The Whitney Museum of American Art on Wednesday named the two curators who will organize the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the first time the exhibition will appear at the museum’s expansive new building downtown.

Both of the curators, Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, have ties to MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art’s outpost in Long Island City. Mr. Lew, 34 years old, served as an assistant curator there before joining the Whitney in 2014, where he is now an associate curator, while Ms. Locks, 32, until recently was an assistant curator at MoMA PS1.

The Whitney Biennial is a survey of what is new and noteworthy in American contemporary art, and the coming one, set to open in the spring of 2017, will be the biggest yet in terms of square footage, said Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney’s deputy director for programs and chief curator. The plan, he said, is to take advantage of the spacious new galleries as well as the museum’s theater and outdoor exhibition space, bells and whistles that its prior home on the Upper East Side lacked.

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Past Whitney Biennials have been criticized for including too much work by non-Americans who live or work in the U.S., and for not showing enough by women or nonwhite artists.

Both Mr. Lew and Ms. Locks happen to be Asian-American, but that isn’t why they were chosen, Mr. Rothkopf said.

Mr. Lew has his “ear to the ground in the sense of who is coming up,” said Mr. Rothkopf, citing his work with emerging artists such as Rachel Rose, whose dreamy, space-inspired video installation “Everything and More” is now showing on the same floor as the Whitney’s Frank Stella retrospective.

Ms. Locks, who worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles from 2010 to 2013, brings a West Coast sensibility and experience with art coming out of the LGBT community, Mr. Rothkopf said. She was part of the team that organized MoMA PS1’s current “Greater New York” exhibition.

Also on board to help craft the biennial: an advisory team that includes a film curator, a writer and editor focused on the Middle East and its diaspora, the director of a Miami-based arts nonprofit and a publisher who founded exhibition and retail spaces in Los Angeles.

The advisers all know about contemporary art, Mr. Lew said, but “everybody has kind of a toe in other things, and it opens up all kinds of conversations.”

Write to Jennifer Smith at jennifer.smith@wsj.com