Naomi Beckwith, Photo: Deanna Sirlin
Installation view: Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers; April 18, 2025–January 18, 2026; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Photograph by David Heald. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
Naomi Beckwith has been the Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York since 2021. She has been appointed the curator for documenta 16, which will take place in Kassel, Germany in 2027.
In 2024, Naomi Beckwith received the David C. Driskell Prize, an honor established by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta as the first national award to celebrate a scholar or artist whose work makes an original and significant contribution to the field of African American Art or Art History. Beckwith was chosen by a review committee from among these nominations by review committee members assembled by the High: Adrienne L. Childs, Senior Consulting Curator at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and 2022 Driskell Prize recipient; Franklin Sirmans, Director of the Pérez Art Museum and 2007 Driskell Prize recipient; and two High Museum of Art curators, Kevin W. Tucker (Chief Curator) and Maria L. Kelly (Assistant Curator of Photography).
On May 22, 2025, I had the pleasure of interviewing Naomi Beckwith at the High Museum. After we spoke, I attended a public conversation at the museum with Beckwith, Katherine Jentleson, Senior Curator of American Art, and Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum. Beckwith’s first comments in the conversation were about the Driskell Prize and the feeling of surprise that she had won this prestigious award. “It was a beautiful shock because I knew, of course, not only of the prize winners who came before me, but of course, of the legacy that David Driskell left, and the legacy that he was already forming, even in his lifetime. I think you're absolutely right that Dr. Driskell was someone who understood the beauty of our history, the way it's taught in the most normal, academic ways in the sort of majority institution. And it's beautiful to be able to waltz through a mostly European-based history, but he also knew that these stories didn't have Black people in them because people didn't know about Black people. But he knew that the methodologies of the ways in which these stories were told necessarily excluded Black stories and African stories, and so, he realized that you didn't just need a new ending to the fairy tale, what you needed was a different framework altogether.”
In 2023 Beckwith, as the Chief Curator at the Guggenheim Museum, gave an interview to CNN’s Richard Quest who said he had difficulty understanding the art. Beckwith responded, “We should take a walk and begin to talk through some of this work. And I think that is my work as a curator to walk, maybe physically and sometimes maybe with a text on the wall, with my colleagues who are tour guides to walk with you literally through this art.”
This is an edited transcription of our conversation.
Deanna Sirlin,
Atlanta, Georgia
June 2025
Constantin Brâncuși, Sleeping Muse, 1909, bronze, 6 5/16 × 10 7/8 × 7 9/16 inches, Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection,
The Art Institute of Chicago, IL, © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Deanna Sirlin: You grew up in the South Side of Chicago at a time when the arts thrived and were a significant part of the community. Is there a work of art or artist that was particularly significant to you at that time? What do you think about this artist and the work now?
Naomi Beckwith: So, confession––when I was growing up on the South Side of Chicago, art wasn't my primary focus. I thought I would be a doctor. So, all the things I was obsessed with and paying attention to were more on the medical side. But you're absolutely right that I grew up in this incredible moment in Chicago in the wake of the Black Power movement, which is also to say that it was still kind of in the embrace of the Black Arts Movement.
DS: Can you tell me what year you're thinking about?
NB: I grew up in the 80s, college in the mid-90s. In that time, there was a sense that there's a project of Black liberation still happening. And the arts are essential to that liberation. My parents made sure that we were utterly literate. I mean literate people, right? There were books everywhere. I grew up in Hyde Park. We had to go to the Hyde Park Art Center. We had to do the art fairs. There was also a Black arts fair at the DuSable Museum, which was just steps away from where I grew up.
DS: It was part of your language.
NB: Exactly––there was no separation in the sense of the arts being something special separated from your life.
DS: But was there a moment, was there one work when you said, “Uh-oh, now I really have to look at this?"
