“For Naomi to get this award is simply underlining the specialness of what she’s been in a position to accomplish — not solely as a curator and a museum chief but additionally as an actual chief within the discipline,” stated Huey Copeland, an artwork historian who gained the Driskell in 2019. Previous winners embrace artists Ebony G. Patterson, Willie Cole and Amy Sherald, in addition to curators and historians Valerie Cassel Oliver and Adrienne L. Childs.
“I’m deeply, deeply humbled to be on this compendium of fantastic thinkers and curators, a lot of whom are buddies,” Beckwith stated. “Wow. It’s fairly one thing to be talked about in the identical breath.”
To Black curators, the truth that Beckwith holds a outstanding and visual function at some of the necessary cultural establishments on this planet, notably as a Black girl who champions range and inclusion in all points of her work, is an indication of progress in an trade that isn’t all the time welcoming to adjustments in perspective and methods of working.
“Simply by her intelligence and her presence, she is opening doorways for thus many people to comply with in her footsteps. She’s setting a mannequin of what it means to be a politically engaged, ethically attuned, conceptually rigorous thinker, scholar, curator and cultural employee, working on the highest ranges,” Copeland stated.
Childs, who gained the Driskell in 2022 and was on this 12 months’s jury, stated that when the prize was first conceived, it was “unthinkable” to think about {that a} Black girl could be a chief curator on the Guggenheim. That Beckwith has not solely executed so but additionally introduced dynamic, inclusive programming and practices to “an establishment that’s been round for a very long time and has wanted a change is critical,” Childs stated.
Beckwith arrived on the Guggenheim in the summertime of 2021, after a interval of tumult and reckoning on the museum. Its creative director and chief curator had stepped down months earlier following allegations of discrimination on the establishment. In a 2020 letter, curators on the museum described it as “an inequitable work setting that permits racism, white supremacy, and different discriminatory practices”; and in 2019 a Black visitor curator also accused the Guggenheim of racism. (The museum later stated an impartial investigation discovered no proof of racist remedy of the visitor curator.) Like many establishments, the Guggenheim’s leaders vowed to prioritize inclusivity.
“The Guggenheim Museum celebrates the well-deserved recognition awarded to Naomi with the Driskell Prize,” J. Tomilson Hill, chairman of the Board of the Guggenheim Museum, stated in a press release. “Naomi is a catalytic thinker and chief whose scholarship continues to revise and develop the canon of artwork historical past by way of her dedication to amplifying the work of African American artists in all places. She contributes a important voice to our modern dialogue, and her curatorial observe strikes us ever nearer to a extra thought of and equitable world.”
Artists, artwork historians and curators who’ve labored with Beckwith all through her profession stated highlighting the work of a broad spectrum of artists has all the time been on the core of her strategy as a curator, above and past the institutional requires range and inclusion in recent times.
“Naomi has a historical past of being very delicate to and dedicated to elevating voices and views of African American artists,” stated Randall Suffolk, the Excessive Museum’s director, “and that makes her deserving of the prize.” Beckwith’s well-liked 2018 retrospectives of works by Howardena Pindell and Nick Cave on the Museum of Modern Artwork Chicago, for instance, didn’t simply showcase the artists’ most well-known works however framed them as a part of broader conversations about inequality, racism, revolution, gender equality and extra. Copeland stated Beckwith is sensible at staging work in exhibitions but additionally at partaking it “in methods which can be actually on the slicing fringe of artwork historic and significant observe.”
“For me, it’s so necessary to make exhibitions that create new narratives round artists,” Beckwith stated. “I’m not focused on simply saying, ‘Right here’s the perfect work by X and Y artists or current work by artists of a sure era.’ I’m attempting to make statements about what’s necessary to acknowledge on this artist’s work for all of our historical past.”
The prize consists of $50,000 of unrestricted cash to help the recipient’s work.
Beckwith, 47, was raised within the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, just a few blocks away from the DuSable Black Historical past Museum and Training Heart. Although she beloved artwork, for so long as she might keep in mind, she’d wished to be a health care provider. She felt that a whole lot of progress needed to be made to enhance reproductive and sexual well being, and care for ladies’s our bodies, particularly for these of Black girls.
“I had this fantasy that I’d open a clinic on the South Aspect of Chicago,” she stated, so she went to Northwestern to check biology and get on the premed monitor. However alongside the way in which, she couldn’t ignore her love of artwork, so she made the “very troublesome determination” to pivot from science to artwork, in the end graduating with a level in historical past and African American research. Beckwith had by no means been in a position to think about artwork as an actual profession.
She wasn’t alone in that.
“Once I instructed my mom I used to be not going to be a health care provider and I wished to be a curator, she mainly hung up on me,” Beckwith recalled, laughing. It wasn’t till just a few months later, after seeing an article in regards to the Whitney Biennial with a photograph of one of many curators — Cassel Oliver — that her mom acquired on board with the brand new plan.
“There was a portrait of Valerie within the paper, so Mommy might see that this was a Black girl, and that allowed my mom to loosen up and notice that there was a complete profession that her daughter might embrace and be constant about as a result of there was anyone who seemed like her doing it already.”
After Northwestern, Beckwith headed to London, the place she acquired a Grasp of Arts from the Courtauld Institute of Artwork. Since then, she has held fellowships on the Institute of Modern Artwork in Philadelphia and on the Whitney Museum of American Artwork, and labored as an affiliate curator on the Studio Museum in Harlem earlier than returning to Chicago in 2011. On the Museum of Modern Artwork Chicago, she held a number of curatorial roles and was named a senior curator in 2018. Three years later, the Guggenheim got here knocking.
Beckwith stated that she’s glad she made the change from science to artwork; that following her ardour has introduced her nice pleasure in life. She additionally concedes that, to her, artwork and science aren’t all that completely different.
“Each profession paths had been motivated by a deep love and look after Black individuals, Black lives and Black tradition,” she stated. “On the one hand, I wished my medical observe to care for Black our bodies, and now, on the creative aspect, I’m extra focused on caring for the Black spirit.”
