Naomi Beckwith, the Guggenheim Museum’s deputy director and chief curator, has named her artistic team for her edition of Documenta, which will open in Kassel, Germany, in June 2027.
“I am grateful to be working with this team on Documenta 16. I admire their independence of spirit and thought, characterized by a deep respect for artists and audiences alike,” Beckwith said in a statement. “We look forward to exploring the diverse fields of contemporary artistic practices together and engaging in dialogue with the pressing questions shaping our planet’s social and cultural landscapes and their futures.”
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Beckwith will plan the exhibition of Documenta 16 with the four-person team of Carla Acevedo-Yates, Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, and Xiaoyu Weng. They will also run point on the publication and programming for Documenta 16, which will run from June 12, 2027, to September 19, 2027.
Carla Acevedo-Yates is a curator and scholar specializing in contemporary art of the Americas with a focus on the Caribbean and Latin America diasporas. She has held curatorial roles at the Michigan State University Broad Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where her recent projects included “Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora 1990s – Today” and “entre horizontes: Art and Activism Between Chicago and Puerto Rico.”
Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro is a writer and publicist who in 2018 was a fellow at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin.
Romi Crawford is a professor of visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studies the intersection of art-making, economics, and politics. She is also the founder of the Black Arts Movement School Modality and New Art School Modality platforms.
Xiaoyu Weng led the modern and contemporary art department at the Art Gallery of Ontario and is the newly named director of the New York alternative space Art in General, a position she will hold while helping run the Tanoto Art Foundation. She previously worked at the Guggenheim Museum, where she created an online series examining anti-Asian racism, with an eye to contemporary artists’ perspectives on the swell of it during the Covid-19 pandemic.
This is the first all-female artistic team to lead Documenta since the quinquennial’s founding in 1955. Beckwith is the first Black woman to helm an edition of the show, as well as the second-ever American-born artistic director, after Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in 2012.
Beckwith’s appointment followed a protracted selection process that followed the heavily scrutinized 2022 edition. Against the backdrop of Israel’s war in Gaza, the entire selection committee resigned before Documenta could even name a curator for the upcoming edition, forcing the art festival to restart the selection process. An entirely new selection committee was announced earlier this year.
Sven Schoeller, chairman of Documenta’s supervisory board, called Beckwith’s appointment “the start of a new future for documenta.”
