Past Driskell winner Amy Sherald, Naomi Beckwith and artist Charles Gaines attend a Gordon Parks Foundation awards dinner in May in New York. (Patrick McMullan/Getty Images)
March 8, 2024
Guggenheim curator Naomi Beckwith wins Driskell Prize
Washington Post | By Tariro Mzezewa | March 7, 2024
“For Naomi to get this award is just underlining the specialness of what she’s been able to accomplish — not only as a curator and a museum leader but also as a real leader in the field,” said Huey Copeland, an art historian who won the Driskell in 2019. Past winners include artists Ebony G. Patterson, Willie Cole and Amy Sherald, as well as curators and historians Valerie Cassel Oliver and Adrienne L. Childs.
“Just by her intelligence and her presence, she is opening doors for so many other folks to follow in her footsteps. She’s setting a model of what it means to be a politically engaged, ethically attuned, conceptually rigorous thinker, scholar, curator and cultural worker, operating at the highest levels,” Copeland said.
“Naomi has a history of being very sensitive to and devoted to elevating voices and perspectives of African American artists,” said Randall Suffolk, the High Museum’s director, “and that makes her deserving of the prize.” Beckwith’s popular 2018 retrospectives of works by Howardena Pindell and Nick Cave at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, for example, didn’t just showcase the artists’ most famous works but framed them as part of broader conversations about inequality, racism, revolution, gender equality and more. Copeland said Beckwith is brilliant at staging work in exhibitions but also at engaging it “in ways that are really at the cutting edge of art historical and critical practice.”