Zoé Whitley is stepping down because the director of the Chisenhale Gallery after 5 years in cost, the influential east London house introduced at the moment.
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 a component within the constantly era-defining programming of considered one of London’s main modern artwork incubators and, most significantly, in its really inspiring Social Apply strategy. Arts management at the moment could also be tough, however my world view is perpetually expanded by what artists suggest and convey to life,” Whitley says in a press release.
In keeping 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 obstacles to accessing artwork and tradition, putting 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 reminiscent of Bruno Zhu of Portugal, the Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican artist Alia Farid and Simnikiwe Buhlungu of South Africa. She additionally helped to develop the gallery’s publishing arm which launched, amongst eight titles, Joshua Leon’s e-book 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 12 months.
In 2020, Whitley spoke to The Artwork Newspaper for the common interview collection, 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 Trendy the place she co-curated Soul of a Nation: Artwork within the Age of Black Energy (2017).
