Naomi Beckwith, deputy director and chief curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, has been appointed artistic director of Documenta 16, the 2027 edition of the embattled contemporary art exhibition held in Kassel, Germany, every five years.
The most recent iteration of Documenta was embroiled in controversy. Four days into the festival’s opening in June 2022, allegations of antisemitism were lobbied against Documenta 15 and its curators, the Indonesian collective ruangrupa, over the inclusion of a large banner by Taring Padi. The artwork, a commentary on Indonesia’s violent dictatorship, depicted hundreds of military figures, including one of a pig dressed as an Israeli national intelligence officer and another donning fangs, a black hat with a Nazi emblem, and the sidelocks often worn by Orthodox Jewish individuals.
Early into the show’s run, a display featuring works by Palestinian artists was vandalized, prompting over 100 affiliates of the exhibition to issue a collective statement condemning the incident as a racist attack.
Last year, in the wake of October 7, Documenta’s administration lambasted ruangrupa after two members of the collective “liked” pro-Palestine posts on Instagram. Documenta’s response concerned artists and other members of the cultural community who have observed Germany’s worsening surveillance and suppression of speech critical of Israel.
Beckwith was selected by Documenta 16’s second finding committee, assembled this summer after the initial finding committee withdrew en masse in November 2023 following the resignation of Mumbai-based curator and writer Ranjit Hoskoté. Hoskoté was also accused of antisemitism amid the resurfacing of his signature on a petition likening Zionism to Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) in 2019.
Acknowledging the controversies in the lead-up to her appointment, Beckwith told the New York Times that her curatorial method will be different from the previous curators’ approach. “Every exhibition is a deep collaborative practice for me with artists,” she told the paper. “So there are no surprises.”
Hailing from Chicago, Beckwith holds a graduate degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and went on to become a Critical Studies Fellow through the Whitney Museum of American Art’s independent study program before joining the Studio Museum in Harlem as an associate curator. After working closely with Thelma Golden for years, Beckwith returned to Chicago in 2011 as the associate curator at the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and was promoted to senior curator in 2018, having co-curated the first major survey for Howardena Pindell at the museum. She joined the Guggenheim in 2021.
