Zoé Whitley is stepping down because the director of the Chisenhale Gallery after 5 years in cost, the influential East London area introduced at present.
Whitley will depart in March 2025 and plans to return to her profession curating and writing independently. The gallery will start the worldwide seek for a brand new director early 2025.
“I’m proud to have performed an element within the persistently era-defining programming of one among London’s main modern artwork incubators and, most significantly, in its actually inspiring Social Apply method. Arts management at present could also be tough, however my world view is perpetually expanded by what artists suggest and convey to life,” Whitley says in an announcement.
In line with the gallery’s web site, The Social Apply programme “helps artists to create new work by means of collaborative processes”. The native a part of the programme focuses on working with younger individuals who expertise boundaries to accessing artwork and tradition, inserting artists in hospitals, little one and adolescent psychological well being companies, and various provision contexts throughout East London.
Whitley’s tenure resulted in 15 exhibitions devoted to artists comparable to Bruno Zhu of Portugal, the Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican artist Alia Farid and Simnikiwe Buhlungu of South Africa. She additionally helped to broaden the gallery’s publishing arm which launched, amongst eight titles, Joshua Leon’s guide The Course of (2024, co-published with Mousse Publishing). The publication accompanied Leon’s new fee, The Lacking O and E, which was unveiled earlier this yr.
In 2020, Whitley spoke to The Artwork Newspaper for the common interview sequence, A Brush With. Requested about dwelling with one murals, she stated: “Alma Thomas’s Wind and Crepe Myrtle Concerto (1973) jogs my memory of my childhood in Washington, DC, and particularly of summertime outdoor with my grandmother.”
Whitley was beforehand senior curator on the Hayward Gallery in London and Adjunct Analysis curator at Tate Fashionable the place she co-curated Soul of a Nation: Artwork within the Age of Black Energy (2017).
