Photo Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Guggenheim Museum
Naomi Beckwith, the Guggenheim Museum’s deputy director and chief curator, will curate the 2027 edition of Documenta, a closely watched art exhibition that takes place once every five years in Kassel, Germany.
She is the first Black woman ever to curate the show in its 69-year history, as well as the second American-born curator ever to helm the art festival, after Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who did the 2012 edition.
Her appointment comes after a lengthy selection process that has faced tumult since the last edition in 2022. During that process, against the backdrop of Israel’s war in Gaza, the entire selection committee resigned before it could even name a curator for the 2027 edition, forcing Documenta to start all over again. An entirely new selection committee was named earlier this year.
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Documenta is a show typically recognized for leaning more academic than its Italian counterpart, the Venice Biennale. But more recently, the exhibition has become known for something else altogether: ongoing controversy related to how the organizers of the 2022 edition, known as Documenta 15, dealt with allegations of antisemitism. The effects of those accusations are still being felt, with German politicians closely guarding the funding of the next edition, titled Documenta 16.
Typically, curators come to Documenta with at least one major biennial under their belt. Although Beckwith has served on the curatorial committee for one edition of SITE Santa Fe’s SITElines biennial and the awards jury for the 2015 Venice Biennale, she is less well known for doing biennials than she is for organizing major shows held at American institutions. (Disclosure: Beckwith recently served on the jury for the inaugural ARTnews Awards.)
Before joining the Guggenheim in 2021, Beckwith has held curatorial posts at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Based now in New York, she is now at work on a Rashid Johnson retrospective due to open next year at the Guggenheim. Other notable shows organized by her include a Lynette Yiadom-Boakye survey held at the Studio Museum in 2011 and a Howardena Pindell retrospective held at the MCA Chicago in 2018.
In 2021, she served on the curatorial committee for the New Museum exhibition “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” which was conceived by the late curator Okwui Enwezor (who organized Documenta 11) and focused on how Black artists have portrayed mourning and loss.
“It is the honor of a lifetime to be selected as Artistic Director for documenta 16,” Beckwith said in a statement. “documenta is an institution that belongs to the entire world, as much as it belongs to Kassel, as well as an institution that is in perpetual dialogue with history as much as it is a barometer of art and culture in the immediate present. I am humbled by the breadth of this responsibility and equally excited to share my research and ideas with this storied and generous institution: one that affords space and time for focus, deep study, exploration, experimentation, and awakenings for artists, curators, and audiences alike.”
Sven Schoeller, chairman of Documenta’s supervisory board, called Beckwith’s appointment “the start of a new future for documenta.” Her Documenta opens on June 12, 2027.
The antisemitism controversy that afflicted Documenta in 2022 largely went unmentioned in the announcement of Beckwith’s appointment, though Timon Gremmels, the Minister of State for Science and Research for the state of Hesse, briefly alluded to it in his statement. He said that Documenta had finally “struck a good balance between freedom of art and discourse and protection against anti-Semitism and discrimination.”
Beckwith’s appointment marks the first time ever that both Documenta and the Venice Biennale—the world’s top two biennial-style art exhibitions—are being curated by Black women. Koyo Kouoh, a Cameroonian-born curator who currently leads the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, was recently named curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale.
