In Minor Keys:
Koyo Kouoh, Venice,
and the Sound of Global Africa

I was at 1-54 in New York when the call came. I remember the moment exactly -- the texture of it, the weight of what was being said before I had fully processed it. Koyo Kouoh was gone. The art world had lost one of its most luminous intelligences. And I had lost someone I had been privileged to know personally, a giant in the most precise sense of the word.

She had come to visit me at Maison AfriKin not long before that. We sat together, walked through the show we had up, talked about Miami's art scene, about how African diaspora culture gets seen, held, and transmitted. She was curious in the way that truly great people are curious: not performing interest, but actually hungry for it. She carried herself with that rare combination of authority and warmth that makes you feel both elevated and at ease in the same moment. I learned from every room I shared with her.

Her transitioning is still surreal to me. It does not sit right. But what she built, and what she set in motion, most certainly does.

Who Was Koyo Kouoh

Born in Douala, Cameroon in 1967 and raised in Zurich, Switzerland, Koyo Kouoh spent her life building infrastructure for African art from the inside out. She was the founding artistic director of RAW Material Company in Dakar -- a center for art, knowledge, and society that she described with characteristic devotion: "Dakar is my everything. Dakar made me what I am today." She curated the artistic programs of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair for eight consecutive editions in London and New York. She served on the curatorial teams for documenta 12 and documenta 13. She mounted landmark exhibitions across Brussels, Limerick, Pittsburgh, Hamburg, Moscow, and Berlin.

In 2019, she became Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town -- at the time facing a crisis of direction and public trust. She walked in and turned it around. Her 2022 exhibition When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting became one of the most celebrated shows of its decade, still traveling three years on. The New York Times had called her "one of Africa's preeminent curators and art managers" a full decade before her Venice appointment. ArtReview named her among the 100 most influential people in contemporary art every year from 2014 through 2022.

In December 2024, she was appointed Artistic Director of the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. She became the first African woman ever to hold that position. She was 57 years old. She died of cancer in Basel on May 10, 2025, having submitted her complete curatorial vision to the Biennale president just weeks before, on April 8, 2025. Her husband had expected the exhibition to be canceled. Instead, Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco reached out directly and asked to carry her vision forward. With the support of her family, they agreed.

What Koyo's Work Means to Me as a Curator and Producer

I have spent nearly three decades producing festivals and cultural events on the world's largest stages -- Madison Square Garden, Arthur Ashe Stadium, Forest Hills, Bayfront Park, Mana Wynwood. I have traveled to roughly sixty countries. I have built AfriKin from the ground up. And in all of that work, across all of those years, the question I have returned to again and again is the same one Koyo Kouoh dedicated her entire career to answering: who gets to define what African art is, who it is for, and where it belongs in the architecture of world culture?

What Koyo understood -- and what made her irreplaceable -- is that curation at its highest level is not about selecting objects. It is about constructing reality. The exhibitions she built did not just show African art. They argued, with force and precision, that African art has always been at the center of human creative life, and that the margins it has been assigned to are a political fiction, not a cultural fact. Every show she made was a correction of the record. Every institution she built was a structure that would outlast the argument.

As a producer, I recognize that genius immediately because it is the same work -- different medium, same mandate. You are not just mounting an event. You are establishing what is possible. You are demonstrating, through the undeniable fact of excellent execution, that this belongs on the world stage, that this community deserves this scale, that this story has always been worth telling. Koyo did that at Zeitz MOCAA. She did it at 1-54. She was about to do it at Venice -- the oldest and most prestigious contemporary art exhibition on earth -- when she transitioned. And her team, honoring her precisely, is doing it now.

She did not wait for the art world to come to Africa. She built the centers. She established the authority. She changed the question entirely.

Alfonso D. Brooks -- AfriKin Foundation

That is the model. That is the inheritance. That is exactly what AfriKin is committed to building here in North Miami -- not waiting for recognition, but constructing the institution that makes recognition unavoidable. When Koyo sat with me at Maison AfriKin and talked about Miami's art scene, I heard in her voice the same understanding: that institution-building in diaspora communities is not supplementary to the global art conversation. It is essential to it.

In Minor Keys: What the Exhibition Proposes

The title she chose is borrowed from music, and it is deliberate. Minor keys carry complexity, depth, and an emotional register that major keys sometimes flatten. Kouoh proposed that the art world listen differently -- to quieter frequencies, collective memory, ceremony, and the aesthetics of survival. She wrote of tuning into "soul frequencies, the persistent signals of earth and life," drawing on Edouard Glissant's cultural theory of archipelagoes, invoking free jazz's unpredictable openness as a model for how the exhibition should feel. The writers informing its framework include James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Glissant himself.

