Southern Perspectives in Venice

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.” 

Personal Structures 

In conjunction with the official Venice Biennale, the European Culturale Center (ECC)-Italy in Venice will host Personal Structures—Confluences, an international contemporary art exhibition celebrating coexistence through the intersections of artistic practices, cultures, and disciplines. Exhibited at the Palazzo Mora, Palazzo Bembo, and Marinaressa Gardens from May 6–November 22, the show will feature more than 150 artists and multidisciplinary creatives from forty countries. Among them will be nine artists hailing from Louisiana and Mississippi, all represented by Orleans Gallery in New Orleans, and all creating bodies of work specifically inspired by the rich character of our corner of the world. Together, their work for this show tells the story of New Orleans as anchored by the 2005 devastation of Hurricane Katrina, ending with the celebration of rebirth, held in the hands of the region’s culture bearers. 

“I'm often quoted as saying the art of the modern South needs to be seen on the world stage, because the artists living and creating here are extraordinary, and the work they are making is universally resonant,” said Cayman Clevenger, owner and director of Orleans Gallery. “It is often work that could only come from this place—from a rich but complicated history, from the duality of beauty and decay, from a culture that celebrates more than it mourns, from a place where music permeates the air, where Spanish moss drips off the branches of ancient oak trees, and where bayous and bayou dwellers, both fearsome and beautiful, are only steps away. Ours is a culture that rewards creative expression, and celebrates the culture bearers who have made our region known around the world.” 

Andrew LaMar Hopkins: A self-taught Southern artist who spent a decade in New Orleans, LaMar Hopkins’s work draws from his own Creole ancestry, bringing to life vividly imagined, but meticulously studied, worlds of Creoles of Color and white Creoles in the American South. In Personal Structures, he will exhibit “Creole Venus,” representing, as Clevenger puts it, “the ceremonial beginnings of life on the Mississippi.”  @boyneworleans1850 on Instagram. 

[Read more about LaMar Hopkins in this profile from our August 2025 issue.] 

Karen Ocker: Ocker’s decades-long career as a New Orleans artist has been inspired by her hometown’s culture of music, magic, and resilience. She makes use of reclaimed materials—including antique instruments—to frame altar-like portraits of the region’s icons, such as John Batiste, Allen Toussaint, Amédé Ardoin, and others. With her to Venice, she is bringing Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson, musical parents of New Orleans culture, as well as an altar to an unknown female musician—who will carry their legacy on into the future. karenockerart.com. 

Michie Cooper: With a needle and thread as her paintbrush, Cooper takes on the architectural tradition of New Orleans expression with a new moodiness, documenting the spirit of the city’s neighborhoods with a distinctly painterly approach to textiles. Her work, “What September Means,” which she is exhibiting in Personal Structures, invokes the collective Southern experience of storm season through a cottage devastated by Hurricane Katrina. michiecooper.art. 

Adam Trest: Based in Laurel, Mississippi, Trest’s fairytale naturescapes are rich in symbols and saturated in color, balanced by careful form and patterns that open the doors to the rich storytelling of the South. For the Venice exhibition, Trest takes on the role of telling the story of Katrina itself via a tryptic of the storm rolling in. adamtrest.com.

Joe Mustachia: Using a signature hand-slung paint technique that renders his scenes of New Orleans full of movement and life, Mustachia has developed an instantly-recognizable style that combines contemporary Pop Art with the iconic color palettes of New Orleans. His works act as the centerpiece of Orleans Gallery’s showcase, referencing the first second line held after Katrina with the work “Blue Tarp Blues,” and the moment electricity was restored afterward with “Beacon of Light.” joemustachia.com.  

Tony Bernard: Bernard spent much of his career as a mentee of one of Louisiana’s most famous artists, George Rodrigue. Based in Lafayette, Louisiana, his renderings of Louisiana scenery and iconography are often described as “Cajun Pop Art.” For Personal Structures, his depiction of a Creole cottage rising in the morning represents the hope sustaining the city in the years after the storm. tonybernardstudio.com. 

Jen Morgan: A fiber artist based in Mandeville, Morgan specializes in the craft of wet felting, to which she incorporates hand stitching and beadwork to create fantastical portraits of Louisiana scenery, icons, architecture, and flora and fauna. A fine art-felted Black Masking Indian is her contribution to Personal Structures, a testament to the continued richness of New Orleans culture. jenmorgancreativearts.com. 

Kloé Donley: In Donley’s work, Princess Diana smirks in all elegance; Britney blows a bubble of gum, Elton’s got his pink shades on. The young New Orleans Pop Artist combines ornate wallpaper-esque backdrops with maximalist expressions of humanity at its most commercially glorified. Her work, “Rebirth,” portrays a young trumpeter, “perhaps the next Louis Armstrong,” says Clevenger, representing the culture bearers of tomorrow. kloeoncanvas.com. 

Morgan Gray: Raised in bayou country and based in New Orleans, Gray’s work joins abstractionism with expressionism, color study and portraiture, in a body of work that is as mesmerizing as it is fun. Excess is expressed in contoured color, in portraits of pop culture icons, abstract patternmaking, tablescapes, and botanicals. With Donley, she offers a glimpse of New Orleans leaders of the future, with the painting “Tomorrow’s Big Queen,” depicting a young girl who will someday rise to the highest ranks of the Black Masking Indians. morganpaintsstuff.com. 

Can’t make it to Venice in the next five months? Live vicariously by reading up on this year’s exhibition at labiennale.org or following along on Instagram @labiennale. Learn more about DeDeaux’s work at dawndedeaux.net and Melancon’s work at demondmelancon.com.