Even Better Than the Real Thing

Meg Onli is Curator-at-Large at the Whitney. In addition to the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Onli will co-curate the Museum’s 2026 Roy Lichtenstein retrospective, the artist’s first New York retrospective in over thirty years, with artist Alex Da Corte and Whitney director Scott Rothkopf. Onli was previously co-director and curator of the Underground Museum. Prior to that, she was an Associate Curator at the ICA Philadelphia. While there, Onli curated Speech/Acts (2017), Colored People Time: Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, Banal Presents (2019), Jessica Vaughn: Our Primary Focus is to be Successful (2021), and co-curated Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation (2021).

Chrissie Iles is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney and responsible for helping build the Museum’s comprehensive collection of moving image art. She was co-curator of the 2004 and 2006 Whitney Biennials and curated the film section of the 2002 Biennial. Past Whitney exhibitions include two major surveys of film and video installation, Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art (2001) and Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art (2016). Recent shows include Mountain/Time (2022), addressing ideas of re-mapping, migration, Black and Indigenous geographies, and conceptualizations of time and knowledge, including Korakrit Arunanondchai, Tourmaline, Clarissa Tossin.

Amber Jamilla Musser is Professor of English and Africana studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024). Her collaborative projects include co-editing the series Elements in Feminism and Critical Theory for Cambridge University Press, co-editing Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, and co-hosting its accompanying Feminist Keywords Podcast. Her research focuses on the intersections of black feminism, sexuality, and the aesthetic.