by Jordan LaHaye Fontenot | May 26, 2026 | For Country Roads Magazine

 

Louisiana artists carry the Gulf South’s stories of memory, catastrophe, and rebirth to the world’s most prestigious contemporary art exhibition.

On a fated few nights in 2023, an internationally acclaimed curator from Africa looked up at the stars and a twinkling disco ball from a space age artistic compound called Camp Abundance, where she was discussing art and life and the Anthropocene with its creator, the New Orleans artist Dawn Dedeaux. 

“We spent several evenings together … engaged in deep conversations about global art, scattered artist microcosm depots, and the larger galactic mysteries,” recalls DeDeaux. Koyo Kouoh, who at the time was Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, had been traveling the American South as part of a series of residencies and cultural exchanges exploring regional art from the global perspectives of African memory and justice. 

At the time, no one, not even Kouoh herself, could have predicted how her brief time with Dedeaux and various other New Orleans artists and culture bearers would come to impact global perspectives on art. 

In late 2024, the board of the Venice Biennale—the world’s oldest and most prestigious international exhibition of contemporary art and architecture—announced Koyoh as the official curator of the event’s 61st iteration, to be held in 2026. She is the first ever African woman to hold the position. 

On display in Venice’s Central Pavilion in the Giardini and the Arsenale shipyard complex, currently in Venice from May 9–November 22, Kouoh’s central group show is titled In Minor Keys and made up of the works of 110 artists, collectives and organizations she personally selected from across the globe. In her introduction to the exhibition, she writes, “In Minor Keys stands as a collective score composed together with artists who have built universes of imagination. Artists who work at the boundaries of form, and whose practices can be thought of as intricate melodies to be heard both collectively and on their own terms. These are artists whose practices seamlessly bleed into society. Artists who accommodate daily life as part of a logical an aesthetically consistent relation of parts. Artist who are exceedingly generous and hospitable to life.” 

Among Kouoh’s artists—which hail from locales such as Nairobi, Kingston, Beirut, and Bangkok—are two representatives from the Gulf South, both from New Orleans. Dawn Dedeaux is one of them, her multimedia conceptual explorations of technology, ecology, philosophy, and apocalypse joining others in the curation’s studies on, as Kouoh put it, “the profound memory of geology that absorbs … violences.” 

In Venice preparing for the exhibition when we spoke, she shared that she brought to the Biennale some of her earlier works that “reflect environmental changes facing both New Orleans and Venice.” These include pieces from her WaterMarkers series, which contemplates the impact of rising season on coastal cities, and Dirt Bowl Table—which presents soil samples collected from around the world. “[There will be a] featured center tribute of soil from Koyo Kouoh’s birthplace in Cameroon,” she said. She will also premier her most recent work, a multimedia project she’s been working on for two years called Meteor Studies Project, which she describes as “an outgrowth of my meditations over recent decades from my vista view of Louisiana’s vanishing coastline, facing southward toward the big asteroid strike in the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago that killed over 70% of all life forms on earth.” 

Joining her is Demond Melancon, Big Chief of the Young Seminole Hunters Black Masking Tribe. Melancon’s work, which transfers the master beading and textile techniques characteristic of New Orleans’s Black Masking tradition into its own art form, stands alongside other artforms inspired by Afro-Atlantic “choreographies of self-organized assemblies . . . [processions] to seasonal or spiritual celebration, and mourning.” 

This is the first time New Orleans has been represented at the Venice Biennale since 2015, when curator Okwui Enwezor selected Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick’s photographic series documenting life at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. DeDeaux and Melancon’s inclusion in this year’s exhibition is a direct testament to Kouoh’s interest in connections and parallels across geographies, to her own witnessed encounters of how art ties history and perspective and exploration all together, even across diasporas and across cultures. 

Kouoh herself never got to see her vision unfold. Mere months after her appointment to the Biennale curatorship in December 2024, she was diagnosed with cancer and died in May 2025 at age fifty-seven. The exhibition, therefore, stands as her last great work, and her team has worked tirelessly to ensure that her hand is the one guiding the experience. On the final day of planning with Kouoh, her team wrote that “The exhibition had found its manifest forms, it was no longer intention, nor abstraction. We could hear the music she so gracefully composed with us.”