Meg Onli, Assistant Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, presented a public program at Atlanta Contemporary as part of Art & Dialogue: Atlanta on Thursday, March 30, 2017.
Meg Onli is a curator and writer whose work attends to the intricacies of race and the production of space. Since joining the Institute of Contemporary Art as an Assistant Curator she has worked on the exhibition The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now and is currently organizing a group exhibition entitled Speech/Acts, which assembles a group of artists who are working with Black poetics. Prior to joining Institute of Contemporary Art she was the Program Coordinator at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. While at the Graham Foundation she worked on the exhibitions Architecture of Independence: African Modernism and Barbara Kasten: Stages. In 2010 she created the website Black Visual Archive for which she was awarded a 2012 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. In 2014 she was the recipient of a research grant from the Graham Foundation for the collaborative project Remaking the Black Metropolis: Contemporary Art, Urbanity, and Blackness in America with curator Jamilee Polson Lacy. Onli holds a Master’s degree in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her writing has appeared in Art21, Daily Serving, and Art Papers.
Founded in 1973 as Nexus, a grassroots artists’ cooperative, Atlanta Contemporary has since become one of the southeast’s leading contemporary art centers. They play a vital role in Atlanta’s cultural landscape by presenting six–10 exhibitions within four seasonal cycles each year, featuring consequential artists from the local, national, and international art scenes. They are one of the few local institutions that commissions new works by artists, paying particular attention to artists of note who have not had a significant exhibition in the Southeast. They organize 50+ diverse educational offerings annually, unrivaled by other local organizations of our size. They are the only local organization to provide on-site subsidized studio space to working artists through their Studio Artist Program, removing cost as a barrier to the creative process. Admission to Atlanta Contemporary is always free.