Naomi Beckwith Assembles All-Women Curatorial Team for Documenta 16 in Kassel

News Guggenheim’s Naomi Beckwith Will Curate Documenta 16 Elaine YJ Zheng

Naomi Beckwith has announced the all-women curatorial team for Documenta 16, opening in Kassel, Germany, in June 2027. It marks a historic moment: the first time the quinquennial will be directed by an all-women group, led by Beckwith, who is also the first African American artistic director in Documenta’s 65-year history.

Joining Beckwith are curators and thinkers Carla Acevedo-Yates, Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, and Xiaoyu Weng. Together, they will oversee exhibitions, public programmes, and publishing initiatives that Beckwith envisions as forming a more ‘porous’ platform—one capable of holding the contradictions and urgencies of the present.

The team brings overlapping commitments to questions of diaspora, feminism, expanded representation, and global contemporary practice. For Beckwith, they also share what she has described as “an independence of spirit and thought,” each grounded in a generosity toward artists and audiences alike.

Acevedo-Yates, originally from San Juan, has foregrounded Caribbean and diasporic art through her curatorial work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, including significant exhibitions of Puerto Rican and Latin American artists.

Crawford, a Chicago-based scholar and Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, deepens the team’s focus on African American cultural histories. Formerly a curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, her work critically engages questions of race, representation, and public space.

Rodríguez Castro, a Puerto Rican writer, editor, and theorist, integrates literature, feminism, and decolonial thought. Her editorial and curatorial projects foreground Latin American and Caribbean feminist perspectives while interrogating structures of power and language.

Weng, whose career spans New York and Toronto, has held curatorial roles at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and Art in General; her work often traces the intersections of migration, technological change, and social transformation.

Though distinct in their practices, the curators are connected through shared topics of research and professional ties. Acevedo-Yates and Rodríguez Castro both root their work in Puerto Rican perspectives; Crawford’s scholarship resonates with Beckwith’s sustained engagement with Black and diasporic creativity; and Beckwith and Weng share an institutional history at the Guggenheim.

Their appointment arrives at a pivotal moment. Documenta 15, directed by ruangrupa in 2022, was overshadowed by widely reported controversies concerning antisemitism, censorship, and the limits of collective authorship. Against that backdrop, Beckwith’s leadership signals both continuity and a renewed commitment to the rigorous, forward-looking criticality for which the exhibition is known.

As preparations for Documenta 16 begin, the art world will be watching closely to see how this constellation of curators realises Beckwith’s porous, plural vision for one of the most scrutinised exhibition platforms of our time. —[O]

Main image: (Left to right) Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Xiaoyu Weng, Carla Acevedo-Yates, and Naomi Beckwith. The Artistic Team for documenta 16, Kassel (2025). Photo: Nicolas Wefers.