WHERE CURRENTS MEET | BLACK AND AFRICAN ARTISTS TAKE CENTER STAGE IN VENICE
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The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia opens this week under a title borrowed from music: In Minor Keys. Conceived by the late Koyo Kouoh — the first African woman to lead the Biennale’s artistic direction — the theme proposes an art world that listens differently: to quieter registers, collective memory, ceremony, and survival. This season, those registers belong to Black artists in a way that the 131-year-old exhibition has never seen before.
Thirteen African national pavilions participate this year — a historic high — including four nations attending for the first time. New Orleans Big Chief Demond Melancon is making his Biennale debut, presented by Chicago’s Mariane Ibrahim Gallery. And across the European Cultural Centre’s (ECC) palazzi, the parallel exhibition Personal Structures – Confluences is amplifying that energy with more than 175 artists from 40+ countries, including a meaningful expansion of African and South African representation.
Personal Structures – Confluences: The ECC’s Open Laboratory
Running concurrently with the main Biennale, the European Cultural Centre (ECC) Italy’s Personal Structures – Confluences, brings together more than 175 artists across Palazzo Bembo, Palazzo Mora, and the Marinaressa Gardens. The exhibition is free to enter across all three venues, positioning it as one of the most accessible major programs in Venice. As ECC Head of Art Sara Danieli describes it, Confluences explores “how personal narratives build ties with collective ones, shaping an ever-evolving cultural landscape.”
Among the most anticipated South African contributions are works by Neo Mokgoshing and members of the Jala Foundation for Contemporary African Artists — whose practices converge around questions of identity, material memory, and the body’s relationship to history.
The Jala Foundation, presenting painting at Palazzo Mora, works from a clear mandate: the contemporary African art world must build its own infrastructure of visibility. Its inclusion in Confluences speaks to the ECC’s own positioning — porous, global, open to artists at every stage of their careers — and provides six months of sustained engagement between emerging African painters and international audiences.
Also at Palazzo Mora: the Bold Beauty Project (BBP), a photography series redefining how institutions represent women with disabilities. Co-founded by Shelly Baer and Eva Ritvo and curated by Patrice Samara, BBP’s 14 large-scale portraits — including Bahamian disability inclusion consultant Erin Brown — bring inclusive visibility into the Confluences frame.
The Big Chief Arrives: Demond Melancon at the Giardini & Arsenale
The most talked-about debut of this Biennale season may belong to Big Chief Demond Melancon of the Young Seminole Hunters — a New Orleans artist whose medium is needle, thread, and glass beads, and whose tradition is over 200 years old. Presented by Chicago’s Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Melancon is appearing in both the Giardini and the Arsenale, making him, as best as anyone can determine, the first Black Masking Indian ever to participate in the Venice Biennale.
Born in 1978 in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, Melancon entered the Black Masking Culture in 1992 and received the title of Big Chief in 2012 — the highest ceremonial role within a Mardi Gras Indian tribe. His suits, beaded panel by panel with hand-sewn glass work as small as 2mm, are narrative compositions rooted in African and diaspora history: Nyabinghi warriors, Shaka Zulu, the Amistad uprising, Emperor Haile Selassie. “I’m big on studying,” Melancon has said. “There’s a lot of research before I start to bead.” This year’s suit stood over 10 feet tall and weighed 120 pounds.
The Black Masking tradition itself is an act of historical reckoning. Originally forbidden from participating in Mardi Gras, Black communities in New Orleans created their own carnival — drawing on bonds between enslaved African people and the Indigenous tribes who gave them refuge. “When I sew my suit, I’m sewing in rebellion to that,” Melancon has said. That rebellion, translated into Venice’s most storied exhibition spaces, is exactly the kind of minor key Kouoh was calling for.
Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, which has reshaped the international contemporary art market through its commitment to Black and African artists from its Chicago base, announced its representation of Melancon in February 2026. His first solo exhibition with the gallery is already scheduled — in Chicago, in 2027.
Chicagoan Nick Cave has also been invited to exhibit during Minor Keys, having initially received the call from Kouoh. The artist, educator and messenger will be presented by Jack Shaiman Gallery. Cave's exhibition Mammoth debuted at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) earlier this year.
The United State is being represented by artist Alma Allen, and as with most things with the current administration, his selection was mired in controversy. First with the removal of any diversity and inclusion language being removed from the selection application and the lateness of his selection. Two of Allen's galleries have stepped back from representing him because of the potential blowback from the administration.
A Season Transformed | Black Artists Across the Biennale
Koyo Kouoh’s In Minor Keys is structured around seven thematic strands — among them Procession–Invocation, The Creole Garden, and The Shrines. Across the Giardini and Arsenale, the program emphasizes collective memory, spirituality, and diasporic connection. The effect, across dozens of national pavilions and the main exhibition, is a season that finally, unmistakably, centers the experiences and aesthetics of the African world and its diasporas.
South African art arrives in Venice this year freighted with context: ten South African artists appear in the main Biennale, and the controversy over the original South African selection — artist Gabrielle Goliath, whose Elegy project planned to commemorate victims in Gaza — remains a charged backdrop.
Lubaina Himid RA, born in Zanzibar, a pioneer of the Black British Art Movement and Turner Prize winner — represents Great Britain at the Giardini with Predicting History: Testing Translation, a major solo exhibition of new multi-panel paintings curated by Ese Onojeruo. She is only the second Black woman to hold the British Pavilion; the first, Sonia Boyce, won the Golden Lion in 2022.
Sammy Baloji (DRC) appears in both the main exhibition and the Congolese national pavilion, Simba Moto! Seize the fire!, at the Antico Refettorio. His practice mines Congo’s colonial past and the politics of material extraction and memory. The Bahamas returns to the Biennale for only the second time with In Another Man's Yard, presenting a posthumous collaboration between the late John Beadle and Lavar Munroe, curated by Northwestern’s Dr. Krista Thompson. Both artists’ practices are rooted in Junkanoo, the national processional festival of The Bahamas, transforming discarded materials into works that address Caribbean inheritance, authorship, and colonial history.
Ethiopia’s Tegene Kunbi offers his solo meditation on silence and cultural memory at Palazzo Bollani. Four nations — Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Somalia — are making their Biennale debut.
Venice has always been built on water that flows from everywhere and belongs to no one place. This season, the artists converging on its palazzi are carrying those waters with them.
EXHIBITION INFORMATION
Personal Structures – Confluences | ECC Italy | May 9–Nov. 22, 2026 | Palazzo Bembo, Palazzo Mora & Marinaressa Gardens | Free entry | personalstructures.com
61st International Art Exhibition – In Minor Keys | La Biennale di Venezia | May 9–Nov. 22, 2026 | labiennale.org
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