NB: There are two moments, actually, another moment professionally, but when I was really young, there were two moments that grabbed my attention. Being from one of these families that insists on literacy, there was a set of encyclopedias in the house, the World Book Encyclopedia. And I would just pull them down and sit on the floor and flip through them. And I absolutely remember in grade school being kind of arrested by the entry for Brancusi. I remember stopping on that image; it was one of his marble sculptures that kind of sat sideways.
DS: Was it this one?
NB: Well, there was the sleeping one, but this one was a little bit more fishy-looking. It wasn't exactly that one. But it was amazing because not all the entries had pictures, but there was an entry for Brancusi.
DS: Was this an old encyclopedia?
NB: It would have been a set from the 80s. And who knows what the edition was? I remember thinking there was something that felt so graceful and pure about this image. And I just had it in the back of my head. Did not really understand what sculpture was, what Brancusi’s interests were, the ways in which he was thinking about the indigenous culture of Romania. And then the second time I really felt the power of images and art, was going to an exhibit at the DuSable Museum of African American History. They had an exhibition of lynching postcards.
DS: What?
NB: Yes, a collection, because it was common for lynchings to be public spectacle events. So, people came, sometimes there were picnics, literally, and people brought their families.
Lynching postcard published by Harkrider Drug Company, Center, Texas. Texas African American Photography Archive
DS: So, this was turn of the century imagery?
NB: This would have been deep into the 20th century. We're talking 20s, 40s, even. It was not uncommon for people to take photos and turn them into postcards. If you ask around, you'll see there's a collection of these images floating around the world. This was an exhibition of that. And so, first of all, I'm trying to figure out why on earth I was there by myself as a child; I don't think people would have let children in. I was obviously hurt by the images I saw, the utter violence and desecration done to these Black bodies, but it also made me aware of cultural history, that these things don't happen in a vacuum just in the secret of a night, but that there's a whole visual culture that begins to arise around the history of violence done to Black communities. But that also means there's a visual culture around everything around the history of Black communities.
DS: So, did you feel like it was important for you, at that moment, to own that history and the imagery?
NB: Absolutely, but also, to see that there's a record of those things. So, whereas somebody may have taken an image of that for pleasure, you can then recast the use of that image and make it part of a historical record so that people don't forget that this was really happening. So later on, as an adult, I can process what it means to transform the use value of an image.
DS: It’s very yin and yang: Brancusi and lynching postcards.
NB: Right. Brancusi always has a sense of balance and peace in his works. But going back to your question about, what do you think of these artists now? I don't know the artists who took these lynching photographs.
DS: They weren't artists.
Kerry James Marshall, Heirlooms and Accessories, 2002, Ink-jet prints on paper in wooden artist's frames with rhinestones, Each: 51 x 46 inches,
Purchase, Smart Family Fund Foundation for Contemporary art, and Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, IL
NB: Well, maybe. One never knows, right? But I know that these images appear in the work of Kerry James Marshall. He has a whole series of artworks called Heirlooms and Accessories [2002]. There's a whole series of these lynching photographs that he's turned into other images. These are works that inform the work of Hank Willis Thomas and informed the work of so many artists who are interested again in that history of violence through visual culture, and then Brancusi. I went to the Studio Museum in 2007, and not long before that, there was an exhibition of a trio of artists who were all living in LA at the time, and you'll have to forgive me, because I'm going to forget one of them, but it was Rodney McMillian and Edgar Arceneaux. They had recently done this crazy installation where they had imagined that a sculpture by Brancusi called The Endless Column had somehow lifted off from Romania and literally burst through the wall of the Studio Museum. So, the whole show was a hole in the wall where this sculpture was coming through and kind of crashed into the floor, and it was genius, absolutely genius. It added a level of sci-fi imagination to this work, but also it showed that they, too, saw an interesting affinity to Brancusi’s project. It's fascinating that I was arrested by his imagery as a child, because I could say maybe I saw a little bit of the African in it or something like that. But I think Brancusi’s project was, “I'm going to take the forms of my people and make them modern and contemporary art.” I think so many artists can relate to that, especially if you consider yourself part of a minoritized culture.
