ARTnews Awards 2024: About the Jury

The ARTnews Awards, a new editorial project honoring excellence in art achievements at US arts institutions, has just revealed the inaugural winners for its 2024 edition. To help select the winners, ARTnews invited six closely watched curators based in the US to review exhibitions held between September 1, 2023, and August 31, 2024. Over the course of two meetings, these curators joined two ARTnews senior editors to select a group of nominees and a winner in each category. Read more about each juror below.

Cecilia Alemani

Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator, High Line Art

Cecilia Alemani is an Italian curator based in New York City. Since 2011, she has been the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, the public art program presented by the High Line in New York City. Currently, she is also the curator of the upcoming 12th edition of the SITE Santa Fe International, scheduled to open in the summer of 2025. From 2020 to 2022, she served as artistic director of the 59th Venice Biennale, where she curated the acclaimed exhibition “The Milk of Dreams,” which was visited by over 800,000 visitors.

Naomi Beckwith

Deputy Director & Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Naomi Beckwith is Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where she oversees collections, exhibitions, publications, and curatorial programs and archives, and provides strategic direction within the international network of affiliate museums for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. She came to the Guggenheim from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where she served as Manilow Senior Curator. At the MCA, her exhibitions and publications centered on the impact of identity and the resonance of Black culture on multidisciplinary practices within global contemporary art. She organized and co-organized acclaimed exhibitions such as “Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen,” the first survey of the artist, and whose catalogue received the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award. Before joining the MCA, Beckwith was Associate Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she organized exhibitions such as “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Any Number of Preoccupations” (2011) and “30 Seconds off an Inch” (2009–10).

Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation)

Executive Director & Chief Curator, Forge Project

Candice Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation and lives in Red Hook, New York. Her writing and curatorial practice explore the intersections of history, contemporary art, and Indigeneity. She is Executive Director of Forge Project, Taghkanic, New York, and Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies, Bard College. She is curator of the exhibitions, “Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination Since 1969,” on view in 2023 at the Hessel Museum of Art; “Impossible Music,” co-curated with Raven Chacon and Stavia Grimani at the Miller ICA; and the touring exhibitions such as “Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts,” co-curated with Dylan Robinson, and “ᑕᑯᒃᓴᐅᔪᒻᒪᕆᒃ Double Vision,” featuring textiles, prints and drawings by Jessie Oonark, Janet Kigusiuq, and Victoria Mamnguqsualuk. She was the Senior Curator for the inaugural 2019 and 2022 editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art and part of the curatorial team for the Canadian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, featuring the work of the media collective Isuma; Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel; and the exhibition “Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art” at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Her notable essays include “The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economies on the Colonial Frontier,” in the Documenta 14 Reader; “Outlawed Social Life,” in South as a State of Mind; and “The Appropriation Debates (or The Gallows of History),” in Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (New Museum/MIT Press, 2020).

Tina Kukielski

Susan Sollins Executive Director & Chief Curator, Art21

Tina Kukielski is executive director and chief curator of Art21, a nonprofit art organization specializing in storytelling about contemporary art and producers of award-winning documentary films. Kukielski led Art21’s digital transformation and is executive producer of its long running TV program airing biannually online and on PBS. Kukielski previously held curatorial positions at the Whitney and Carnegie Museums. She was a co-curator of the 2013 Carnegie International.

María Elena Ortiz

Curator, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

María Elena Ortiz is curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, where she curated Jammie Holmes: Make the Revolution Irresistible (2023). She was curator at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), where she curated group shows “Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection,” “The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Caribbean Art,” and solo exhibitions for Firelei Báez, Ulla von Brandenburg, william cordova, Teresita Fernández, José Carlos Martinat, Carlos Motta, and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. At PAMM she founded the Caribbean Cultural Institute, a curatorial platform dedicated to Caribbean art, and worked to grow the museum’s collection, securing works by Simone Leigh, Bisa Butler, Bony Ramirez, and others. In 2024 the Modern presented “Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diaspora Art Since 1940,” her survey that explores the history of Surrealism in the Caribbean in connection to Afro-surrealist and Afrofuturist art.

Pilar Tompkins Rivas

Chief Curator & Deputy Director, Curatorial & Collections, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

Pilar Tompkins Rivas is the Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Curatorial and Collections at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a new museum dedicated to the art of visual storytelling that is under construction in Los Angeles. In her role at the Lucas Museum, Tompkins Rivas provides leadership, strategic direction, and managerial oversight for curatorial, acquisitions, exhibitions and planning, museum services, and conservation. Previously, she was the director of the Vincent Price Art Museum (VPAM) at East Los Angeles College, where she served as Director and Chief Curator, organizing numerous exhibitions such as solo presentations of artists such as Carolina Caycedo, Guadalupe Rosales and Patrick Martinez. At VPAM, Tompkins Rivas spearheaded partnerships between the museum and the Smithsonian; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); and the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens; and launched diversity pipeline programs including a museum studies certificate program. Prior to her tenure at VPAM, she served as Coordinator of Curatorial Initiatives at LACMA, co-directing the institution’s UCLA-LACMA Art History Practicum Initiative and the Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship Program in addition to co-curating exhibitions in partnership with the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative.

Maximilíano Durón

Senior Editor, ARTnews

Maximilíano Durón is a queer, Chicanx journalist and critic covering contemporary art. His writing focuses on the work of artists of color, specifically Latinx/Chicanx artists, queer artists, and their intersections, as well as curators, collectors, and scholars whose work has transformed the art world. He has been at ARTnews since 2014 and is currently senior editor, managing the publication’s art fair and Top 200 Collectors coverage. Durón is a winner of the 2023 Rabkin Prize for visual art journalists and a founding member of Critical Minded, an initiative that looks to support the work of a diverse intergenerational group of cultural critics of color. He received his undergraduate degree from NYU in journalism and art history.

​Alex Greenberger

Senior Editor, ARTnews

Alex Greenberger is a senior editor at ARTnews, having started there as an editorial assistant in 2015. He has covered topics ranging from protests against a former Whitney Museum vice chair in 2018 and 2019 to the controversy involving charges of antisemitism and harassment in Documenta 15 in 2022. In his criticism, Greenberger has addressed body horror, the history of video art, the legacy of Pablo Picasso, and the work of artists Wangechi Mutu, Wolfgang Tillmans, Marlene Dumas, and innumerable others. His articles have also appeared in Artspace and the Village Voice, and in gallery catalogs. He graduated from New York University with a BA in art history and cinema studies.

Read more about the ARTnews Awards.