Migrating with Forms

Naomi Beckwith is the Artistic Director of documenta 16 and Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation in New York. There she oversees collections, exhibitions, publications, curatorial programs, and archives and is jointly responsible for the strategic direction within the international network of affiliated museums. Previously, she held curatorial positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

A graduate of the Courtauld Institute of Art, Beckwith has (co-)organized renowned exhibitions and monographic projects, including the award-winning exhibition Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen (2018, MCA Chicago) and The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now (2015, MCA Chicago). She was a member of the curatorial team for the realization of the exhibition Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America (2021, The New Museum, New York), conceived by Okwui Enwezor before his death. Her exhibitions, lectures, and publications focus on the impact and resonance of Black culture on multidisciplinary practices in global contemporary art. As a scholar and art historian, Beckwith has been a visiting professor at Northwestern University, Chicago, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently, she teaches as a lecturer at the Kassel Art Academy, Germany.

She has received fellowships for the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Beckwith was awarded the 2024 David C. Driskell Prize for African American Art and Art History by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. In fall 2025, she led the curatorial team for the American Season at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, presenting the exhibition ECHO DELAY REVERB — American Art, Francophone Thought and the Melvin Edwards retrospective.

Lucy Bradnock is Dean for Research at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Reader in Modern and Contemporary Art History, and Editor of the journal Art History. She is a specialist in modern and contemporary art in the United States, with a particular focus on art histories of California and the American West; ecological and infrastructural histories of American art and cultural labor; the intersection of art, activism, and radical theatre practice; and alternative sites and networks of artistic production and dissemination. She is co-lead of the Courtauld Art, Ecologies, Infrastructures research cluster. She teaches on the Art History bachelor's degree and convenes the American Art in the Age of Ecology course of the Special Option master’s degree.

She is author of No More Masterpieces: Modern Art After Artaud (2021), co-editor of Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator (2015), and co-author of Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945-1980 (2011). Her writing is also included in exhibition catalogues produced by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Copenhagen Contemporary; White Cube, Barbican Art Gallery, and Courtauld Gallery, London, and in art history journals including Art History, Art Journal, Oxford Art Journal, Getty Research Journal, and Journal of the Archives of American Art.