Lavar Munroe Magnifies The Spirit at the Bahamas Pavilion in Venice

The Bahamas returns to La Biennale di Venezia with only its second-ever national pavilion—and its first in more than a decade. Titled “In Another Man’s Yard: John Beadle, Lavar Munroe, and the Spirit of (Posthumous) Collaboration,” the exhibition joins the late Bahamian artist John Beadle and multidisciplinary artist Lavar Munroe in a deeply personal meditation on memory, ritual, and collective making. Curated by Krista Thompson and presented at San Trovaso Art Space in Venice’s Dorsoduro district, the pavilion reflects the layered histories and creative traditions of The Bahamas while positioning Junkanoo culture at the center of its dialogue.

Across painting, sculpture, and installation, Munroe extends Beadle’s lifelong commitment to transforming discarded materials into vessels of cultural memory. Both artists draw from the visual language and communal spirit of Junkanoo—the centuries-old Bahamian festival rooted in procession, performance, and improvisation—using found cardboard, abandoned costume fragments, newspaper clippings, and Haitian sloop sails to construct works that carry traces of labor, grief, celebration, and survival. 

Created in the wake of Beadle’s passing in 2024, the pavilion becomes not only an intergenerational exchange, but also an act of tribute, foregrounding what Munroe calls “posthumous collaboration” through works that incorporate Beadle’s sketches, collected materials, and artistic influences.

For Munroe, the presentation marks a pivotal return to Venice a decade after his first Biennale appearance in “All the World’s Futures,” curated by Okwui Enwezor. Now representing The Bahamas at a historic moment for the nation’s cultural presence, the artist brings a more expansive and grounded vision of Bahamian identity to an international audience—one rooted not in postcard clichés, but in the complexity of community, ancestry, sound, and material transformation. 

Whitewall spoke with Munroe about honoring Beadle’s legacy, the emotional resonance of Junkanoo traditions, and the immersive works that he’s presenting in Venice.

Lavar Munroe Honors John Beadle Through Posthumous Collaboration

WHITEWALL: The Bahamas is returning to the Venice Biennale for the second time ever. How does it feel to co-represent the pavilion for this milestone?

LAVAR MUNROE: It’s a profound sense of pride. This is actually my second time participating in the Venice Biennale—my first was in 2015, in All the World’s Futures, curated by the late Okwui Enwezor. I exhibited three paintings in the Arsenale alongside artists like Sonia Gomes, Jason Muran and Lorna Simpson (immediate wall/floor/hanging neighbors). At the time, I was fresh out of graduate school and was literally a kid in a grown-up event. haha

Now, 10 years later, I’ve matured and developed a voice that I can confidently say is my own. To return and co-represent The Bahamas at such a milestone moment—alongside John Beadle—feels incredibly meaningful. It’s an opportunity to share a deeper, more grounded expression of who we are as artists and as a nation that is overflowing with creativity (as opposed to the Sun, Sand, and Sea idea that is sold to the world).

WW: How did you begin working on the exhibition? What did you want your artwork to say to its visitors

LM: I entered this project guided first by paying homage to the legacy and visual language of John Beadle, and second by the thousands of Bahamian hands that labored in secrecy for months to produce the Junkanoo costumes that will ultimately embody a portion of my work in Venice.

These collective acts of making—rooted in discipline, ritual, and shared cultural knowledge—form the conceptual and ethical foundation of much of the work I will exhibit in the Venice Biennale.

In the spirit of leadership and mentorship, I have invited emerging Bahamian artist Eddion Wymes to travel from Nassau to assist in the realization of the work.  Through this collaborative framework, leadership is enacted not as a hierarchy, but as an exchange—one that prioritizes teaching, learning, and the building of community across generations and geographies.

Leadership is enacted not as a hierarchy, but as an exchange.”

-Lavar Munroe.

WW: John Beadle has played a significant role in shaping the arts scene in the Bahamas. How did he inspire you and your work here, or throughout your career?   

