Guggenheim’s Naomi Beckwith Will Curate Documenta 16

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Naomi Beckwith, the deputy director and chief curator at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, since 2021, was appointed artistic director of the 2027 edition of documenta in Kassel, Germany.

Beckwith is the first Black woman to curate the quinquennial exhibition since its inception in 1995. She was unanimously selected from a list of five by a committee appointed last summer after the initial committee resigned in 2023 in response to accusations of antisemitism against the backdrop of the Israel-Palestine war.

The same attack was directed at documenta 15 curators, the Indonesian collective ruangrupa, following the unveiling of a controversial artwork said to contain antisemitic imagery by art collective Taring Padi, and led to the departure of managing director Sabine Schormann.

In their resignation letter, members from the first committee expressed ‘grave concern for the future of documenta’, as the platform’s capacity to uphold critical debate was put into question. The documenta institution was notably founded in the aftermath of World War II to facilitate dialogue through art.

Before joining Guggenheim, Beckwith held curatorial roles at Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia; and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Presently, she is working on a Rashid Johnson retrospective set to open next year at Guggenheim. Other notable surveys she has organised include that of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (Studio Museum Harlem, 2011) and Howardena Pindell (MCA Chicago, 2018).

‘I feel a real sense of kinship with Rashid Johnson and his work,’ Beckwith told Ocula.‘We were born in just about the same place, in Chicago, and around the same time. Our parents were deeply interested in Pan-Africanism—we’re children of a generation that has always felt a real affinity with Black culture globally.’

‘It is the honour of a lifetime to be selected as artistic director for Documenta 16,’ Beckwith said in a statement. She is the second American-born curator to lead the city-wide exhibition, after Italian-American curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in 2012.

Documenta’s supervisory board announced this May that they would implement a new code of conduct for its artistic director ‘based on respect for human dignity’—a necessity for artistic freedom that ‘protects us from discrimination’, according to board chair Sven Schoeller. —[O]

Main image: Naomi Beckwith. Photo: Nicolas Wefers.