The Whitney Museum of American Art has hired Nolan Jimbo as its Arnhold Associate Curator, succeeding Rujeko Hockley in the role; he starts on 16 November. Jimbo comes from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where he began as a curatorial fellow in 2021 and rose to assistant curator.

At MCA Chicago he organised solo exhibitions for Gregory Bae, shown in 2022 the year after the artist's death; for Kenzi Shiokava, the artist's first institutional survey; and for Mike Cloud, a nominee for the 2026 ARTnews Awards. He also programmed performances by artists including David Lamelas, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Will Rawls and Wu Tsang, staged the collection shows Interiors in 2022 and Endless in 2023, co-directed the MCA DNA Research Initiative, which produced new scholarship on the museum's holdings, and worked on the curatorial teams for two group shows organised by Carla Acevedo-Yates.

Before Chicago he held curatorial posts at MASS MoCA and the Dallas Museum of Art, and contributed texts on several artists in the 2024 Whitney Biennial catalogue. At the Whitney he will organise and collaborate on exhibitions and public programmes and help grow the collection, work the museum presents as part of its commitment to championing artists and widening the narratives of American art.

Whitney director Scott Rothkopf is reported as calling Jimbo a star among a new generation of curators, praising his movement between exhibitions, performance and scholarship and his expertise in Asian diasporic artists as adding new narratives to American art. Jimbo himself is reported as looking forward to advocating for emerging and overlooked practices, and to putting relationships and collaboration with artists and colleagues at the centre of the job.