, 2025. Photographs by Ron Amstutz.