Zoé Whitley is stepping down as the director of the Chisenhale Gallery after five years in charge, the influential east London space announced today.
Whitley will leave in March 2025 and plans to return to her career curating and writing independently. The gallery will begin the international search for a new director early 2025.
“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. Arts leadership today may be difficult, but my world view is perpetually expanded by what artists propose and bring to life,” Whitley says in a statement.
According to the gallery's website, The Social Practice programme “supports artists to create new work through collaborative processes”. The local part of the programme focuses on working with young people who experience barriers to accessing art and culture, placing artists in hospitals, child and adolescent mental health services, and alternative provision contexts across East London.
Whitley’s tenure resulted in 15 exhibitions dedicated to artists such as Bruno Zhu of Portugal, the Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican artist Alia Farid and Simnikiwe Buhlungu of South Africa. She also helped to expand the gallery’s publishing arm which released, among eight titles, Joshua Leon's book The Process (2024, co-published with Mousse Publishing). The publication accompanied Leon’s new commission, The Missing O and E, which was unveiled earlier this year.
In 2020, Whitley spoke to The Art Newspaper for the regular interview series, A Brush With. Asked about living with one work of art, she said: “Alma Thomas’s Wind and Crepe Myrtle Concerto (1973) reminds me of my childhood in Washington, DC, and especially of summertime outdoors with my grandmother.”
Whitley was previously senior curator at the Hayward Gallery in London and Adjunct Research curator at Tate Modern where she co-curated Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2017).