LM: John Beadle has inspired me in many ways, ranging from material manipulation to bravery as an artist. My work in Venice pays direct homage to John Beadle through a series of intentional acts—rituals and offerings rooted in Junkanoo culture. In the Junkanoo community, when someone passes, we honor them through a Junkanoo Wake: a nighttime ceremonial procession that merges African traditions with Christian faith. It’s driven by goatskin drums, cowbells, whistles, brass, and gospel hymns—layered into a powerful, spiritual soundscape of rhythm, mourning, and celebration.

For the Biennale, I collaborated with cinematographer and photographer Jackson Petit-Homme to document actual Junkanoo wakes connected to the One Family group, which Beadle was affiliated with. From those images, I created a ten-panel processional painting—a Junkanoo wake in Beadle’s honor.

Throughout the work, there are layered references to Beadle. His group’s logo—the ant head—appears across multiple panels. His sculptural language is echoed through objects carried within the procession. I also drew from his obituary—using fragments of songs and text as subtitles within the paintings.

Beadle always identified first as a Junkanoo, rather than an artist, so each panel embodies both the act and the spirit of Junkanoo itself. The works are also embedded with personal offerings, including inherited jewelry from my deceased grandmother, Sadie Curtis (a celebrated educator in the Bahamas who has an elementary school named in her honor)  making the gesture both communal and deeply intimate.

Alongside this, I’ve created a site-specific work inspired by unrealized sketches from Beadle’s sketchbook—using them as a point of departure. I’ve also incorporated Haitian sloop sails that washed ashore in The Bahamas, materials Beadle himself collected and used. These sails appear in both the paintings and the sculptural installation, which I think of as a kind of posthumous collaboration between us.

Discarded Junkanoo Costumes Become Vessels of Memory and Ritual

WW: Your work also transforms everyday and found materials into visionary works. Can you tell us about the materials that you used to create the pieces on view at the Biennale? How were these pieces made?

LM: Following my participation in both Junkanoo parades in Nassau, I undertook an extensive material-gathering process, combing the streets in the early hours of the morning to collect truckloads of discarded Junkanoo costumes. Only hours earlier, these materials were considered top secret—carefully guarded, handcrafted expressions of communal identity. They were then revealed through performance, worn and animated as they surged along Bay Street, Nassau’s main thoroughfare, carried by large, tribe-like communities known as Junkanoos/Junkanooers. By dawn, these once-celebrated objects were abandoned and treated as refuse.

These recovered costumes—bearing the physical traces of movement, labor, and collective ritual— shipped ahead of my arrival to Venice and serve as the primary material for the creation of a large-scale, site-specific sculpture. The work will be constructed in direct response to sketches from the late John Beadles’ sketchbooks, as well as to the physical and historical conditions of the site itself. The materials’ prior life, cultural resonance, and transformation—from secrecy to spectacle to discard—will inform both form and process.

In my paintings, sound and rhythm function as metaphor, allegory, and acts of remembrance. In my 10-panel piece dedicated to John Beadle—titled No Matter How Dreary and Gray, We People of Flesh and Blood Would Rather Live Here Than in Another Man’s Yard (2026)—a rain-soaked, somber atmosphere frames each panel. I attend closely to the visual translation of sound: the song of breath; the rattle of a cart full of pigeons on a lonely dirt road; footsteps in movement; mourning and crying; humming, the ringing of chinaware bells; the sound of rain drops on various surfaces and the quiet noise of a vast ocean set against that of a sublime mountaintop are a few visual clues that play on the idea of “Minor Keys.”

Materially, the paintings are grounded in ideas of inheritance and offering. Objects passed down from my late grandmothers—Sadie Curtis, a celebrated Bahamian educator, and Cynthia Hanna, a revered baker and fruit dealer—are embedded into the work. From Sadie, I incorporate jewelry of various kinds—gold, silver, pearls, and costume pieces. From Cynthia, palm-sized chinaware bells. These objects function not just as materials, but as offerings—gestures directed toward the ancestral spirit of John Beadle.

