Join art historian and curator Krista Thompson for "The Bahamas at the Venice Biennale: The Living Force of Junkanoo and (Posthumous) Collaboration." This public talk examines the current Bahamas Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, In Another Man's Yard, curated by Thompson and featuring the work of John Beadle (1964–2024) and Lavar Munroe (b. 1982), as an intervention into prevailing theories of collaboration in contemporary art. It centers on Junkanoo — a centuries-old Bahamian masquerade tradition in which groups collectively transform discarded materials into elaborate costumes through months of shared labor — as a model of collaborative making in which authorship is deferred and distributed. Each act of cutting, fringing, and assembling carries forward the trace of prior labor while opening onto future transformation.
The talk focuses particularly on what Munroe describes as his posthumous collaboration with Beadle — incorporating sail material Beadle left in his studio to attend to plans he never lived to realize — and situates this within the broader frame of a Biennale that was itself a posthumous realization of Koyo Kouoh's curatorial vision. Thompson advances a genealogy of collaboration rooted in Caribbean and Black diasporic artistic practice highlighting its potential as a force that moves through materials, persists across generations, and refuses the boundary between the living and the dead.
Krista Thompson
Krista Thompson is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art History at Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois and an independent curator. She is the author of An Eye for the Tropics (Duke University Press, 2006), Developing Blackness (The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, 2008), and Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Duke University Press, 2015). Thompson is the editor of Antonius Roberts: Art, Ecology, and Sacred Space (2023) and the co-editor (with Claire Tancons) of En Mas': Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean (D.A.P., 2015). In 2026, she curated In Another Man’s Yard: John Beadle, Lavar Munroe, and the Spirit of (Posthumous) Collaboration, the Pavilion for The Bahamas at the 61st Venice Biennale.
Originally published at artdept.nd.edu.