New York’s Guggenheim Museum has announced the appointment of Naomi Beckwith as deputy director and chief curator. Ms. Beckwith, currently the senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, will replace Nancy Spector, who resigned in October. In her new role, which starts in June, Beckwith will oversee collections, exhibitions, publications, curatorial programs and archives.
“If you look out over the cultural landscape — particularly in the U.S. — she is quite obviously one of the outstanding leaders of today with a huge potential as well,” said Richard Armstrong, the museum’s director. “She’s very adept at issues of identity and, particularly, multidisciplinary art. We have to think about the Guggenheim’s growth over the next few years, so it needs to be a person with enormous capacity.”
Ms. Beckwith received her bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University and her master’s from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London . She joined MCA Chicago in 2011, rising to senior curator in 2018. During that time she co-curated the first major survey of the African-American artist Howardena Pindell and the legacy of the Black avant-garde in “The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now” and “Homebodies.”
In a statement, Beckwith said, “One cannot overstate the iconicity and consequence of the Guggenheim Museum—yet, refusing to rest on its laurels, it readily presents projects that disrupt art history’s mythologies. I’m excited to join the Guggenheim and its passionate team at a pivotal moment. I look forward to merging our shared goals of expanding the story of art, and also working to shape a new reality for arts and culture.”
Prior to her time at the MCA, Ms. Beckwith was an associate curator at New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem, where she organized shows including “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Any Number of Preoccupations” (2011). She is currently on the curatorial team of “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” an Okwui Enwezor–curated survey due to open at the New Museum next month.