Naomi Beckwith Awarded 2024 David C. Driskell Prize

Atlanta’s High Museum of Art has announced curator Naomi Beckwith as the winner of its 2024 David C. Driskell Prize for her contributions to the field of African American art. Beckwith will receive an unrestricted $50,000 cash award and will be honored at a gala event to take place April 26 at the High Museum. The institution has presented the prize annually since 2005 in recognition of the work of African American artists and scholars.

Born in Chicago in 1976, Beckwith since 2021 has served asdeputy director and chief curatorat New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; she is the first Black person to occupy the role of chief curator there. Prior to her arrival at the Guggenheim, she worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), holding various curatorial posts before rising to become senior curator in 2018. While there, she co-curated exhibitions including “Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen” (2018) and “The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now” (2015). Prior to her tenure at the MCA, she was an associate curator at New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem, where she organized shows such as “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Any Number of Preoccupations” (2011) and “30 Seconds off an Inch” (2009–10). She earlier worked as a Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Beckwith holds a BA from Northwestern University and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

“The Guggenheim Museum celebrates the well-deserved recognition awarded to Naomi with the Driskell Prize,” J. Tomilson Hill, chairman of the Guggenheim’s board, said in a statement. “Naomi is a catalytic thinker and leader whose scholarship continues to revise and expand the canon of art history through her commitment to amplifying the work of African American artists everywhere. She contributes a critical voice to our contemporary dialogue, and her curatorial practice moves us ever closer to a more considered and equitable world.”

“I am equal parts elated and humbled to receive the Driskell Prize,” Beckwith said in a statement. “Previous recipients are my mentors, my models and my inspiration, and I am truly honored to be included in this illustrious cohort and contribute to our shared mission of making the most expansive art history imaginable.”