The 2024 Whitney Biennial might be co-curated by Chrissie Iles, a curator on the Whitney Museum, and Meg Onli, an unbiased curator primarily based in Los Angeles who most not too long ago served because the co-director and curator of the Underground Museum there till its abrupt closure final March. The dates and theme for the biennial, the 81st version of the Whitney’s intently watched recurring exhibition, might be revealed at a later date.
Iles, a curator on the Whitney specialising in shifting picture artwork, is not any stranger to the Biennial, having co-curated the 2004 and 2006 editions, and curated the movie programme for the 2002 version. Her different tasks on the establishment have included the 2016 thematic exhibition Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Artwork and a 2009 retrospective dedicated to the conceptual artist Dan Graham (co-organised with the Museum of Modern Artwork Los Angeles). She can also be a college member of the curatorial research programme on the College of Visible Arts, a member of the graduate committee on the Heart for Curatorial Research at Bard Faculty and serves on the board of the Julia Stoschek Assortment.
Previous to her temporary stint as co-director of the Underground Museum—the establishment in Los Angeles’s Arlington Heights neighbourhood was based in 2012 by the late painter Noah Davis and his spouse, sculptor Karon Davis—Onli was an affiliate curator on the Institute of Modern Artwork on the College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Throughout her time there she curated exhibitions together with Coloured Folks Time: Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, Banal Presents in 2019 and a significant solo present by conceptual artist Jessica Vaughn, Our Major Focus is to be Profitable, in 2021. Final yr she additionally co-curated the revelatory retrospective Ulysses Jenkins: With out Your Interpretation (2021), which travelled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
A portion of the 2022 Biennial, which was curated completely in-house by director of curatorial initiatives David Breslin and director of curatorial affairs Adrienne Edwards, stays on view on the museum’s sixth flooring till 16 October.
Nicely acquired by critics, the 2022 biennial has additionally been one of many least controversial editions of the Whitney Biennial in current reminiscence. The exhibition’s 2019 version, curated in-house by Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley, grew to become recognized unofficially because the “teargas biennial” amid months of protests towards the museum’s vice chairman, Warren B. Kanders, whose enterprise holdings embrace corporations that manufacture teargas and different tools utilized in battle zones and to suppress protest actions. After a number of artists within the 2019 biennial threatened to drag their works from the present, Kanders resigned.
The 2017 version of the Whitney Biennial, curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, was dominated by the scandal over a portray by Dana Schutz, Open Casket (2016), which depicted the physique of Emmett Until, a 14-year-old who was lynched by a racist mob in 1955. The biennial’s 2014 version, the final one held within the Whitney’s former constructing on Madison Avenue, grew to become a flashpoint for debates about illustration and fairness when the Yams Collective withdrew its work amid objections to the inclusion of a conceptual work by artist Joe Scanlan, a white man, that consisted of hiring Black actors to play the function of a fictional artist named Donelle Woolford.
