As deputy director and chief curator, Naomi Beckwith oversees collections, exhibitions, publications, curatorial programmes, and archives at the Guggenheim Museum and provides strategic guidance for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s global network of affiliate museums. She has a key role in forming the museum’s vision and collaborates closely with the director, trustees, and employees on strategy planning and implementation for the entire institution as well as its international projects. Beckwith is the Guggenheim Museum’s first Black chief curator and deputy director.
Beckwith is renowned for her work in curating exhibitions featuring artists of colour, dispelling false narratives of art history, and creating practices that increase the representation of the community that museums serve.
Prior to taking on her role at the Guggenheim, Beckwith was at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, where she has held curatorial posts since 2011 and served as Manilow Senior Curator since 2018. During her time with this institution, her exhibitions and publications centred on the impact of identity and the resonance of Black culture on multidisciplinary practices within global contemporary art. Beckwith worked on a number of key exhibitions such as Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen, the first survey of the artist, as well as The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now and Homebodies.
In 2018, Beckwith chaired the first-ever Curatorial Leadership Summit at the Armory Show. She also serves on the boards of the Laundromat Project and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She has been awarded fellowships by the Centre for Curatorial Leadership, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, and other organisations. She received a history BA from Northwestern University in Chicago and an MA with distinction from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.