In December 2024, Naomi Beckwith was chosen by the international selection committee as Artistic Director of documenta 16. Now she has announced the team that will join her, which is entirely composed of women: Carla Acevedo-Yates, Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, and Xiaoyu Weng will work with her to design the exhibition, publications, and programming of documenta 16, scheduled to run in Kassel from June 12 to September 19, 2027.
“I am grateful to collaborate with this team on the realization of documenta 16,” Beckwith said. “I admire their independence of spirit and thought, fueled by their generosity to artists and audiences. We are all excited to traverse together a myriad of fields of current art practices and to dialogue with the big questions that shape the multiple social and cultural landscapes of our planet and its future.”
Carla Acevedo-Yates, curator and researcher, focuses on contemporary American art with a cross-cultural gaze, looking particularly at the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States. She has worked as a curator at Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, where she organized group shows such as Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora 1990s - Today and entre horizontes: Art and Activism Between Chicago and Puerto Rico. Her most recent research, including exhibitions, publications and lectures, investigates the diaspora as a space of cultural production capable of reinventing social and political life.
Romi Crawford is a lecturer, writer and educator, teaching Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research explores the knowledge that flows from the creative act through a collaborative, dynamic, often experimental art-historical approach. Her projects, both academic and curatorial, dwell on collective experiences of artistic production, maintaining an intergenerational and participatory nature. Crawford continuously analyzes practices and strategies born out of uneven social and economic contexts, giving rise to new languages and structures, including improvised and para-institutional forms. Her interest in the pedagogical models of the 1960s and 1970s led her to found Black Arts Movement School Modality and New Art School Modality, two traveling, free platforms founded on a radical rethinking of the values of art education.
Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro is a curator and writer. Her publications include Dream of Europe: Selected Seminars and Interviews, 1984-1992, a collection of lectures by Audre Lorde (2020); In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love, a selection of writings by abolitionist philosopher Joy James, edited as editorial consultant for Divided Publishing (2023); and Another Sun, a dialogue with political theorist Françoise Vergès (2026). In his works Castro focuses on latent inscriptions, emerging from archives, verse, songs or territories, paying homage to marginalized poets, thinkers and philosophers.
Xiaoyu Weng is a curator and writer, and develops her work in close synergy with artists and cultural workers. Her research develops syncretic and hybrid frameworks to analyze contemporary practices, often embracing different disciplines and cultural contexts. From large institutions to biennials and independents, Weng has worked internationally fostering connections and new constellations of relationships. She has worked as a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art in Yekaterinburg, and the Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco and Paris.
Photo by Nicolas Wefers
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| An all-female curatorial team to documenta 16 |
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