Hand-fringed Bahamian national newspapers also appear throughout the work, including the front-page announcement of John Beadle’s death. These are not presented as documentation alone, but as sites of mourning—spaces that hold public memory and collective witnessing. Together, these elements carry both beauty and grief, affirming art’s capacity to connect us to deeper emotional and sensory worlds.

A recurring material across the paintings and sculptures is a fluorescent orange tassel originally used in a Junkanoo costume. I salvaged it from a property on West Street Hill in Nassau that had experienced a house fire, where it was being used as a makeshift caution barrier. In the work, this tassel becomes symbolic—it points to the ways families and communities mark and commemorate the dead. Sometimes that takes the form of memorial pins with a loved one’s image, sometimes a specific flower or color. Here, it’s this fluorescent tassel, repurposed and recontextualized from Another Man’s Yard—pun intended.

In the earlier paintings in the show, the range of materials is especially expansive. Many of these elements were gathered during my travels across Senegal, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, as well as much closer to home—in my studio yard in the Bahamas.

In Nassau, something interesting happens: kids from nearby Haitian and Bahamian families often throw toys, gadgets, and random objects over my wall. There’s a dog in the yard, so they’re usually too afraid to come in and retrieve them. It’s become almost ritualistic—every time I return, I’m guaranteed to find a new accumulation of materials waiting for me.

What might seem incidental or discarded becomes part of the work. These objects carry traces of play, absence, and community, and they enter the paintings as both found material and lived experience.

Inside the Artist’s Two Studios

WW: What is your studio like back home? 

LM: I split my time between the U.S. and the Bahamas—roughly half the year in each, moving back and forth in shorter stretches rather than one long stay. Because of that, I operate out of two studios that shape my practice in very different ways.

Studio A (A is for America): My primary studio is a 2,500-square-foot former can factory tucked inside an industrial park in Baltimore. It has these incredible 20-foot bay windows that overlook train tracks and rows of red brick buildings—a cityscape that always feels in motion.

Inside, the walls were once pristine white but are now layered with years of marks—notes, colors, gestures—almost like a living archive of thought and process. There’s an abundance of paint, carefully organized by my assistants, alongside brushes, rolls of canvas, and a large corner I call “the graveyard.” That’s where unfinished works live—pieces that didn’t quite make the cut. But nothing is ever truly abandoned; I often return to them, resurrecting them through collage or simply painting over them.

This is where I produce the majority of my work. The space is structured, expansive, and deeply tied to my daily practice.

Studio B (B is for Bahamas): Studio B is almost the complete opposite. It’s a small, 300-square-foot wooden structure in the Bahamas that I built by hand with my cousins in the early 2010s. It’s painted the same red and white as my Baltimore studio, but the environment couldn’t be more different.

It’s surrounded by lush fruit trees—papaya, noni, guinep, coconut palms—and constantly animated by dogs, lizards, doves, and wild hens and roosters that more or less run the yard. The space is filled with sound: broken English, Haitian Creole, heavy Bahamian dialect, and Caribbean music drifting in from neighbors.

There’s a strong sense of community—kids peeking through chain-link fences covered in cerasee vines, others watching from nearby rooftops. The studio shifts seasonally between an art space and a Junkanoo shack, so it’s always evolving.

Compared to Baltimore, it’s much smaller and far more communal. It’s where collaboration happens naturally—where I both learn and teach the most. It feels less like a “workspace” and more like an extension of home—because it actually is.

“But nothing is ever truly abandoned; I often return to them, resurrecting them through collage or simply painting over them.”

-Lavar Munroe.

WW: What else are you working on this year?

LM: Honestly, I’m looking forward to a bit of a break. I’ve been fully immersed in the Venice Biennale since last fall. That said, I have a solo exhibition of new work opening in June at Monique Meloche Gallery, where I’ll be continuing the ten-panel procession. It’s still very much in progress—I’m working remotely with my studio assistants in Baltimore while finishing things here in Venice.

In July, I’ll be part of a group show in Tirana Albania, a collaborative show with Larkin Durey,  where I will be contributing a few smaller works. After that, I’m planning to slow down—travel a bit with my partner and kids, then head back to The Bahamas to rest and reset before the fall.