After a thirteen-year hiatus, the Bahamian Pavilion has returned to Venice with a proposition that is as much educational as representational: that the Caribbean nation can be reintroduced to the world through its contemporary artistic inheritance.
To do so, the pavilion turns to the late master John Beadle and his former student Lavar Munroe, framing their work through one of the Bahamas’ defining cultural touchstones — Junkanoo — the whistling, crepe-costumed procession that floods the islands twice a year and persists as a visual philosophy of resiliency and reverence. For Venice, this takes shape in the transformation of the San Trovaso Art Space in Dorsoduro, where large-scale sculptural works are assembled from strips of discarded Junkanoo costumes, in line with an event defined by perpetual re-imagination. Emerging under slavery in the British American colonies, the festival belongs to what Derek Walcott, the Caribbean Nobel laureate, called “the fragments of epic memory.”
An Junkanoo costume installed in the Bahamian Pavilion in Venice.
Munroe’s own costume, alongside one once worn by his daughter, is installed in a riotous back room, flanked by a ferocious tiger and a rippling white wave suspended overhead. Junkanoo revelry is dedicated to the dead, and here Munroe commemorates Beadle through a series of paintings depicting a memorial procession based on photographs by the Bahamian photographer Jackson Petit, as well as through Beadle’s material legacy. Here, Munroe incorporates ideas from Beadle’s sketchbooks and materials found in his studio, including sailcloth from Haitian sloops—aptly echoing the exhibition’s title, “In Another Man’s Yard.”
Beadle died in 2024 at the age of 60, with the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas describing his passing as leaving “a cavernous space in the visual and creative arts in the Bahamas.” Beadle studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Tyler School of Art, as did Munroe, developing a practice of imbuing found and industrial materials—metal, black iron, tarpaulin, cardboard, and wood—with new purpose across painting, sculpture, and installation. Large cardboard cutouts of human and natural figures drawn from Junkanoo iconography were a hallmark of his practice; examples appear in the Venice presentation. In Inverted Tree, Man for Hire (2004), for example, the trunk of a wily branched tree bears a piercing gaze.
Bringing Beadle’s work to Venice was first envisioned in 2014, one year after the Bahamas’ Venice debut, according to 2026 pavilion curator Krista Thompson. At the time, Beadle was researching Venice’s maritime culture, viewing the lagoon city as a kindred archipelago defined by tourism and a long-standing woodworking tradition tied to boats and oars. However, government funding was withdrawn from the project.
The Venice presentation was later revived through support from Baha Mar, a resort company with a significant investment in contemporary art in the Bahamas, making the 2026 iteration with Munroe possible. John Cox, executive director of arts and culture at Baha Mar and co-founder of the Fuse Art Fair, told ARTnews that “In Another Man’s Yard,” from his perspective, is a necessary correction to the global imagination of the Bahamas, shaped for decades by successful advertising — white sands, crystal water, and good times — yet largely absent of Bahamian faces and voices.
“Nothing could be further from the truth than the idea of a monolithic Bahamas,” Cox said. “If you sit in a room with Bahamians, you go: ‘Whoa — I didn’t know this is what the Bahamas looks like.’”
Bahamian artists, he added, are inadvertently becoming ambassadors for a deeper experience of the Bahamas, one he suggests is more sustainable as tourism shifts in a global context, where visitors have increasingly varied options. The Biennale’s title, In Minor Keys, chosen by its late artistic director Koyo Kouoh, resonates here in its attention to overlooked histories as spaces of repair and reparation.
“It’s about reassigning expectations — definitions of what it means to be Bahamian. What is the Bahamian experience? Who is a Bahamian?” he told ARTnews. “There’s nuance, complexity, modernism, elements assigned to us that the creative community best embodies.”