DS: What led you to want to be a curator? And when did you first realize this was your vocation? Was there a particular moment or incident that was pivotal?
NB: So, I leave the sciences. I decide that the only other thing I loved was art, and I was taking art history classes throughout school. I was even working at the gallery in the student union at Northwestern. The whole time I was pre-med, mind you. Obviously, again, the arts were with me. So, I was kind of already curating even in undergrad. I decided to go to grad school for art history, and when I went, I didn't know what would come of it at all. I thought, all right, you have three options here. One is, you can become an academic and stay forever and teach forever, which sounded tempting for a long time, I'm not going to lie. The other option was I could become a critic. I could write about art. I wanted to be in some kind of discussion with art and that was one way to do it, but then it was becoming very clear when I was in school that that vocation was just not self-sustainable anymore. It also occurred to me that what I really wanted to do was be in conversation with artists, not just the art object, and I didn't want to write about things after the fact, which was the critical side. I wanted to sit with artists and have these relationships and a series of conversations that sometimes might go into art objects or that may go anywhere. Who knows? And that's when I realized, well, the people who do that the most were not only curators, but contemporary art curators. I wasn't going to do historical work. I was really going to focus on my peers. So that became the way I decided to conduct myself when I got to New York. But I also remember the first time I became aware that there was a thing; there was a person or a force, let's say, behind an exhibition. I didn't have a word for it, but I remember in high school going. . . .
DS: In high school, is that when you first knew about curators?
NB: I didn't know the word, but I knew there was somebody putting exhibitions together, because I distinctly remember going to see this exhibition about Odilon Redon at the Art Institute. And I walked into that exhibition, and I thought, this isn’t in chronological order. We're not walking through his work from this is what he did as a child through this is what he did as a mature artist. It was putting things up together according to the content of the work, according to themes, maybe what was happening historically. And I thought, oh, somebody's actually laying this out for me. That's when I became aware that there's somebody who has to think about the story that's told about art. Later on, I realized that's called a "curator."
The “Endless Column” project at the Studio Museum of Harlem, a collaboration among Edgar Arceneaux, Rodney McMillian, Vincent Galen Johnson, Olga Koumoundouros and Matthew Sloly Phoyo: Adam Reich/Studio Museum of Harlem
DS: The first thought in my mind is that curators are caretakers.
NB: Of course––that's what the word means.
DS: Creating the exhibition and placing the art is caretaking.
NB: Absolutely, I think that point is so important for the contemporary field; you're actually caring for the artist and the art at the same time. But I also think the notion of a curator was shifting. I'm lucky to have been born when I was, because the original idea of a curator was someone who caretakes for objects when the artist is no longer around. The artist is gone. So, it becomes somebody's job to adopt these things and put them in a museum and make sure they are sometimes on view, but oftentimes they’re just squirreled away somewhere and recorded. The job was that you were behind the scenes, that you were working with objects when the maker was gone. And then you start to see a real shift in the '60s when curators are not necessarily formal art historians. They're sitting with artists and making these arguments live. Before, it was often artists creating exhibitions; it's not until the middle of the 20th century that you start to see that real shift.
DS: So, was there an artist or a curator that you got excited about? I'm trying to think of the 1960s. I want to know who that is.
NB: Well, a lot of this was already happening in Europe, so you would have had someone like Pontus Hultén there, and I am totally forgetting the name of this man. I was just talking about him last night. He curated a show called When Attitudes Become Form. [Editor’s Note: Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form was curated by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1969.]
DS: Oh, that's a great title.
