Naomi Beckwith Shares 5 Works in the Guggenheim Collection

The Guggenheim curator highlights five works in the museum's latest exhibition, sharing her personal affinities with artists including Mona Hatoum and Mark Bradford.

By Way Of: Material and Motion in the Guggenheim Collection surveys some of the ways in which contemporary artists moved away from traditional markers of studio practice to embrace novel ideas of what it means to be in the world.

Spanning the 1960s to the present day, the exhibition includes almost 30 artworks, mostly sculptures and large-scale installations, inspired by a gift from the D.Daskalopoulos Collection. It includes Arte Povera artists like Mario Merz and Jannis Kounellis alongside contemporary artists such as Rashid Johnson and Senga Nengudi.

Invited by Ocula Magazine, the Guggenheim's deputy director and chief curator Naomi Beckwith introduces her first collection show at the museum, sharing intimate insights on five select works—from a pair of grand purple mounds that wrap around the building's columns to a motorcycle that scales the gallery walls.

1. Rashid Johnson, Cosmic Slop "Bitter" (2015)

I feel a real sense of kinship with Rashid Johnson and his work. 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. We both became art history nerds, too.

All this background comes through in Cosmic Slop "Bitter". This object is essentially a painting in the vein of American Abstract Expressionism, but it's made with wax and black soap instead of paint. The wax recalls an ancient technique of encaustic painting, while the soap is an homage to the grooming object commonly used to care for Black bodies.

2. Mona Hatoum, Deep Throat (1996)

I didn't actually see Mona's work in my first encounter with her—I felt it. It was an installation called Recollection (1995). As I entered the space, I felt I was being brushed by cobwebs. In time I learned that Mona had taken strands of her hip-length hair and fastened them to the ceiling, so that as you walked through the space you had this discomfort, but you couldn't see where it was coming from.

Mona is interested in how power and violence, even when you can't name or see it, can act upon the body. Her multimedia installation in this show, Deep Throat, offers an interior view of the artist's body as an object to be consumed, or in her words, 'probed, invaded, violated'. A camera hunts through the artist's innermost pathways, which are served to us like a delicacy on a dinner platter.

3. Mark Bradford, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy (2001)

Mark Bradford's painting Daddy, Daddy, Daddy is from the first body of work of his I saw in the 2001 group show, Freestyle, at the Studio Museum in Harlem. It was a seismic exhibition that laid out the stakes for Black artists coming through the wake of identity politics and was deeply invested in language and art history.

Bradford trained as an artist and also as a stylist. He took end papers from his mother's hair salon to create what is ostensibly a painting. These end papers are a material that touches Black women's hair, their bodies, their life. It was the first time I had seen cultural material from Black life joined with the language of American Abstract Expressionism. My jaw hit the floor; I thought it was a miracle.

4. Maro Michalakakos, Oh! Les Beaux Jours (2012)

Oh! Les Beaux Jours, which means 'Oh! Happy Days', is part of the D.Daskalopoulos Collection gift. I wanted to include Maro's installation in the collection and eventually in this exhibition because I love the ambition of its monumental scale—especially when it's by a woman. I love it when people are unalloyed and super ambitious. After making this work, the artist said that she realised she could do anything.

I had always imagined the two polyurethane foam mounds wrapping around the columns in Tower Gallery 2. But because of the way they were originally constructed, the aperture at the top was too narrow and they didn't fit. So, bless Maro, we sat downstairs with a tape measure and she re-fabricated and expanded parts of that object so it could work in that site as I had envisioned. That's the beauty of working with living artists.

5. Mario Merz, Acceleration=Dream, Fibonacci Numbers in Neon and Motorcycle Phantom (1972, refabricated 1989)

Mario Merz is one of many artists who sit at the foundation of the way I think about art. Nothing he made was expected. He was interested in how nature could provide a kind of logic or intuition to be harnessed in art practice.

This piece was made for the Guggenheim in 1989. Merz often incorporated the Fibonacci sequence in his work, a mathematical formula ubiquitous in nature. Here, he saw the embodiment of the concept in a motorcycle—in its composition and acceleration in space. The sequence also matches the arithmetic layout of a spiral, and so there is deep resonance with the Guggenheim's architecture—a spiral within a spiral—even though the work isn't presented in the rotunda for this show. —[O]

By Way Of: Material and Motion in the Guggenheim Collection is on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York from 15 March 2024 to 12 January 2025.