The Studio Museum in Harlem’s young curator finds joy in presenting art that puts the world in perspective.
By Rebecca Carroll
Photography by Ashley Sky Walker

Looking at the arrangement of photographs in the exhibit “Zwelethu Mthethwa: Inner Views” at the Studio Museum in Harlem, you get the sense that you are in some way courting intimacy. The collection, on display through October, consists of three series of images. “Interiors” and “Empty Beds” capture the home lives of South African migrant workers, while “Common Ground” documents survival after natural disasters—wildfires in Cape Town and Hurricane Katrina in the United States.

You feel as if you’re in conversation with the nuanced vulnerability of each shaken, resilient subject. It’s both a little pleasing and a little unsettling. That’s how exhibit curator Naomi Beckwith, 34, likes it—disparate people, images, and ideas coming together in kinship to rock your world. What led Beckwith, now in her third year with the Studio Museum, to this arresting and influential place? It turns out that it all started with a game of touch football.

“People sort of blink at me when I tell them that’s really how I entered the black art world,” she says, “but a lot of it is about community.” She’s talking about a football league established back in the day when she first moved to Brooklyn from Philly, where she had been a fellow at University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Contemporary Art. The team, whose name, KIFL, was an acronym for what the players called the Kambui Intergenerational, Intergender, Interracial, International, Interactive, Interdisciplinary, Interad-infinitum… Football League, included then unrecognized and now celebrated artists Hank Willis Thomas, Kambui Olujimi, and Chris Myers. “It was a serious touch football game,” Beckwith assures. “I remember someone broke their finger on the first day.”

Featured earlier this year in J. Crew’s spring catalog, the statuesque Chicago native with a molten voice and elegant eyes initially thought she would pursue a med school path and become a surgeon (a goal she had announced to her family at the tender age of 4). However, her creative side could not be ignored. She spent her junior year of high school in a program that gave students the opportunity to work and travel with renowned installation artist Mark Dion. Shortly after entering college, she had “a crisis of purpose” and realized that it was art she loved most. She credits the outstanding art program at Northwestern University for introducing her to conceptual artists like Adrian Piper and Carrie Mae Weems.

“Serendipity abetted by a nice, close proximity” took Beckwith to the Studio Museum in 2007, where she has since worked fiercely and delightedly under the stewardship of art world titan Thelma Golden. Beckwith’s curatorial vision looks beyond aesthetics. “What is this work doing that allows me to see the world in a different way?” she asks herself of every piece. She declares that her job as associate curator at one of the leading black contemporary art museums in the country gives her pleasure, “and it’s important to recognize that.”