Documenta Appoints First All-Women Artistic Team Amidst Controversy

An all-women ensemble of writers, educators, translators, and curators will helm the artistic direction for the next edition of the pentennial art show Documenta in Kassel, Germany, slated to take place from June 12 to September 19, 2027.

The international exhibition announced yesterday, August 18, that the Guggenheim Museum’s Deputy Director and Chief Curator Naomi Beckwith, who was appointed to lead the event last December, has selected Carla Acevedo-Yates, Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, and Xiaoyu Weng to join her core team.

Already steeped in controversy, Documenta was criticized by free speech advocates earlier this year when its organizers instituted a new code of conduct that conflates antisemitism with anti-Zionism.

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Acevedo-Yates is a critic and researcher specializing in Latin American and Caribbean diasporic contemporary art. At the end of May, she departed her most recent curatorial position at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Crawford, who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, focuses on examining American visual culture through the lens of race and ethnicity. Her scholarship and curatorial work frequently engage with the collaborative artistic practices and collective strategies embedded in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s.

Castro is a poet, translator, and editor originally from Bogotá, Colombia. She has previously worked on publications such as Dream of Europe: Selected Seminar and Interviews, 1984-1992 (2020), a collection of unpublished lectures and interviews by Audre Lorde, and abolitionist scholar Joy James’s In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love (2023).

Born in Shanghai and based in New York, Weng was most recently named the executive director of the nonprofit independent arts organization Art in General. Her curation and writing practices have a particular concentration on themes of feminism, identity, and decolonization. She has previously held curatorial positions at institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.