Meg Onli and Chrissie Iles. Photo: The Whitney Museum of American Art.
The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, has revealed that Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli will co-organize the eighty-first iteration of the Whitney Biennial, slated to open in the spring of 2024. Iles is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney and has co-organized two previous editions of the Biennial. Responsible in large part for the building and shaping of the museum’s collection of moving image art, she is the curator most recently of the Whitney’s group show “Mountain/Time,” which investigates concepts surrounding re-mapping, migration, and Black and Indigenous geographies. Onli is a writer and independent curator based in Los Angeles, and is the former director and curator of the Underground Museum. Prior to her arrival there, she was an associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where she most recently co-curated the retrospective “Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation.” Onli was the inaugural winner of the Figure Skating Prize established by Virgil Abloh’s Art Space and is a former Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellow. She is currently a fellow at the Getty Research Institute.
“It’s an honor and joy to welcome Meg to the Whitney to partner with Chrissie on what will be her third Biennial. At its best, a Biennial curatorial team pairs two singular voices united by shared passions, commitments, and an ineffable spark,” said Whitney chief curator Scott Rothkopf in a statement. “Through their prior work, Chrissie and Meg have earned both the admiration and affection of artists, two essential qualities when it comes to organizing this ambitious show.”
“Meg and Chrissie will bring to the 2024 Biennial dynamic chemistry, diverse experiences, and a commitment to honoring the rich legacy of the Biennial,” noted Whitney director Adam D. Weinberg. “We enthusiastically look forward to their conception and the artworks they present at this challenging time in American culture.”
Launched in 1932, the Biennial is the world’s longest-running regular survey of American art and has to date featured the work of more than 3,600 artists.