Naomi Beckwith, deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim Museum, will curate Documenta 2027, a high-profile art exhibition that takes place every five years in Germany Hosted once in Kassel.
She is the first black woman to curate the festival in its 69-year history and the first since Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in 2012. Two American-born curators run the festival.
Her appointment comes shortly after the last election in 2022, following a lengthy selection process and facing turmoil in the years that followed. In the process, and against the backdrop of Israel’s war in Gaza, the entire selection committee resigned before the 2027 curators were confirmed, forcing Documenta to start over. A new selection committee was appointed earlier this year.
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Documenta is generally considered to be more academic than the Venice Biennale in Italy. But lately, the exhibition has become famous for something else: the ongoing controversy over how the organizers of Documenta 15 in 2022 have handled accusations of anti-Semitism. The fallout from the accusations remains, with German politicians closely watching funding for the next documenta, known as Documenta 16.
Typically, curators come to documenta with at least one major biennial under their belt. Beckwith is best known for organizing major exhibitions at U.S. institutions, although she served on the curatorial committee for one edition of SITElines Biennale at SITE Santa Fe and as a jury member of the 2015 Venice Biennale. Famous for hosting biennales. (Disclosure: Beckwith recently served on the jury for the inaugural ARTnews Awards.)
Before joining the Guggenheim in 2021, Beckwith served as curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. She currently lives in New York and is currently participating in a Rasheed Johnson retrospective opening at the Guggenheim Museum next year. Other notable exhibitions she organized include the Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Survey at the Studio Museum in 2011 and the Howardena Pindell Retrospective at the MCA Chicago in 2018.
In 2021, she serves on the curatorial committee of the New Museum exhibition “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” curated by the late Okwui Enwezor (11th Kassel Organizers of Documenta), focusing on how black artists depict mourning and loss.
“It is the honor of a lifetime to be chosen as Artistic Director of Documenta 16,” Beckwith said in a statement. “Documenta is an institution that belongs to the entire world as much as it belongs to Kassel, an institution that is in permanent dialogue with history and at the same time a barometer of art and culture of the present. I am humbled by the breadth of this responsibility, It is also a pleasure to share my research and ideas with this legendary and generous institution: one that provides space and time for artists, curators, and audiences to focus, delve, explore, experiment, and awaken.”
Sven Scherer, chairman of Documenta’s supervisory board, called Beckwith’s appointment “the beginning of a new future for Documenta.” Her Documenta will open on June 12, 2027.
The anti-Semitism controversy that has dogged Documenta in 2022 was largely absent from Beckwith’s appointment announcement, although Hessian State Minister for Science and Research Timon Gremmels briefly mentioned it in a statement Got to this point. He said documenta ultimately “achieved a good balance between art and freedom of expression and the prevention of anti-Semitism and discrimination.”
Beckwith’s appointment marks the first time that Documenta and the Venice Biennale – two of the world’s major biennale-style art exhibitions – have been curated by black women. Koyo Kouoh, born in Cameroon, is currently the director of the Museum of Contemporary African Art in Cape Town and was recently appointed curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale.
