The ARTnews Awards, a new editorial program that recognizes outstanding artistic achievement in U.S. arts institutions, has just announced its inaugural 2024 recipients. To help select winners, art news Six high-profile American curators are invited to review exhibitions held between September 1, 2023 and August 31, 2024. During the two sessions, these curators joined art news Senior editors select a group of nominees and winners in each category. Read more about each juror below.
Cecilia Alemany
Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director and Chief Curator, The High Line
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Cecilia Alemani is an Italian curator based in New York. Since 2011, she has served as the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director and Chief Curator of High Line Art, a development of New York City’s High Line Public art project launched. Currently, she is also the curator of the 12th SITE Santa Fe International, which will open in the summer of 2025. From 2020 to 2022, she served as artistic director of the 59th Venice Biennale, curating the critically acclaimed exhibition “Dream Milk”, which was visited by more than 800,000 people.
Naomi Beckwith
Associate Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Naomi Beckwith is associate director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where she oversees collections, exhibitions , publications, curatorial programs and archives, and provides strategic guidance to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s international network of museums. Guggenheim Foundation. She comes to the Guggenheim from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, where she served as Manilow Senior Curator. At the MCA, her exhibitions and publications focus on the impact of identity and the resonance of black culture on multidisciplinary practices in global contemporary art. She organized and co-organized critically acclaimed exhibitions such as “Howardina Pindel: What Still Remains to Be Seen,” the first survey of the artist, whose catalog won the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award . Prior to joining MCA, Beckwith was associate curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she organized “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Any Number of Attention” (2011) and “30 Seconds off an Inch” (2009- 10) Waiting for exhibitions.
Candace Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation)
Executive Director and Chief Curator, Forge Project
Candice Hopkins is a citizen of the Carcross/Tagish Nation and lives in Red Hook, New York. Her writing and curatorial practice explore the intersections of history, contemporary art, and indigeneity. She is the executive director of the Takakaniki Forge Project in New York and a fellow in Indigenous art history and curatorial studies at Bard College. She is the curator of the exhibitions “Indian Theatre: Indigenous Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969,” which will be on display at the Hessel Museum of Art in 2023; “Music of the Impossible,” with Raven Chacon and co-curated by Stavia Grimani at the Miller ICA; and touring exhibitions such as Soundings: An Exhibition in Five co-curated with Dylan Robinson Parts,” and “ᑕᑯᒃᓴᐅᔪᒻᒪᕆᒃ Double Vision,” featuring textiles, prints, and paintings by Jessie Oonark, Janet Kigusiuq, and Victoria Mamnguqsualuk. She was Senior Curator at the inaugural Toronto Art Biennale in 2019 and 2022, and was part of the curatorial team for the Canadian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, which featured work by the media collective Isuma; Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel; and the exhibition “Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art” at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Her notable papers include “The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economics on the Colonial Frontier,” published in Readers of Documenta 14; “Illegal Social Life”, The South is a state of mind; and “The Appropriation Debate (or the Gallows of History),” Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Values (New Museum/MIT Press, 2020).
Tina Kukielski
Susan Sollings Executive Director and Chief Curator, Art21
Tina Kukielski is executive director and chief curator of Art21, a nonprofit arts organization that tells the story of contemporary art and produces award-winning documentaries. Kukielski has led Art21’s digital transformation and is executive producer of its long-running television show, which airs biannually online and on PBS. Kukielski previously served as a curator at the Whitney Museum and the Carnegie Museum. She was co-curator of the 2013 Carnegie International Exhibition.
maria elena ortiz
Director, Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth
María Elena Ortiz is a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, where she curated Jamie Holmes: Making the revolution unstoppable (2023). She is a curator at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), where she curated the group exhibitions Aligned with Power: Art from Africa and the African Diaspora from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, The Other Side of the Present: Caribbean Art vision”, as well as Firelei Báez, Ulla von Brandenburg, William Cordova, Teresita Fernández, José Carlos Martinat, Carlos Motta Solo exhibition of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. At PAMM, she founded the Caribbean Cultural Institute, a curatorial platform dedicated to Caribbean art, and worked to grow the museum’s collections, winning grants from Simone Leigh, Bisa Butler, Ph.D. Works by Bony Ramirez et al. In 2024, Modern Magazine presented “Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diaspora Art since 1940,” her survey exploring Caribbean Surrealism’s relationship to Afrosurrealist and Afrofuturist art.
Pilar Tompkins Rivas
Chief Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial and Collections, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
Pilar Tompkins Rivas is chief curator and associate director of curatorial and collections at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, under construction in Los Angeles , a museum dedicated to the art of visual storytelling. During his tenure at the Lucas Museum, Tompkins Rivas provided leadership, strategic direction, and management oversight for curatorial, acquisitions, exhibitions and programming, museum services, and conservation. Previously, she served as Director of the Vincent Price Art Museum (VPAM) at East Los Angeles College, where she served as Director and Chief Curator, organizing numerous exhibitions such as Carolina Caicedo, Guadalupe ·Solo exhibitions by artists such as Rosales and Patrick Martinez. At VPAM, Tompkins Rivas spearheaded partnerships between the museum and the Smithsonian Institution; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); and the Huntington Library, Museum of Art, and Botanical Gardens; and launched Diverse pipeline programs, including museum studies certificate program. Prior to her tenure at VPAM, she served as Curatorial Program Coordinator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), co-directing the institution’s UCLA-LACMA Art History Internship Program and the Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship program, in addition to co-curating exhibitions with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Getty PST: Los Angeles/Los Angeles Initiative.
Maximiliano Duron
ARTnews Senior Editor
Maximilíano Durón is a queer, Chicanx journalist and critic covering contemporary art. His writing focuses on the work of artists of color, particularly Latinx/Chicanx artists, queer artists, and their intersections, as well as curators, collectors, and scholars whose work has transformed the art world. He was in art news As senior editor since 2014, she manages the publication’s art fair and Top 200 collectors coverage. Dulong is a 2023 Rab Gold Medal winner for visual arts journalists and a founding member of Critical Minded, an initiative that supports the work of a diverse, intergenerational group of cultural critics of color. He holds bachelor’s degrees in journalism and art history from New York University.
Alex Greenberg
ARTnews Senior Editor
Alex Greenberger is a senior editor art newsGreenberg started working there as an editorial assistant in 2015. He has covered topics ranging from protests in 2018 and 2019 against a former vice president of the Whitney Museum to controversies involving allegations of anti-Semitism and harassment at Documenta 15 in 2022. In his critique, Greenberg discusses body horror, the history of video art, the legacy of Pablo Picasso, and the work of artists Wangechi Mutu, Wolfgang Tillmans, Marlene Dumas Si and countless others. His articles also appear in art space and village voiceas well as in the gallery catalogue. He graduated from New York University with a BA in Art History and Film Studies.
Learn more about the ARTnews Awards.
