The Excessive Museum of Artwork in Atlanta has bestowed the 2024 version of its annual David C. Driskell Prize, which honours contributions to modern artwork by Black artists and artwork historians, to Naomi Beckwith, the deputy director and chief curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Basis and Museum. Along with receiving $50,000, Beckwith will likely be formally honoured on the nineteenth annual Driskell Prize Gala in Atlanta on 26 April.
“Beckwith has an extended and illustrious monitor file of championing Black artists and their contributions to the sphere, so it’s solely becoming that we recognise and help her work with the 2024 Driskell Prize,” Rand Suffolk, the director of the Excessive Museum, mentioned in a press release. “We sit up for celebrating her on the 12 months’s gala and to welcoming her into the corporate of our distinguished prize recipients.”
In her 15-year profession as a curator, Beckwith has organised acclaimed exhibitions and printed vital scholarship exploring the affect of Black identification and tradition on the practices of myriad modern artists throughout completely different genres and media, together with Arthur Jafa, Rashid Johnson, Howardena Pindell, Jimmy Robert and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
Since becoming a member of the Guggenheim in 2021, she has overseen the collections and exhibitions programmes at its varied websites. Beckwith’s positions earlier than her tenure on the Guggenheim included a curatorial position on the Museum of Up to date Artwork in Chicago, the place she curated Howardena Pindell: What Stays to Be Seen (2018), the artist’s landmark survey.
Beckwith began out as a curatorial fellow on the Institute of Up to date Artwork in Philadelphia. She later served as an affiliate curator on the Studio Museum in Harlem, the place she organised 30 Seconds off an Inch (2009-10), an exhibition that includes greater than 40 artists of color. She additionally labored on the advisory group for Grief and Grievance: Artwork and Mourning in America, the New Museum exhibition conceived by the late curator Okwui Enwezor.
Beckwith sat on the jury of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, and has contributed to quite a few exhibition catalogues and publications, together with Artforum, Frieze and The New York Instances.
“I’m equal elements elated and humbled to obtain the Driskell Prize,” Beckwith mentioned in a press release. “Earlier recipients are my mentors, my fashions and my inspiration, and I’m really honored to be included on this illustrious cohort and contribute to our shared mission of constructing probably the most expansive artwork historical past possible.”
The Driskell Prize, named for the famend African American artist and artwork scholar David C. Driskell, was established by the Excessive Museum in 2005 as the primary nationwide award to rejoice an artist or scholar’s unique, important contributions to the canons of African American artwork or artwork historical past. Previous recipients of the prize embrace the artists Ebony G. Patterson (in 2023), Amy Sherald (2018) and Mark Bradford (2016), and the curators Naima J. Keith (in 2017) and Kellie Jones (2005).
