In December 2024, Naomi Beckwith was appointed Artistic Director of documenta 16 by the international selection committee.
She is now announcing her core team: The ensemble of Carla Acevedo-Yates, Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro and Xiaoyu Weng will work with Beckwith to develop the exhibition, publications and programming of documenta 16.
Naomi Beckwith: “I am grateful to walk with this team in crafting documenta 16. I admire their independence of spirit and thought which, for each, is fueled by their generosity to artists and audiences alike. 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.”
documenta 16 will take place from June 12 to September 19, 2027 in Kassel.
Carla Acevedo-Yates is a curator and researcher working with contemporary art of the Americas from a transcultural perspective, with a particular focus on the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States. She has held curatorial positions at the Michigan State University Broad Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where she curated the group exhibitions Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora 1990s – Today and entre horizontes: Art and Activism Between Chicago and Puerto Rico, among other projects. Her recent exhibitions, publications, and lectures have focused on diaspora as a site of cultural production that reimagines social and political life.
Romi Crawford is an educator, writer and professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is interested in knowledge production that emerges from art making and is committed to a method of art historical research that is responsive, collaborative, recuperative, dynamic and often experimental in form. Crawford’s scholarship and curatorial projects examine historical instances of collective art making and are themselves collaborative and intergenerational by design. She is routinely concerned with artistic techniques and strategies that emerge from uneven social and economic conditions, and how such circumstances embolden new genres, ways of making, and structures, including improvisational and para-institutional formats. Crawford’s research into pedagogical activities that embed in art practices of the 60s and 70s prompted her to establish the Black Arts Movement School Modality and the New Art School Modality. Both platforms are free, roving, and grounded in a revised set of values for arts education.
Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro is a writer and editor. Her titles include Dream of Europe: Selected Seminar and Interviews, 1984-1992, a collection of lectures by Audre Lorde (2020); In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love, selected writings by abolitionist philosopher Joy James, compiled as editorial advisor to Divided Publishing (2023); and Another Sun, a conversation with political theorist Françoise Vergès (2026). Across numerous titles, Castro attends to latent inscriptions, whether met in archives, verse, in song or terrain. In each page, she honors the legacies of poets, wordsmiths, and clandestine philosophers.
Xiaoyu Weng is a curator and writer whose work unfolds through close collaborations with artists and cultural practitioners. She develops syncretic and hybrid frameworks that bring contemporary practices into focus, often spanning disciplines and cultural contexts. From major institutions to biennials and independent initiatives, her work has developed across international settings where friendships take root and new constellations of connection emerge. Weng has held curatorial positions 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, among others.
Main Image: The Artistic Team for documenta 16: Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Xiaoyu Weng, Carla Acevedo-Yates, and Naomi Beckwith (f.l.t.r.), Kassel 2025. Photo: Nicolas Wefers