NEW YORK, NY.- The Whitney Museum of American Art announces that the next Whitney Biennial will be co-organized by Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli. Iles, the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney, and Onli, a writer and curator, based in Los Angeles, who was the director and curator of the Underground Museum, will lead the development of the eighty-first edition of the Museum’s landmark exhibition series, set to open in spring 2024.
“The Biennial helps define the Whitney as an institution that champions the creativity, talent, passion, and vision of the art and artists of our time,” said Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown Director. “Meg and Chrissie will bring to the 2024 Biennial dynamic chemistry, diverse experiences, and a commitment to honoring the rich legacy of the Biennial. We enthusiastically look forward to their conception and the artworks they present at this challenging time in American culture.”
"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 Scott Rothkopf, the Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney. “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."
A constellation of the most relevant art and ideas of our time, the Whitney Biennial is a showcase of contemporary artists working across media and disciplines, representing evolving notions of American art. Established by the Museum’s founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1932, the Whitney Biennial is the longest-running survey of American art. More than 3,600 artists have participated to date, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Frank Bowling, Mark Bradford, Alexander Calder, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Raven Chacon, Ellen Gallagher, Jeffrey Gibson, Nan Goldin, Renee Green, Wade Guyton, Rachel Harrison, Jenny Holzer, Edward Hopper, Joan Jonas, Ellsworth Kelly, Mike Kelley, Willem de Kooning, Barbara Kruger, Pope. L, Jacob Lawrence, Carolyn Lazard, Zoe Leonard, Roy Lichtenstein, Glenn Ligon, Agnes Martin, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Julie Mehretu, Sarah Michelson, Joan Mitchell, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Georgia O'Keeffe, Claes Oldenburg, Laura Owens, Jackson Pollock, Postcommodity, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Martine Syms, Wu Tsang, Cy Twombly, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, and David Wojnarowicz.
The early Biennials were organized by medium, with painting alternating with sculpture and works on paper. Starting in 1937, the Museum shifted to yearly exhibitions called Annuals. The current format, a survey show of work in all media occurring every two years, has been in place since 1973. Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept was organized by two Whitney curators, David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, and featured works by sixty-three intergenerational artists and collectives working across disciplines and media.
Chrissie Iles is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is responsible for helping build the Museum’s comprehensive collection of moving image art. Past exhibitions at the Museum include two major thematic surveys of film and video installation, Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art (2001) and Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art (2016), and the retrospective Dan Graham: Beyond (2009), co-organized with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She was co-curator of the 2004 and 2006 Whitney Biennials and curated the film section of the 2002 Biennial. Recent shows include Mountain/Time (2022), a group exhibition addressing ideas of re-mapping, migration, Black and Indigenous geographies, and conceptualizations of time and knowledge, including Korakrit Arunanondchai, Tourmaline, Kandis Williams, Kahlil Joseph, Clarissa Tossin, Maia Ruth Lee, Arthur Jafa, Anicka Yi, Alan Michelson, Ian Cheng, and Mark Leckey.
Iles is a Graduate Committee member of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, a Curatorial Studies faculty member at the School of Visual Arts, a Visiting Critic in Columbia University’s Fine Art Department, and a board member of the Julia Stoschek Collection. Recently published writing includes “East German Gothic and Black Second Sight: Unheimliche Histories in Stan Douglas’s Der Sandmann” (Das Minsk, Potsdam, 2022) and “Sacred Systems: The Moving Image Works of Korakrit Arunanondchai” (Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, and Kunsthalle Hamburg, 2022).
Meg Onli is a curator and writer whose work attends to the intricacies of race and the production of space. In 2021, Onli was appointed co-director and curator of the Underground Museum. Prior, she was the Andrea B. Laporte Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (ICA Philadelphia). While at the ICA Philadelphia, Onli curated the exhibitions Speech/Acts (2017), Colored People Time: Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, Banal Presents (2019), Jessica Vaughn: Our Primary Focus is to be Successful (2021), and co-curated the retrospective Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation (2021).
Onli is the recipient of a 2012 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital, a 2014 Graham Foundation Grant, and the 2019 Transformation Award from the Leeway Foundation. She was also the inaugural recipient of the Figure Skating Prize, awarded by Virgil Abloh’s Art Space in 2021. A former Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellow, Onli is currently a 2022/2023 fellow at The Getty Research Institute.
