46th Silver Memorial Program

The 46th Annual Gail Silver Memorial Program will feature speakers Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, Curators of the Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing in conversation with Dominic Molon, Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art and interim Chief Curator.
Iles and Onli will focus their talk on their experience organizing and curating the Biennial, which featured 71 artists and collectives and is the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States. The Biennial also features a robust schedule of performances and film programs. Hear about organizing this large and multifaceted event, curatorial process, and the curator’s perspectives on what it means to engage audiences in museums today.

Free. Registration required for this in-person program.
Museum members will receive an email to register in mid-September.
Registration opens to the public on Tuesday, October 1.

Endowed in 1974 by her family and friends, the Gail Silver Memorial Lecture at the RISD Museum is open to the public.

Chrissie Iles is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her exhibitions include co-curating the 2004 and 2006 Whitney Biennials, and curating major survey exhibitions of Sharon Hayes, Louise Bourgeois, Dan Graham, Donald Judd, and Paul McCarthy, and several thematic exhibitions of moving image art, including Signs of the Times: Film, Video and Slide Installation and Britain in the 1980s, Scream and Scream Again: Film in Art, Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, voted best group show in New York in 2001 by the International Association of Art Critics, and Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art 1910-2016. She is a member of the Graduate Committee at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and a Faculty member of the Curating Course at the School of Visual Arts. She was appointed to curate the 2024 Whitney Biennial alongside Meg Onli.

Meg Onli is a Curator-at-Large at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Onli has worked as the Andrea B.Laporte Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and most recently as Director and Curator of the Underground Museum, Los Angeles. She has curated exhibitions such as Speech / Acts,  Colored People Time: Mundane Features, Quotidian Pasts, Banal Presents (2019), and Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation with Erin Cristovale. She was appointed to curate the 2024 Whitney Biennial alongside Chrissie Iles.