Naomi Beckwith, the artistic director of documenta 16, has unveiled her creative team for the next edition of the contemporary art exhibition, which will take place in 2027 (12 June-19 September). This marks the first time that the influential show, which is held in the German city of Kassel every five years, will be led by an all-female team.
Beckwith, the deputy director and chief curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, was announced as the curator of the 16th edition of Documenta in December last year. Her team of four women curators— Carla Acevedo-Yates, Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, and Xiaoyu Weng—will develop the exhibition, publications and programming for the upcoming edition.
Carla Acevedo-Yates is currently a curator at the MCA Chicago. Previously, she was the associate curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, where she organised solo exhibitions by Johanna Unzueta, Claudia Peña Salinas, Duane Linklater, and Scott Hocking.
“Her recent exhibitions, publications, and lectures have focused on diaspora as a site of cultural production that reimagines social and political life,” says a documenta statement. In 2022, she organised the Focus section at the Armory Show fair in New York.
Romi Crawford’s research practice explores areas of race and ethnicity linked to American visual culture including art, film, and photography, according to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she works as a professor. Her publications include The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (Northwestern University Press, 2017). In 2023, she founded the New Art School Modality, a new art institution that aims to make art education more accessible.
The Colombian writer and editor Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro has contributed to publications such as Artforum and The Brooklyn Rail. Her publications include Dream of Europe: Selected Seminar and Interviews, 1984-1992, a collection of lectures by the late civil rights activist Audre Lorde (2020), and In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love, featuring selected texts by the abolitionist philosopher Joy James. In 2022, she presented the keynote address and curatorial seminar Ocean Blue (2022) at the De Appel Amsterdam institute.
Shanghai-born curator Xiaoyu Weng says in a statement that her practice focuses on the “impact of globalisation, the convergence of art, science, and technology, and emerging ecological and environmental transformations through the lens of feminism, identity, and decolonisation”. She has held curatorial positions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.
The last edition of Documenta in 2022 sparked controversy after two antisemitic images were found in the work People’s Justice (2000), by the Indonesian artist collective, Taring Padi. The work was removed from show and, in the following days, Documenta posted a statement that was attributed to the Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa, who curated the exhibition. It read in part: “We acknowledge that this was our error.”