NB: It's a great title, but that was considered the first show of Conceptual Art. In the States, there's Kynaston McShine, who was a Black curator working at the Jewish Museum and then MOMA, who did a seminal show called Primary Structures in 1966. I only became aware of these people later, but I was already living in their wake. Living in the possibility that a curator was somebody who had a sense of art history, but was really midwifing these works, artworks, into the world, and that's the kind of contemporary curator that we're living with now.
If you want to talk about who's been directly influential on me, Valerie Cassel Oliver was one of the first people I knew of as a curator working in Chicago when I was in school. I remember writing her and asking her if she needed an assistant because she was brought on to the Venice Biennial projects, and she answered, "You're so sweet to ask, but you know, I already am an assistant really on that project.” But it was so amazing that she wrote back. I became aware of her because my mother saw her in a paper, and she's like, "Look, you told me you were interested in art history and curating. I have no idea what you want to do, but I found this Black woman in the paper who's doing that.” Another amazing influence, of course, was Lowery Stokes Sims, who was the President of the Studio Museum when I started there in 2007. I mean, she is an art historian, right? She's someone who has learned to take her skills walking through art, walking with artists, but also doing international studies––going to the Caribbean, thinking about Black culture diasporically, and bringing that into the academy, and especially as the first Black woman to work as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum.
Thelma Golden, obviously––the great art historian, great strategist around artists and someone who understands that at different moments in the art world, different parts of it will be ascendant. Sometimes it will be the academy, sometimes it will be the artists themselves. Sometimes it will be the market. She's been able to be fluid enough to advocate for Black art and Black artists inside of all those fields. And Okwui Enwezor––someone I got to sit beside and really go through his project, which is to say, if you don't like the art history you've been bid, create a new one. So, he, along with artists and writers, like Salah Hassan and Chika Okeke, really started making a new art history, and that was absolutely inspiring for me.
DS: I'm really interested in where you came from because I believe these things are important. There was a certain energy in Chicago when you were growing up.
NB: Amazing––still is.
DS: Still is, exactly, but do you see this in other cities in the United States?
NB: Every city has had something. I I think this goes back to Oakley's lesson, because his work was also very influenced by where he's from and then expanded on what it means to take one's homeland and natal condition into the world. And for me, I was from a place where, as I said already, there was no separation of social life, and art and aesthetic life.
DS: It was all one.
NB: It was all one. So, that was important for me, even in terms of my formal and informal education. Secondly, I was from a place that founded a lot of organizations and institutions to support art, so that entrepreneurial spirit of Chicago was really important to be able to institution-build and build communities around that. You'd absolutely see that with Dr. Margaret Burroughs starting the South Side Community Art Center, starting the DuSable Museum, but you still see it in someone like Theaster Gates with his Rebuild Foundation. There's an absolute through-line there. And when New York was going through its great Abstract Expressionist moment, Chicago was absolutely committed to figuration.
DS: That's right.
NB: You have that tradition in its academy, which allows people to do certain types of representation that just weren’t happening everywhere else. But I'm also from a place that was deeply invested in Pan-African as a movement. Chicago, even in general, no matter where you are, who you are culturally or ethnically, has always thought of itself as a city of diasporas coming together. Most people in that city are very aware of somewhere else in the world, or multiple places in the world, and that also infused this Pan-Africanist moment. I was always aware of myself as being from a place with a deep Black culture, but also connected to other Black cultures. That was the beginning of my international thinking. I felt this kind of liberty in saying that I could be moving around the world because I have all these brothers and sisters everywhere. Why would I not? And why would I not be interested in other parts of the world? I think all that begins to inform how I think about curating.
And you can go to other cities––St. Louis had a brilliant sort of concentration, its own Black Arts Movement; Detroit, obviously, was another site. I mean, we're here in Atlanta right now, and it's amazing to think about, let's say, the legacy of someone like Radcliffe Bailey, who was always deeply interested in this kind of found object tradition that you see around the Black diaspora, but also connecting narrativity and movement and what it means to migrate from one place to another as a deep part of his practice, and you actually see that kind of unfolding across art here to this very day.
