Love Is the Language:
Venice, the GRIOT,
and What We Are Building Next

There is something disarming about love at scale. You can prepare your critique, sharpen your argument, arrive with your position fully formed. And then love walks in and the words simply will not come. Not because the argument was wrong, but because love occupies a frequency that argument cannot reach.

That is what I witnessed this past weekend in Venice.

Many came expecting an African show. Some came ready to test it. What they encountered instead was love -- love as aesthetic principle, love as curatorial mandate, love as the organizing logic of an entire Biennale season. Love rooted in Koyo Kouoh's vision, carried forward by her team, expanded by 131 participating artists from across the globe. Hard to attack love. As I kept observing, watching people move through the Arsenale and the Giardini, through the pavilions and the satellite exhibitions, the words for critique just would not form. Love leaves that kind of vacuum.

I was in Venice for the opening of In Minor Keys -- Koyo Kouoh's final gift to the art world, the curatorial vision she completed four weeks before she died and entrusted to the Biennale to carry forward. I have written at length about Koyo, about what she meant to this community and to me personally. What I want to do here is tell you what it felt like to be there. What the city felt like. What the work felt like. And what it confirmed for me about the path AfriKin is on.

Walking Venice Is a Spiritual Act

I walked for days. The data on my phone will confirm it -- steps accumulated like evidence. From the Arsenale to the Giardini, from Castello to Dorsoduro, through pavilions that ranged from quietly devastating to overwhelmingly beautiful. Venice during Biennale season is not a city you visit. It is a city you inhabit, temporarily, at a frequency that is not available any other time. The canals, the architecture, the light on the water at six in the morning -- all of it becomes part of the viewing experience in a way that no other major art event in the world can replicate.

What struck me most, walking show after show, was the diversity. Not as a talking point, but as a lived reality. I encountered artists from across the African continent and diaspora, from the Caribbean, from South America, from every corner of a global Black world. I ran into old friends I had not seen in years. I met artists I had known only through their Instagram presence and finally shook their hands. We toasted Koyo. We toasted Global Africa. We toasted the fact that we were all standing in Venice in 2026 bearing witness to something that had never been done at this scale before.

The diversity I witnessed this weekend was not representation. It was truth. The art world was simply, finally, accurately reflecting who has always been making the work.

Alfonso D. Brooks -- AfriKin Foundation

There is a phrase from a show I visited -- Boako Amoafo's exhibition -- that stayed with me all weekend and that I keep returning to now: It doesn't always have to make sense. Something about that lands precisely for this moment in my own work and in this community. We spend so much energy explaining ourselves to people who have not decided to understand us, justifying our vision to audiences who are not our audience, building arguments for rooms that will not be moved by argument. The invitation is to stop. Build from love. Build from clarity. Build for the people who are already there.

Koyo's Vision, Confirmed

I arrived in Venice carrying a theme. AfriKin's returning curator, Dr. Joseph L. Underwood, and I had been developing the concept for the 12th edition of the AfriKin Art Fair for months. We had a title. We had a framework. We had a sense of urgency around it. And I wanted to test it against the largest contemporary art event on the planet before we made the public announcement.

When Joseph and I walked through In Minor Keys together, something happened that I can only describe as confirmation. The resonance was immediate and unmistakable. Koyo had arrived at the same frequency -- independently, through her own deep study and curatorial intelligence -- that we had been reaching for. The griot tradition. The keeper of memory. The teller of stories that must not be lost. The understanding that in times of acceleration and forgetting, the most radical act is to remember. To slow down. To listen.

Madam Koyo was leaning in on something that our community needs with tremendous urgency right now. And seeing it articulated at that scale, in that context, with that quality of work -- it was confirmation that we are pointed in the right direction.

We must return to the Griots. To the oral historians who carried the memory of entire civilizations in their bodies, their voices, their relationships with sound and story. We are living in a time of high-speed forgetting. The chase is relentless. The noise is continuous. We have been taught to perform acceleration, to optimize, to produce -- and somewhere in that teaching, many of us have forgotten how to breathe. How to be still. How to receive.

The Griot knew something essential: that the story is not decoration. The story is the architecture. The story is how a people know who they are, what they carry, and what they are building. GRIOT: Urgent Storytelling for Our Times is a call to return to that understanding -- through art, through performance, through the full range of creative expression that the AfriKin Art Fair has always made space for.

On Finding Your Tribe and Growing Together

One of the gifts Venice gave me this year was the reminder of what real community looks like. Not network. Not industry. Community. The people who show up because they believe, not because it is convenient. The people who walk the shows with you at 9 in the morning when the crowds have not yet arrived and talk about what they are seeing with the kind of depth and honesty that only comes from shared commitment. The people who raise a glass for Koyo with grief and with gratitude at the same time, because they understood what she was doing and why it mattered.

