On May 22, 2025, at the High Museum of Art, Naomi Beckwith, Deputy Director, and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, joined High Museum Senior Curator of American Art and the Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art Katherine Jentleson for a conversation about the future of museum work.
“I don’t think it’s worth having all this art in the world if we can’t offer it to the public, if we can’t explain it to the public, if we can’t have the public interacting with it.” — Naomi Beckwith, Deputy Director, and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
The evening marked Beckwith’s first public appearance in Atlanta since receiving the 2024 David C. Driskell Prize, the nation’s first award to honor early and mid-career contributions to African American art and art history.
Here are five key takeaways from the night.
- What we see depends on where we look. Referencing David Driskell’s approach to rewriting art history, Beckwith emphasized the need to rethink how institutions frame and present culture. In her view, the job of a curator is to expand who gets to be part of the canon by shifting the rules of what counts. “What if we told art history through, let’s say, a practice of ritual? Or a practice of found object history? Or a practice of community building?” she asked. “And when you take those different parameters, you get different people inside those stories.
- Remixing is a methodology. In discussing the Guggenheim exhibition, Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers, Beckwith described Johnson’s approach as part of a broader aesthetic lineage. Calling him a “citational artist,” Beckwith pointed to how Johnson draws from sources as wide-ranging as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, and Amiri Baraka to build new visual languages. “Take all these references and remix, recode them, make a montage out of them,” Beckwith said. “It is absolutely the way I think he had learned to deal with culture.”
- Architecture and art should align. When asked about curating inside the Guggenheim’s spiraling, slanted design, Beckwith shared how Johnson visited the museum weekly during the planning of A Poem for Deep Thinkers to walk the space and observe how his art would interact with the building and the people inside it. “What you have to do is find a way to make your story inside the envelope that you have,” Beckwith explained. “And this building doesn’t work for all artists, right? … So you have to – you really have to marry those things.”
- Art history isn’t a straight line, either. In a recent exhibition built around Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach, Beckwith didn’t position Ringgold simply as a student of European modernists. She widened the frame of reference by placing Ringgold’s work alongside artists such as Picasso, Jacob Lawrence, Howardena Pindell, and Shabalala Self. “One of the words that I always avoided in thinking about the artists who came before Faith Ringgold was the word influence,” Beckwith said. “Instead of talking about influence, it’s more expansion. The expansion of history.”
- Museums are service institutions. Beckwith didn’t set out to be a curator. She was a pre-med student for three years before shifting course. What convinced her was the belief that institutions aren’t just places for display – they’re stewards of memory and meaning. “I believe in museums because they are the institutions that also believe in sitting between the art and the artist and the public,” Beckwith said. “And I don’t think it’s worth having all this art in the world if we can’t offer it to the public, if we can’t explain it to the public, if we can’t have the public interacting with it.”
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