Meg Onli

Curator-at-large, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

In June this year, the Whitney Museum of American Art announced that Meg Onli was to become its first curator-at-large in 15 years, formalising a partnership between Onli and the museum that had already been developing: Onli is co-curating the 2024 edition of the Whitney Biennial with Chrissie Iles and in 2026 she is staging (along with the Whitney’s new director Scott Rothkopf and the artist Alex da Corte) a major survey of Roy Lichtenstein. She arrives on the museum’s staff with an impressive track record for exhibitions that reflect on the Black experience in the United States – among them, ‘Colored People Time: Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, and Banal Presents’, a three-chapter series at the ICA Philadelphia (where Onli previously worked as associate curator), and ‘Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation’ (2022) at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In 2010, Onli founded the Black Visual Archive – an online collection of documents that explores Chicago as a unique site for Black visual culture with a particular focus on how contemporary artists mine the complex history of Black representation in the United States.

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