The 61st Biennale runs May 9 through November 22, 2026, across the Giardini, the Arsenale, and locations throughout Venice. This season features thirteen African national pavilions -- a historic high -- including four nations attending for the very first time: Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Somalia. The main exhibition is organized around seven thematic strands, among them Procession-Invocation, The Creole Garden, and The Shrines.

Lubaina Himid RA -- born in Zanzibar, pioneer of the Black British Art Movement, Turner Prize winner -- represents Great Britain with a major solo exhibition, only the second Black woman ever to hold the British Pavilion. Sammy Baloji of the DRC appears in both the main exhibition and the Congolese national pavilion Simba Moto! Seize the fire! Big Chief Demond Melancon of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward, presented by Chicago's Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, may be the first Black Masking Indian ever to participate in the Venice Biennale -- his beadwork compositions rooted in African and diaspora history, suits standing over ten feet tall and weighing 120 pounds. Ethiopia's Tegene Kunbi offers solo meditation on silence and cultural memory at Palazzo Bollani. The Bahamas returns for only the second time with In Another Man's Yard, rooted in Junkanoo. Morocco appears for the first time ever in an official national pavilion. Nick Cave, whose landmark Mammoth debuted at the Smithsonian earlier this year, exhibits following an initial call from Kouoh herself.

Beyond the Pavilions: What to See Off the Beaten Path

Venice during Biennale season is a city within a city -- the official program at the Giardini and Arsenale is only the beginning. Across the calli and canals, in historic churches, forgotten palazzi, and spaces that have never before hosted art of this caliber, the satellite universe is where some of the most urgent work lives. These are the shows I am watching, and the ones I believe carry the deepest resonance with what Koyo set in motion.

Why You Need to Go -- and Why It Matters for Future Generations

This is not an ordinary Biennale. There will be other Biennales -- in 2028, 2030, and beyond. There will not be another first. There will not be another Koyo Kouoh. There will not be another moment in which the full weight of the African world's creative authority arrives at the world's oldest art exhibition under the curatorial vision of the first African woman to lead it -- a vision submitted four weeks before she died, carried forward by the team she chose, exactly as she designed it.

When I think about future generations -- about the young artists who will come up through the AfriKin Art Fair, through African Fashion Week Miami, through the programs we are building at Maison AfriKin -- I think about what it means for them to know that this happened. That Koyo Kouoh was appointed to lead Venice. That she built the vision. That the art world, in an act of institutional grace, chose to honor it completely. That thirteen African national pavilions showed up in 2026, a number the Biennale had never seen before. That the Jala Foundation showed in Palazzo Mora. That Gabrielle Goliath refused to be silenced and brought her work to a church in Castello when the state tried to shut her out.

These are not footnotes. These are foundations. What gets witnessed becomes part of the record. What gets documented becomes part of the inheritance. Every artist, curator, producer, collector, and community member who walks through Venice this season and bears witness to what Koyo built is participating in the writing of a new chapter in the history of African culture on the world stage.

For me personally, getting to Venice before this closes in November is not optional. It is pilgrimage. To walk the pavilions Koyo curated, to feel her great spirit moving through the Giardini and the Arsenale, to take in In Minor Keys knowing the conversation we had at Maison AfriKin, knowing what she believed about where this diaspora belongs in the global story -- that is not tourism. It is witness. And witness is one of the most powerful things any of us can offer a life that was given entirely to this work.

AfriKin, La Biennale, and What We Are Building Here

The AfriKin Art Fair 12th Edition opens November 29 through December 6, 2026, at Maison AfriKin, curated by Joseph L. Underwood, Ph.D. When I think about the framework Kouoh was operating within -- the griot tradition, the oral historian, the keeper of cultural memory, the one who holds the story when no one else will -- I hear a direct line to what we are building here. She was calling on artists to be griots. She was calling on institutions to make space for that telling. What we are preparing for Miami this November lives inside that same call. More will be revealed -- perhaps, if the ancestors allow, from Venice itself.

What I can say now: the Call to Artists for the AfriKin Art Fair 12th Edition opens this week. We are calling on artists from across the African diaspora to bring their work, their vision, and their voice to Miami this November. Stay close to afrikin.org and our channels. The announcement is coming. And when it does, you will hear the connection to everything Koyo stood for.