Kerry James Marshall, When Frustration Threatens Desire,1990, Acrylic and collage on canvas, 80 × 72 inches,
Collection of April Sheldon and John Casado
DS: Well, in Chicago in particular, the migration was straight up, right?
NB: I mean, nothing but a collection of railroads.
DS: Has winning the Driskell Prize influenced the way you think about art and curation? Because this is recent.
NB: This is very recent. And so, has it changed the way I think about art? I think it changed the way I think about myself more than anything. Here's a little anecdote that I told after I got the Driskell Prize. I remember this was maybe early 2000s. Lenny Kravitz was doing an interview for some rock and roll magazine. Let's call it Rolling Stone. I don't know exactly what it was, but he had a new album or something out, and you know, Lenny Kravitz is all like, molto sexy, molto hippie, rock, what have you. And so, they're trying to talk to him about what he's excited about, what he's listening to, talk to us about this new musical journey. And he's like, okay, you know what I'm really excited about? I just made the cover of Essence magazine. Lenny Kravitz, who's becoming this massive international star, was basically saying, the only validation he wanted was for Black women to find him sexy. And I feel the same way about the Driskell Prize. When Rand Suffolk [Director of the High Museum] was calling me, I thought he was calling about something else. It was like, he would never call me about the Driskell Prize. But what I got from that was the sense that my peers, my elders, people who are part of my Black community see the work that I'm doing and consider it essential to this practice of making Black art history. And I thought, oh, my God, this is my Essence cover moment! I mean, I would also love to be on the cover of Essence, but what I wanted was that validation from my people.
DS: Okay, so now let's fast forward up to the current moment. What led you to want to work with Rashid Johnson? And what was your experience of curating the exhibition? Is there a work in the exhibition or a moment in the experience of curating that was especially resonant for you?
NB: Oh, yeah, so interesting. I mean, who would not want to work with Rashid Johnson?
DS: But not everybody did.
NB: Not everyone did. So, I think the question is, what led to you and Rashid working together? Because I'm not the only one who's called Rashid to ask, could we do something? I like to say that this project with Rashid was two years in the making and 20 years in the making, because we did meet 20 years ago. We met at a Kerry James Marshall opening, Chicago artist bringing the Chicago folks together. And that was the beginning of a lot of laughter and a lot of back and forth around what it meant to be two kids growing up, two Black kids growing up in Chicago at the same time.
DS: Where was this Kerry James Marshall show?
NB: This was at the Jack Shainman Gallery. The show was in New York, but all of these Chicago folks showed up there. And, of course, I'd known of Rashid before, but we had never met. Everyone assumes we knew each other in Chicago, but he’s on the North Side, and I'm the South Side, and never the twain shall meet. He's a Cub fan; I'm a White Sox fan. I mean, we have to keep that out of our conversations. You have to get along sometimes. All that to say, we didn't know each other in Chicago, but we knew all these people in common. And obviously, we knew all these references to what was happening in the city, like the Black History Jeopardy program every every February. We would make jokes about that. And so, this kind of sibling sense, I think, really brought us together because we were also walking through our history with similar projects, which is watching the generation just half a step above us, like the Lorna Simpsons and the Carrie Mae Weems, the Glenn Ligons of the world, contending with this question of representation, and being misread and being miscoded. In their wake and under their inspirations, really thinking about the complexities of those questions of who gets to represent whom, and what does it mean to misread? And how can you work around that?
