Naomi Beckwith, appointed in December 2024 as the artistic director of documenta 16, has announced the curatorial team that will collaborate with her on the exhibition, comprising all women for the first time. Beckwith is also the first Black director in the quinquennial event’s 65-year history.
The group consists of curator and researcher Carla Acevedo-Yates, educator and writer Romi Crawford, editor and writer Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, and curator and writer Xiaoyu Weng. Together, they will oversee the exhibition, publications, and programming for documenta 16, which will take place in Kassel, Germany, from June 12th to September 19th, 2027.
“I admire their independence of spirit and thought, which, for each, is fueled by their generosity to artists and audiences alike,” Beckwith said in a statement. “We are all excited to traverse, together, myriad fields of current artistic practices and to be in dialogue with the immense issues shaping our planet’s manifold social and cultural landscapes and its futures.”
Acevado-Yates focuses her work on contemporary art in the Americas, across the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States. Her previous curatorial positions were at the Michigan State University Broad Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Meanwhile, Weng is a curator often focusing on migration and social change, who has held positions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, among others.
Crawford works as a professor of visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her scholarship emphasizes collaboration and experimentation, often through intergenerational projects. Lastly, Rodríguez Castro is an editor whose publications include Dream of Europe: Selected Seminars and Interviews, 1984–1992 by Audre Lorde and In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love by Joy James.
This appointment follows a controversial documenta 15, directed by Indonesian art collective ruangrupa in 2022. This event was marred by a contentious debate over anti-Semitic caricatures in some exhibited works, along with other allegations of anti-Semitism. This led to the removal of work by the Indonesian collective Taring Padi and criticism against the directorial team.
