- documenta
The German Federal Cultural Foundation is funding the mediation program of documenta 16, implemented within the area “Mediation, Interpretation and Programming,” with €3.5 million in 2026 and 2027. This paves the way for the realization of a comprehensive, systemic outreach program. As a fundamental component of the artistic concept, this area will be overseen by Romi Crawford. She is part of the curatorial team led by Naomi Beckwith, the artistic director of documenta 16.
Naomi Beckwith, who draws on extensive international museum experience, attaches central importance to education. In Romi Crawford, she has brought an expert into the team who has now convinced the foundation board of the Cultural Foundation with her complex educational concept.
Romi Crawford is an educator, writer and professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is interested in knowledge production that emerges from art making and is committed to a method of art historical research that is responsive, collaborative, recuperative, dynamic and often experimental in form. Crawford’s scholarship and curatorial projects examine historical instances of collective art making and are themselves collaborative and intergenerational by design. She is routinely concerned with artistic techniques and strategies that emerge from uneven social and economic conditions, and how such circumstances embolden new genres, ways of making, and structures, including improvisational and para-institutional formats. Crawford’s research into pedagogical activities that embed in art practices of the 60s and 70s prompted her to establish the Black Arts Movement School Modality and the New Art School Modality. Both platforms are free, roving, and grounded in a revised set of values for arts education.
The German Federal Cultural Foundation is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
