Rujeko Hockley (left) and Jane Panetta. © 2017 Scott Rudd. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum.

The Whitney Museum announced Wednesday that Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley will co-curate the 2019 Whitney Biennial. As current curators of the Whitney’s staff. the two women are “two of the most compelling and engaged curatorial voices of the moment,” according to a statement from the Whitney’s chief curator, Scott Rothkopf.

“We are thrilled to be collaborating on the forthcoming biennial, particularly at such an historic juncture in our country and our world,” Panetta and Hockley said in a statement.

Rujeko Hockley was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in Washington, DC from age two. Hockley was educated at the City University of New York and worked as a curatorial assistant at The Museum of Modern Art until 2009

Panetta joined the Whitney in 2010 and has curated solo presentations by Willa Nasatir and MacArthur “Genius” Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Hockley, who was came to the museum in March 2017, co-curated the highly acclaimed Brooklyn Museum show “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85.” At the Whitney, she has so far co-curated “Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined,” , on view at the Whitney until February 25, 2018, as well as the ongoing group show “An Incomplete History of Protest.”

The news comes at the end of a year marked by intense controversies around cultural appropriation in the art world. Among the most divisive arguments was the public maelstrom around Dana Schutz's painting of Emmett Till, Open Casket. The painting prompted open letters calling for the removal and even destruction of the painting, silent protests in front of the work, and demands that other works ALL of Dana Schutz's paintings be banned from a show in Boston as punishment for her offense of the Emmett Till painting.

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