I have been building AfriKin for a long time. I founded Rockers Movement in 1998. I have produced events on stages from Madison Square Garden to Bayfront Park Miami. I have traveled to sixty countries. I have learned, in all of that, that nothing of lasting value gets built alone. The question is not whether you need a team -- of course you do. The question is whether you are building with the right people. The people who believe in the vision before the vision is fully visible. The people who contribute their best work not for a transaction but for a legacy. The people whose presence makes the building of the thing itself a form of the thing you are trying to build.

I am grateful for my tribe. For Dr. Joseph L. Underwood, whose curatorial intelligence gives AfriKin's art programming its rigor and its depth. For the entire team at Maison AfriKin, for every artist, partner, and supporter who has chosen to grow with us. Venice reminded me of this: the work is the community. The community is the work. You cannot separate them.

FIFA World Cup 2026 Is One Month Away

I came back from Venice with energy, ideas, and a deep sense of the moment we are in. Because while I was walking those calli and bearing witness to Koyo's legacy, back home in North Miami, something else was taking shape -- something that I also believe is among the most important projects AfriKin has ever undertaken.

FIFA World Cup 2026 is essentially here. The matches begin in June. The eyes of the world will be on this hemisphere, on this region, on this community. And AfriKin -- the signature African diaspora cultural institution on the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau's official FIFA World Cup 2026 tourism platform -- is ready.

Art and the Beautiful Game: Africa on the World Stage opens June 1 at Maison AfriKin, 1600 NE 126th Street, North Miami. Through October 2. This exhibition is our curatorial argument that the beautiful game and Black creative culture have always been inseparable. That the African players who have shaped world football -- and the African nations competing this summer -- are not just athletes. They are cultural architects. They are the inheritors of the same tradition the griots held. They carry community on their backs every time they step onto the pitch, and what happens to them, and what they make possible for their people, is one of the defining cultural narratives of our time.

On June 20, the night before Cabo Verde plays Uruguay at Hard Rock Stadium, AfriKin hosts the Cabo Verde International Football Welcome Reception at Maison AfriKin -- a diplomatic and cultural event bringing together consulates, community partners, and AfriKin's full network to celebrate the beautiful game and the nations that live inside it. This is what it looks like when an institution built by the diaspora becomes the institution that the world comes to when it wants to understand where culture and sport converge.

Announcing AfriKin Art Fair 2026: GRIOT

And now, from Venice, with the confirmation that Koyo's final vision gave me -- I am proud to formally announce the AfriKin Art Fair 12th Edition. Curated once again by Dr. Joseph L. Underwood, Ph.D. Taking place during Miami Art Week and Art Basel Miami, November 29 through December 6, 2026. At Maison AfriKin, 1600 NE 126th Street, North Miami, Florida.

The Call for Artist Proposals is now open. We invite artists of African heritage to submit proposals for this landmark exhibition. GRIOT centers creative tradition as an act of survival, witness, and transformation. Drawing on the West African griot and griotte -- the keepers of history, the truth-tellers, the ones who issued warnings and celebrated achievements -- this exhibition positions contemporary artists as inheritors of that lineage. Those who remember. Those who name. Those who imagine otherwise.

We welcome proposals across all media and disciplines. Painting, sculpture, photography, textile, performance, installation. Work that engages memory and archive, the body as site, diaspora and displacement, language and voice, joy and celebration, Afrofuturism, land and water, protest and political action, gender and kinship. The work must speak to our audience. It must carry stories that resonate with our current lived experience. This is not an exhibition of archaic pasts. It is a powerful, living archive.

Travel. Witness. Live.

If there is one thing Venice confirmed for me beyond the professional and the institutional, it is this: get out there. Travel. See the world. Experience what the world is making. There are extraordinary things happening in art, in culture, in human creativity right now -- not in spite of the difficulty of the moment, but because of it. Difficulty has always been the condition under which the most urgent work gets made. The griots knew this. Koyo knew this. The artists filling Venice this season know this.

The Venice Biennale runs through November 22, 2026. If you can get there, go. If you cannot, follow the work from wherever you are. Follow the artists. Read the catalogues. Watch the documentation. Stay connected to the global conversation. And if you are in Miami or visiting during FIFA World Cup season, come to Maison AfriKin. Walk through Art and the Beautiful Game. Stand in the space we have built and feel what it means when a community decides to tell its own story at the highest possible level.

I am just back from Venice with energy, clarity, and gratitude. The confirmation I needed. The community that held me. The art that reminded me why we do this. And now, home, the work continues.

GRIOT season is open. Come and tell your story.