And also, what does it mean as a Black subject to maybe not always have to answer to the grand history of Blackness, especially in this country, or even in the world, but to really think about oneself and one's positionality in the world, and how your personal life actually becomes political, to quote a good feminist artist. These were our parallel projects, and that's where we were able to meet and work together. It's been a thrill to do this show––there's literally 30 years of art in this exhibition. Thirty years of art for a man who's in this late 40s, right? And it's amazing to also see how he's moved from someone who's grappling with these questions, especially through photography, and image-making, and what does it mean to capture someone? What does it mean to try to tell someone's story? What does it mean to move from that to something tongue-in-cheek and maybe use fiction to kind of elide all these stories that everyone expects from you as an artist, especially as a Black male artist. Walking through the way that he basically obtained this amazing faculty with material, and started to get his hands dirty with black soap and wax. And then, just like confound the whole history of American painting. All that is there, and it's been amazing to see someone with that level of focus and ambition and vulnerability and honesty. I don't know if there's one work that's super poignant. There are so many poignant things in this exhibition for me, especially a work he made for the exhibition called Three Broken Souls. It's in the Rotunda. I don't have time to describe it in its fullness, but it is amazing that every time I look at that work, I still see something new.
But there's a really amazing moment where I write the wall text for the exhibition. There are labels for individual works, there is the intro panel, there are section texts that give you a little bit of insight into how he's working. And one of the section texts is called "Know Your Heritage." It's about the ways in which Rashid is thinking very much about legacy and history, and the ancestors that have come before us. But "Know Your Heritage" happens to be the title of that Black History Program, that Black History Jeopardy Program, that came on every February in Chicago, and Rashid broke out laughing. He's like, who wrote this? And nobody got the joke except for he and I, so it's nice to have this kind of little shared secret, in the space of the exhibition.
DS: I want to hear about the Rotunda piece.
NB: The Rotunda piece, Three Broken Souls, it's a beautiful piece. It's a mosaic work, so you have to get in tightly and see all the materials in the broken bits, but you also have to walk away and see it from a distance, because it reveals something else entirely from a short distance and then much, much further back.
DS: Can you describe your experience of looking at an artwork you have not seen before?
NB: When I approach a work, I know I approach it with a little bit of a professional eye, but the first thing that I always try to ask myself is, what is it made of? Not what is it as an object, but what is it made of? I’m really interested in material history. Maybe that comes from a long history of found object tradition and Black culture, but I’m always interested in what is it made of, how does it come together? Does it want me to see what it's made of, or is it trying to give me an illusion of something? Does it want me to see an image? Is it made of paint, but wants me to see an image? Or is it made of paint, the way Rashid does it, where it's just thick, thick impasto, like cake frosting, and then he carves into it. So, what's more important is how his body has moved, not the material. But there are moments when the material is more important. I tell everyone, approach a work and just start looking at the fundaments of what makes it up. I also do that exercise: look closely and look afar, walk away, and come back. It's also important to ask yourself, do you like it or not? It's okay to have taste in the face of a work.
But it's also important to be able to then talk to yourself about why do you like it? Why don't you like it? If you don't like it, that's amazing, because I always say it's important to have an opinion about something, than not have an opinion about something. Think about its scale. Is it big? Is it trying to envelop you, or is it small and does it want you to peek in? Is it trying to inspire you with its grandiosity, or does it want you to have a really intimate moment with it? Or can you do both in the space of an object? Does it remind you of anything? Does it remind you of something even in your home? Have you seen this somewhere in the world?
DS: So, all of these moments are going through your head when you're approaching a work of art for the first time?
NB: For the very, very, very first time.
DS: And does it change later?
NB: Yes, because after asking those questions, I can come back and go, who's done this before? I've got a Rolodex in my head of artistic gestures and materials and so forth. But it's always important to approach a work on its own terms initially. It's a hard thing to do, because I think many of us, even if we're not in the art field, have trained ourselves to think there's an immediate message, and we have to go to an art object and go––when, I see a monolithic black object with keys, and the keys are about pushing, and pushing is about labor. We automatically go to metaphor. I always tell people, "Don't get to metaphor first, get to the material. Get to the materials first, and you'll find the metaphors later.”
Rashid Johnson, Three Broken Souls, 2025 © Rashid Johnson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photography by Stephanie Powell
DS: And then what happens when you meet the living artist?
