Documenta 16 Adds Raven Chacon and Three Advisers to Its Curatorial Team
Documenta 16, the major contemporary art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, has added a new curator to its team: the composer and artist Raven Chacon.
Naomi Beckwith, the artistic director of documenta 16, announced the expansion. The official documenta announcement was published on 28 October 2026. Chacon joins as curator-at-large, a role that is not tied to one fixed area of the show and lets a curator work across the whole project.
Chacon is best known in the United States for his music. In 2022 he became the first Indigenous artist to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, according to ARTnews. He is also a visual artist. He showed work at Documenta 14 in 2017 as a member of Postcommodity, an artist collective.
Beckwith also brought in three curatorial advisers: Osei Bonsu, Timea Junghaus and Noam Segal. Advisers are outside experts who offer guidance to the main team without holding the top decision-making roles. Their names were reported by ARTnews alongside Chacon's appointment.
The core curatorial team stays the same. It is made up of Carla Acevedo-Yates, Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro and Xiaoyu Weng.
Beckwith was named artistic director in December 2024 by an international selection committee, the panel that chose her to lead the exhibition. She is now building out the team that will shape the show's programme.
Documenta 16 is scheduled to open on 12 June 2027 and run until 19 September 2027. The exhibition takes place across Kassel, a city in central Germany. Visitors will be able to see the works in the venues the show uses across the city.
For anyone planning a trip, the dates give more than a year of lead time. The exhibition is free of any admission details, so tickets and entry costs are not yet known.
What the expansion means for the show is simple. Beckwith now has a larger team around her, with a new curator working across the project and three advisers joining the group. The main lineup of the show has not changed.
