In early 2015, John Beadle, a pivotal member of the Bahamian art scene, was readying himself to represent The Bahamas at the 56th Venice Biennale. The tiny country (population 400,000) had staged its first pavilion in 2013, and Beadle was researching what he would do for the second. “He was interested in visiting the factories around Venice that made oars and boats. It was in keeping with his own work,” says the Bahamian curator Krista Thompson. “He saw Venice as an archipelago, like The Bahamas.”
But the Biennale dreams of small countries often run aground and in this case the government suddenly withdrew its support. “It decided to invest the money in small regional festivals instead,” Amanda Coulson, this year’s commissioner, tells The Art Newspaper. Now, in 2026—and two years after his death in 2024, aged 60—Beadle’s work will at last come to Venice as The Bahamas has a pavilion once again.
John Beadle missed out on representing the Bahamas in 2015 but posthumously exhibits this year
Photo courtesy of the Bahamas Pavilion
In an exhibition called In Another Man’s Yard, Beadle’s work will appear both within and alongside that of artist Lavar Munroe, a fellow Bahamian and beneficiary of Beadle’s mentorship, who at 43 is very much alive.
Coulson has had a varied cultural career, in film production, commercial galleries, museums and as a co-founder of the Volta art fair. She was born to an Anglo Bahamian father and American mother, before moving to the UK in 1972 just prior to the country’s independence, but describes Nassau—the capital of The Bahamas—as “my anchor”. Returning to Nassau in 2011, she became the director of its National Gallery until 2021, and since 2020 has run Tern, a commercial gallery dedicated to spotlighting Bahamian and Caribbean artists both at home and abroad. “Being the director of the museum had made me aware of how little opportunity artists have here,” she says. “I’m committed to nation building through culture.”
In February last year, Coulson set up a WhatsApp group to initiate The Bahamas’ participation in the 61st Biennale after a 13-year absence, Thompson came on board as curator and a fundraising group was formed. “The government is too cautious about something like this not being successful,” Coulson says. “So, we found our own way. When you come from the Caribbean, you figure out a way round things, to get things done.”
Lavar Munroe (pictured) will exhibit alongside pieces by his late mentor John Beadle
Photo by Roy Cox, courtesy the artist
Picking up the baton
Thompson’s proposition was finally to present the work of Beadle in Venice, but alongside a younger, living artist. “John set the bar high in terms of his skill and professionalism,” Thompson says. “And he was a very community-minded man. I wanted to choose someone who picks up on the same social themes and engages materially in the same way.” As well as going through his sketchbooks, to create works that Beadle never managed to make, Munroe will be using materials left in Beadle’s studio. These include sails from the sloops used by Haitian migrants coming to The Bahamas, a theme to which Beadle frequently returned.
The idea of collaboration is also at the heart of Junkanoo, a tradition in which both Beadle and Munroe are deeply rooted. Junkanoo is a carnival that takes place on 26 December and 1 January, with costumes constructed over months by competing groups. “I was born into it,” says Munroe of the work that takes place in Junkanoo shacks (actually, hangar-sized buildings) scattered over the islands. “My group, the Saxons, is based in Grants Town where I was born. It includes doctors, lawyers, gangsters.”
The extravagant costumes are created from a cardboard framework, which is passed along a production line. “You have the designer, then the builder, the paster who applies the paper, which is fringed, the decorator who drops the gems and the feathers, and then the performer. It’s alchemy,” Munroe says. It is also, according to Coulson, essential. “It’s how many Caribbean children learn the fundamentals of art-making,” she says. “We don’t have an art supply store. We have cardboard and newsprint.”
John Beadle’s Inverted Tree, Man For Hire (2004)
© Estate of John Beadle
Memory and loss
Beadle often chose to make sculptures in cardboard, of wheels and oars and barrows. “For him, it was about focusing on what is foundational to Junkanoo, socially and materially: the armature—the cardboard—not the decoration,” says Thompson. In Venice, Munroe will be working with discarded costumes from the latest Junkanoo, as well as materials from Beadle’s studio, including sails from the Haitian sloops. “People’s energies are accumulated in those old costumes, as they are in the materials from John’s studio,” Thompson says.
Such ideas of memory and loss are integral to the 61st Biennale in other ways, since its artistic director Koyo Kouoh died in May last year. “I’d been with her in February. When I heard the news I thought it was a hoax,” says Munroe, who was close to the curator. “So, to create this show in memory of both her and John is important and emotional.” Furthermore, Kouoh’s chosen title of In Minor Keys has resonance for the Bahamians, referring as it does to the overlooked and intimate and, in Kouoh’s words, “the small islands”.
For Munroe, this is not his first posthumous collaboration. In 2015, he had already shown work at the Venice Biennale, in Okwui Enwezor’s exhibition called All the World’s Futures. “My father—my friend and confidant—had been too sick to attend but promised he’d never miss another of my shows,” says Munroe. “Sadly, he died the following year.” Since then, Munroe has made sure of his father’s presence in his exhibitions: in an urn containing his ashes; in the orange parasails that he used in the business he ran. Both will be in Venice, as well as a newly made ten-panel work—acrylic paint on unstretched canvas—that includes references to many of Beadle’s major motifs, such as the machetes that migrating Haitians bring with them to The Bahamas to do “yard work”, and the mobile houses and wheelbarrows that recall continual movement. In his grand and processional Junkanoo wake, Munroe is recalling the ancestral spirits. He will not be alone in Venice.
• San Trovaso Art Space, Dorsoduro 947