NB: Oh, that's always fun. Sometimes I meet the living artist never having seen their work, which is great. And then vice versa, I'll see the work and be like, oh, you made that? It's funny, sometimes putting the person first, before the objects, and I won't name any names, but this is why I said that the most interesting thing is those conversations, for two reasons. One, of course, gives you insight into why an artist is working. If I know their work, I have a thousand questions. But the other thing is, I'm more interested in how artists see the world, not just how they make objects, but how they see the world. Artists every day are literally inventing something, creating something, bringing something into being that just wasn't there before. And artists have the capacity to say that the world we're living in now isn't necessarily the world that we have to live in, and that we can change something. For me––I'm getting emotional even thinking about it––that is the most powerful, like message, to anyone.
DS: A beautiful dreamer, huh?
NB: Beautiful dreamer––exactly! That's what I love to hear from artists. I want to be reminded of that every day.
DS: How much energy do you spend trying to enter something? Is that one of your favorite things, to enter something new and see a work that you've never seen before?
NB: 100%––but also, I think it's really important to not totally psychologize an artist through the artwork. You've got to pull the object out a little bit. There are some artists who are asking for a little bit of this, like, "this is my heart and soul on the canvas.” But I'm not so keen on that. For me, a good artist is someone with a very personal vision, but also a deep understanding of where they're situating themselves in the world. That push and pull between, let's say, history and art history and society and community and culture and one sort of personal approach, all that is what makes the art object. But I think we fell into a rabbit hole, especially in the 90s, trying to make arguments about people through their artworks and especially people who were minoritized, like every woman's artwork was about her sexuality. Every Black person's artwork was about trauma, like, all right, no.
DS: Enough.
NB: Exactly, enough from the psychologizing. We have to put this in the context of how does this change the way we think?
DS: Don't you think that critics did that more?
NB: Yeah, of course. They were limited. That's not a critique of the critic. I mean, every critic is limited. But when you have a group of artists who are saying I'm not making work about painting anymore, I may be making paintings, but I'm not making paintings about painting, then the natural default for a lot of people is to say, well, it's all about you. This is why it becomes really important to study different types of art and have conversations with artists who are saying, well, I'm deeply, of course, interested in my cultural background, but my cultural background just allows me a new visual language to think about, another way into art. That's what that is.
Naomi Beckwith is the Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She is also the Artistic Director of Documenta 16, opening in 2027. Beckwith comes to the Guggenheim from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, where she has held curatorial posts since 2011 and served as Manilow Senior Curator since 2018. Prior to joining the MCA, she was a fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, working on numerous cutting-edge exhibitions including Locally Localized Gravity (2007), which was an exhibition and program of events featuring over 100 artists whose practices are social, participatory, and communal. Beckwith was previously the Associate Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where she focused on themes of identity and conceptual practices in contemporary art and artists of African descent, as well as managed the Artists-in-Residence program. Beckwith has curated key exhibitions such as 30 Seconds off an Inch at The Studio Museum in Harlem (2009-10), exhibiting work by 42 artists of color or those inspired by Black culture. She holds an MA with Distinction from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, completing her Master’s thesis on Adrian Piper and Carrie Mae Weems, and was a Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.
Naomi Beckwith
© Nicolas Wefers, documenta
Deanna Sirlin is an artist and writer from Brooklyn, New York currently living and working in Georgia. She received an MFA from Queens College, CUNY where she studied with Robert Pincus-Witten, Charles Cajori and Benny Andrews. She has received numerous honors, including a Rothko Foundation Symposium Residency, a grant from the United States State Department, a Yaddo Foundation Residency and a Creative Capital Warhol Foundation Award from its Art Writing Mentorship Program. Her installation, Unfolding, is on view at Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center in Asheville, NC from April 4 to August 16, 2025.
Deanna Sirlin
Photo: Jerry Siegel