Ten years after his Venice Biennale debut, Lavar Munroe returns to represent The Bahamas with a posthumous collaboration with his mentor, John Beadle. Words by Folasade Ologundudu.
On the morning of New Year’s Day, the streets of Bay Street in Nassau, The Bahamas, are strewn with discarded costumes – the remnants of the Junkanoo festival that took place the day before. Inscribed in 2023 on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, the festival celebrates the cultural traditions and practices of enslaved Africans through a vibrant procession of elaborate costumes, dance and music rooted in liberation. For decades, Junkanoo has been a central source of inspiration for the late artist John Beadle. Now, years after Beadle’s death, Lavar Munroe is reinterpreting his work at the Venice Biennale.
It is not the first time Munroe has exhibited at the Venice Biennale. The Guggenheim Fellow first participated in 2015 under the curatorial vision of Okwui Enwezor. This year, he returns to represent The Bahamas through a posthumous collaboration with his mentor and arguably the country’s most celebrated artist, the late John Beadle. The pavilion is Sponsored by Baha Mar, the 1,000 acre luxury hotel on Nassau.
Lifelong Junkanooers, the pair share more than an affiliation with the festival. Both artists have drawn deeply from Junkanoo, which traditionally marked the only two days of respite enslaved Africans were granted during the chattel slavery era of colonial rule in The Bahamas. Their respective practices are united by an interest in research, materiality and cultural history. Munroe’s own research-driven practice most recently evolved through time spent in Zimbabwe, where he studied the spiritual traditions of the Shona, a Bantu-speaking people renowned for their stone sculpture, architecture and musical traditions. It is this process of research and spiritual attunement that continues to shape his work.
In this interview, Munroe reflects on returning to the Venice Biennale a decade after his debut, collaborating posthumously with John Beadle, and the significance of the Junkanoo wake—a communal celebration of life held in honour of a recently deceased member of the Junkanoo community.
F.O.: When you think about your respective practices, how do you feel they are similar, and what differs about them?
L.M.: I think where John Beadle’s work and mine intersect is through materiality. Both of us come from a community of people who are inherently creative. We come from different groups, but we’re the same in the sense that we’re both Junkanooers.
The leaders of Junkanoo groups brainstorm and conjure ideas for themes for the parade. It’s a very secretive process. We’re in the internet age now, but before this we were in the book age. People would fly from The Bahamas to America looking for specific books about the themes for that year’s Junkanoo celebration, and for me, this is how I was introduced to the notion of research. John Beadle was also a very research heavy guy. I had the privilege of reading his sketchbooks, which were dense with information about the history of Junkanoo. If you look at both our practices, we share this colliding of cardboard, although he also used yarn, fishing hooks and other materials. Seeing his work at the National Art Gallery when I was a kid gave me the confidence to know that I could use anything to make an artwork. I began to embrace the notion of material, whether something inherited from my deceased grandmother, my father’s parachutes, or cardboard from homeless encampments. For me, material usually has a sacred aspect to it as well as a social critique. The materials aren’t random, and I think John Beadle was similarly coming from a very specific place to speak about very specific things.
F.O.: What were some of the conversations and brainstorming sessions like with the curator, Dr. Krista Thompson?
L.M.: Well, if you put two Guggenheim Fellows in a room together, magic tends to happen. From our first conversation, my mind was going and going. I don’t think I slept that night after we initially spoke. A lot of our conversation centred on the notion of the Junkanoo wake and a posthumous collaboration. At the time, I was concluding my research in Zimbabwe, where I was studying Kurova Guva. It’s a practice of calling back a spirit so that an ancestor can speak to the people on earth, letting them know what’s happening and what should be happening within society or that community. I was on the heels of completing that work and mentioned the notion of Seven Days to her. She didn’t know the term, but it led her to tell me about Nine Nights in Jamaica, a similar ritual where, after somebody dies, people celebrate and send off the spirit over the course of nine nights. Similarly, in The Bahamas we have something called a Junkanoo wake, which happens on the Thursday or Friday before the funeral of a Junkanooer with the intention of sending off the spirit. We thought it made sense to create a work that functioned as a Junkanoo wake in dedication to John Beadle.
F.O.: How did the posthumous work you collaborated on with John and your newly commissioned works come to life?
L.M.: There were many sketches in John’s sketchbook, including unrealised sculptures. I used them as a jumping off point to both pay homage to and posthumously collaborate with John Beadle, which is something that is not new to me. For many years I collaborated with my father posthumously. I’m using the same materials John used, retrieved from Haitian sloops, to collage into the work, which speaks to crossing this vast body of water. Different things happen in the water that speak about danger, but also about the hero’s journey. I was interested in Joseph Campbell and his monomyth, The Hero’s Journey, which was something I was studying as a postdoctoral fellow at UNC. Rites of passage, birth, death, initiation. Materially, I’m using a lot of jewellery that I inherited from Sadie Curtis, who was a renowned educator in The Bahamas, as well as from my grandmother, who raised me. We also worked with Jackson Petit, a cinematographer and painter who attended the Junkanoo wakes of the group John Beadle was affiliated with, One Family, and documented them. I used that documentation to develop the composition. From that composite of images, we decided on a ten panel piece.
F.O.: In your opinion, is there a particular point of view or statement that’s being made in this pavilion?
L.M.: There are many statements being made in the pavilion, and I think that was the intention from the beginning. From the first conversation with Dr. Krista, the notion of research was critically, theoretically and artistically present for both me and John Beadle. John left instructions. Another Man’s Yard (2006) was installed according to instructions he left behind. There are all these nuances that speak about humanity and spirituality, from the mobile housing scheme that speaks about migration and mobility, to the machetes, which have something spiritual and angelic about them while also feeling simultaneously violent. The paintings all have this spiritual movement that carries through them, speaking to both this world and the other world. There’s a lot being said.
F.O.: When does Junkanoo happen, and what is the process of it coming to life?
L.M.: Twice. Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, and New Year’s Day. The idea is to bring something new to each parade. Brand new costumes that have never been rushed before. Because if you rush them, they lose something. Once you put a costume on for the first time, it becomes this very sacred thing. Then it becomes performative, then sombre, then performative again, and then it’s done. After it’s over, people leave the costumes behind and the sanitation workers come and take them to the dump.
