SANTA FE, NM.- SITE SANTA FE announced that Ekow Eshun has been appointed curator of the 13th SITE SANTA FE International Biennial, opening in summer 2027 and on view through early 2028.
Eshun is an internationally recognized curator, writer, and broadcaster. He made history as the first Black director of a major UK arts institution, serving as Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. As Chair of the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, he leads one of the world’s most high-profile public art commissions. He is also the curator of British Art Show 10, opening in September 2026.
Eshun’s appointment follows Cecilia Alemani’s critically acclaimed Once Within a Time, an expansive exhibition inspired by characters who inhabited, traversed, or left their mark on the Santa Fe region across the centuries. Building on this foundation, Eshun, as a London-based curator whose work spans multiple continents, will bring a global outlook to SITE SANTA FE. His Biennial will further expand the exhibition’s conceptual horizons, offering new ways of considering contemporary art’s role in shaping our understanding of identity, history, and possibility.
“The Biennial thrives on dialogue and experimentation, and with each edition, SITE SANTA FE invites curators whose unique perspectives challenge us to see the world differently. Eshun’s visionary approach, informed by Black diasporic histories, transnational experience, and an engagement with art, literature, music, and film, is both intellectually rigorous and globally resonant. We are confident he will extend and reimagine the Biennial’s legacy,” said Louis Grachos, Phillips Executive Director of SITE SANTA FE.
Like previous editions, the 13th SITE SANTA FE International Biennial will extend beyond the institution’s galleries to activate sites throughout Santa Fe. These citywide presentations will invite audiences to experience the city, foregrounding dialogue between place, people, and artistic practice.
“I’m honored to be invited to curate the 13th SITE SANTA FE International Biennial. New Mexico, known as the Land of Enchantment, is a place where land, imagination, and lived experience are deeply entwined, and where ecological forces have profoundly shaped cultural and human relations. Santa Fe is a site where multiple histories, cultures, and stories intersect, and that richness offers a compelling starting point for an exhibition. I’m excited to collaborate with artists to shape a project that moves between the local and the global, the real and the imagined,” commented curator Ekow Eshun.
His recent exhibitions have attracted significant critical attention. In 2022, In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery brought together eleven contemporary artists of the African diaspora united by a shared engagement with mythology and speculative imagination, marking the first major UK exhibition devoted to Black artists for whom the fantastical is central to their practice. The Time Is Always Now, which debuted at the National Portrait Gallery in 2024 and toured internationally, explored representations of the Black figure in Western art history through works by some of today’s most significant contemporary artists. Black Earth Rising traced connections between climate change and colonialism through works by contemporary African diasporic, Latin American, and Native American artists. His nonfiction book, The Strangers, examines the lives of five prominent Black men, weaving history, biography, and personal reflection.
Beginning with this edition, the exhibition will once again use its full name: the SITE SANTA FE International Biennial. The reintroduction of “Biennial” honors the exhibition’s foundational role since 1995 while recommitting to a cyclical model.
