When Tiona Nekkia McClodden, a Philadelphia-based filmmaker and installation artist, was invited to take part in this year’s Whitney Biennial, she felt satisfaction, but also crippling panic.

On one hand Ms. McClodden, 37, was coming off well-received film and performance projects in New York that had explored black queer culture in the 1980s. But the work had run its course. “I was having this chaotic meltdown,” she said.

What new work would she make?

Selection in the Whitney Biennial instantly marks an artist as a figure at the forefront of American contemporary art. For young selectees like Ms. McClodden — three quarters of this year’s roster of 75 artists are under 40 — it is a surefire résumé and market builder. By the same token, it exposes them to inevitable political stakes and heightened scrutiny.

The Biennial is sometimes provocative by design: the 1993 edition famously landed in the midst of the culture wars with a barrage of in-your-face art asserting race, gender, and sexual identities. Other years have sparked more specific confrontations, as the last one did, in 2017, over a rendering by the painter Dana Schutz of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955.