SITE Santa Fe has appointed independent curator Ekow Eshun as the organizer of the next SITE Santa Fe International. The exhibition’s 13th edition is scheduled to open in summer 2027.
London-based Eshun, a former director of the Institute of Contemporary Art London, has recently drawn acclaim for organizing a number of high-profile exhibitions in the UK. In 2022, he curated “In the Black Fantastic” at the Hayward Gallery in London, which included 11 artists from the African diaspora, among them Nick Cave, Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, and Ellen Gallagher.
He followed that up with “The Time Is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure” at the National Portrait Gallery in London, which presented the work of more than 20 artists whose work rethinks representations of Black people in art history. That exhibition, which opened in February 2024, then traveled to the Philadelphia Art Museum later that year before heading to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh in 2025.
“I think he’ll bring a new energy and a new vision for the International,” SITE executive director Louis Grachos told ARTnews in a recent interview, noting that he had been impressed by Eshun’s curation of “In the Black Fantastic,” which he described as “so fresh, dynamic, and experiential.”
He then invited Eshun to SITE Santa Fe as part of a program related to a Deborah Roberts exhibition at the museum in 2023. “That really inspired me to pursue a conversation” around organizing the next International, Grachos said. “In a way, we’ve been thinking about him for two years, and it felt like the right time to invite him. … The hope is that he’s going to be presenting a show that will be really fresh for our eyes in North America.”
Alongside his work for the SITE International, Eshun is also curating the 10th edition of the British Art Show, which will open in September and travel to five cities in the UK. While the latter show focuses specifically on British and UK-based artists and the International is more global in scope, Eshun told ARTnews he is approaching both exhibitions with a similar ethos.
“With both shows, I’m in the questions that artists pose through their work,” he said. “I’m interested in how artists allow us to reframe questions of history, place, memory, identity, being, belonging—all of these large, fluid, and nuanced questions. I’m interested in creating shows that allow us to see ourselves in potentially unanticipated ways, to find ways to bring us closer to each other even, to refract the world around us in ways that we hadn’t expected.”
Grachos relaunched the biennial last year. The previous iteration of the SITE International, curated by Cecilia Alemani, saw the exhibition extend well beyond SITE’s walls to various other partner institutions around Santa Fe. “One of the things that is so exciting to me is the scale at which it’s possible to work,” Eshun said. “The International is an event that animates Santa Fe in these really unusual and exciting ways. I like the way in turns a city into an ongoing site of discovery.”
“In this day, I think those kinds of collaborations and sharing of resources are so important,” Grachos said. “If you asked what is the most important thing that SITE can contribute to the community, it’s the International because it is an opportunity to engage with the community, as well as that magical balance of also engaging with an international discourse.”
As with Alemani’s edition, Eshun’s exhibition will partially focus on the history of New Mexico—“a part of the world that’s fraught with complex histories that make us rich,” as Grachos put it.
“I’ve always been very struck by SITE’s location and by the geography and history of the Southwest,” Eshun said. “I’ve also been struck by SITE as a space to think seriously and expansively about contemporary art and by this extraordinary location where you have this convergence or confluence of different histories, different legacies of people, place, movement, artistic movements.”
While Eshun hasn’t formally begun working on the theme and artist list of the upcoming International, he said he has “a long and ongoing list” of artists that he’s still adding names to.
“At some point, look at that and see where it’s taken me,” he said. “Artists are quite good at seeing just over the horizon, and I think Santa Fe and the Southwest is a place with broad and exhilarating horizons.”
