Bahamas Returns to Venice Biennale With Intergenerational Dialogue on Junkanoo and Memory

The Bahamas is returning to the Venice Biennale for only the second time in its history, after an absence of thirteen years. This moment belongs to two artists separated by nearly two decades in age but bound by a shared visual language rooted in the streets of Nassau and the broader memory of the African diaspora. John Beadle, who died in 2024, and Lavar Munroe, born in 1982, are speaking to each other across the Pavilion—one through his legacy, the other through works that honor it. The conversation is curated by Dr. Krista Thompson and centers on Junkanoo, the centuries-old biannual festival that has shaped both men's understanding of what art can do.

Junkanoo is not incidental to their work. Beadle called it "the cultural bedrock of The Bahamas," and he meant it literally. He was part of the community of makers who construct the elaborate costumes that move through the streets each year, and that experience taught him something about collaboration, about transformation, about the power of materials that most people discard. He built sculptures from cardboard, from the refuse of commerce, and in doing so he was making a statement about visibility—about how the overlooked, the marginal, the things we throw away, contain their own dignity and their own story. Works like "Cuffed, Held in Check" from 2018 and "Body Space III: Under Lock and Key" from 2012 returned again and again to the same vocabulary: broken oars, mobile shelters, hidden blades. These were not abstract gestures. They were about people, about systems, about the artistic labor that goes unseen.

Munroe inherited this language and extended it. He too works with discarded cardboard, with abandoned Junkanoo costumes, with the material culture of a festival that most international audiences will never witness. But he has also traveled—to Tanzania, to Senegal, to Zimbabwe—and brought back with him a deeper understanding of the spiritual dimensions that run through African diaspora practices. When someone dies in the Junkanoo community, the performers gather. They process. They remember. This is not decoration. This is how a people honors its dead.

The centerpiece of the Pavilion is Munroe's monumental work, an eleven-panel painting titled "No Matter How Dreary and Gray, We People of Flesh and Blood Would Rather Live Here, Than in Another Man's Yard." It depicts a memorial procession, drawn from photographs by Jackson Petit, a Bahamian photographer. The title itself carries weight—it speaks to a refusal, a claim on place, a rejection of displacement. This painting is Munroe's way of commemorating Beadle, of bringing him into the space of the Biennale not as a historical figure but as a presence.

There is also a work called "However Long the Night, the Dawn Will Break," created in 2026 as a posthumous collaboration. Munroe incorporated materials he recovered from Beadle's studio after his death—sail material from Haitian sloops, the kind of thing that carries its own history of movement and labor. Munroe began this practice years earlier, after his own father died. He created works based on plans they had never realized together, using materials connected to his father's work as a parasail operator. It is a way of continuing a conversation that death interrupted.

The exhibition is organized into distinct sections: one devoted to Beadle, one to Munroe, and space for their collaborative work and for the "Jammin" series, created in 2014 with Antonius Roberts and Stan Burnside as part of a Junkanoo-based collective. These works honor Jackson Burnside III and Brent Malone. The whole thing resonates with the 2026 Venice Biennale's theme, "In Minor Keys," conceived by the late Koyo Kouoh. That phrase—minor keys—speaks to artists who work at the boundaries of form, whose practices are intricate melodies to be heard both individually and as part of a larger composition. Thompson's curatorial vision offers a distinctly Bahamian reading of this idea: the minor keys are the discarded materials, the collaborative processes, the hidden labor, the undervalued people and practices that the art world has trained itself not to see. Beadle and Munroe are insisting that we look.