Meg Onli
Meg Onli is the Assistant Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the first black curator to be hired in the museum’s 55-year history. Accordingly, Onli’s work attends to the intricacies and complications of exhibiting art created by artists from the African diaspora. Onli’s practice is largely interested in utilizing decolonizing practices within museums and exhibition spaces. Her recent exhibition Speech/Acts explored experimental black poetry and how the social and cultural constructs of language regularly fail in naming marginalized people. Onli holds a Masters degree in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art and is the Festival Director of the Philadelphia-based BlackStar Film Festival. Her writing has appeared in publications for Art21, Black One Shot, Visual AIDS, and Art Papers.
Awarded Grants
2018
Leeway Transformation Award (LTA)
Related grantees
Overview
Meg Onli is the Assistant Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Her recent exhibition Speech/Acts explored experimental black poetry and how the social and cultural constructs of language have shaped black American experiences. 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. Onli is currently working on the exhibition series Colored People Time which continues her interest in how black American artists utilize language to question structures of power.
