ZoÉ Whitley to Step Down as Director of Chisenhale Gallery
148Dec. 15, 2024
Zoé Whitley, who sinceJanuary 2020has served as director of London’sChisenhale Gallery, will leave her role at the contemporary arts space on March 1, 2025. The gallery has said it will begin a search for her replacement early next year. Whitley has not yet publicly revealed her plans for the future.
“I cannot think of a more electrifying place to experience genuine artistic innovation firsthand than at Chisenhale Gallery, where the new commissions produced reverberate worldwide,” she said in a statement. “I’m proud to have played a part in the consistently era-defining programming of one of London’s leading contemporary art incubators and, most importantly, in its truly inspiring social practice approach.”
Under Whitley’s leadership, the Chisenhale Gallery organized exhibitions for artists including Rindon Johnson, whose 2021 commission for the gallery was included in the Sixtieth Venice Biennale; Nikita Gale and Lotus L. Kang, both of whom went on to participate in the Whitney Biennial; and Alia Farid, Joshua Leon, Rachel Jones, and Benoît Pieron, all of whom received their first major commissions from the Chisenhale. Whitley also produced Leon’s 2024 book The Process, which won the Emerging Art Foundation’s inaugural Art Writing Prize.
Before arriving at the gallery, she spent 2019 as senior curator at the Hayward Gallery, also in London. That same year, she served as curator of artist Cathy Wilkes’s presentation for the British pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Prior to joining Hayward Gallery, Whitley held senior curatorial roles at Tate Britain and Tate Modern—where she coauthored Tate’s Africa acquisitions strategy and cocurated, with Mark Godfrey, the critically acclaimed 2017 exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.” She previously worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Whitley earned her Ph.D. from the Center for Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire.