Documenta announced yesterday the full artistic team for its 16th edition—the first all-female team since the exhibition’s founding in 1955. Set to run from June 12 through September 19, 2027, documenta 16 will be helmed by artistic director Naomi Beckwith, the Guggenheim’s deputy director and chief curator. She is the first Black woman to curate the show in its 69-year history and only the second woman overall, after Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev curated the 2012 edition. Beckwith is also one of the first Documenta artistic directors without significant biennial experience. She served on the curatorial committee for one edition of SITE Santa Fe’s SITElines biennial and the awards jury for the 2015 Venice Biennale, but her long career staging major museum exhibitions was deemed qualification enough.
Beckwith has chosen an all-women curatorial team composed of Carla Acevedo-Yates, Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro and Xiaoyu Weng. With their multicultural and geographically diverse backgrounds, they are expected to reestablish Documenta as a critical observatory on the international art scene through a tandem exhibition, publications and programming.
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Carla Acevedo-Yates is a leading curator, researcher and critic with a focus on the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States, known for approaching the art of the Americas from a transcultural perspective. After holding curatorial positions at the Michigan State University Broad Art Museum, Acevedo-Yates joined the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2019, where she curated groundbreaking group exhibitions on Latino and Caribbean diasporic exchanges and identities, including “Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora 1990s–Today” and “entre horizontes: Art and Activism Between Chicago and Puerto Rico.”
Also arriving in Kassel from Chicago, Romi Crawford is an educator, writer and professor of visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her recent research explores how artmaking can become a form of knowledge production and circulation—an approach central to Documenta’s public programming and publishing. Crawford has been particularly interested in techniques emerging from unequal social and economic conditions, which can give rise to new genres, methods and structures, including improvisational and para-institutional formats. Her study of pedagogical activities embedded in the art practices of the 1960s and 1970s led her to found the Black Arts Movement School Modality and the New Art School Modality—both free, roving platforms grounded in community-driven values for arts education.
Colombian writer, translator and editor Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro is expected to play a key role in the publications program. Known for her critical sensitivity to archives, translation and contextualization, she is best known for editing Dream of Europe: Selected Seminars and Interviews, 1984-1992, a collection of previously unpublished seminars and interviews by Audre Lorde.
Meanwhile, Xiaoyu Weng will bring a perspective centered on Asia in its broader sense, including the diaspora. Born in Shanghai and now based in New York, Weng was recently named director of the newly revived experimental nonprofit Art in General, which she will run alongside her role at the Tanoto Foundation, an independent philanthropic organization founded by Indonesian entrepreneur Sukanto Tanoto and his wife Tinah Bingei Tanoto, dedicated to art and education. She previously led the modern and contemporary art department at the Art Gallery of Ontario, curated the inaugural Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art in Yekaterinburg and worked at the Guggenheim Museum as Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Associate Curator of Chinese Art, where she created an online series examining anti-Asian racism through contemporary art that gained wide attention during the pandemic. Earlier in her career, in 2010, she was the founding director of Asia Programs in Paris and San Francisco for the Kadist Art Foundation.
Documenta’s legacy and what comes after scandal
Beckwith’s appointment in December followed a lengthy and fraught process, coming in the wake of the turmoil that engulfed documenta 15 from its opening amid allegations of antisemitism. Those accusations—set against the backdrop of Israel’s war in Palestine and Germany’s increasingly polarized politics—eventually forced the commission to resign and restart the process. Although a new selection committee was announced earlier this year, leading to the current appointments, the fallout may linger, as German politicians have threatened to closely monitor the funding of documenta 16.
Given our fragile historical moment and the recent upheaval surrounding the exhibition, it is worth revisiting its origins, which may render the 16th edition even more resonant. Founded in 1955 in Kassel, Germany, by painter and curator Arnold Bode, Documenta was conceived to rehabilitate and reignite the power of art in a country still reeling from World War II and the cultural censorship of the Nazi years. Kassel, a provincial city largely destroyed by Allied bombing, became an unlikely stage for what Bode called a “museum of 100 days.” From the start, showcasing modernist works once banned or branded “degenerate,” Documenta evolved into a site of curatorial experimentation that expanded the very idea of exhibitions—from Harald Szeemann’s seminal documenta 5 (1972), which introduced installation-based and conceptual practices, to Okwui Enwezor’s landmark documenta 11 (2002), when the exhibition fully embraced globalism.
It remains to be seen whether the quiet strength of this all-female curatorial team can secure a smooth, censor-free run—and the necessary funding—for what remains one of the most important international art events, a platform that fosters intercultural dialogue and exchange while sending ripples beyond the art market that crystallize into art-historical and critical shifts felt worldwide.
