Derrick Adams Honors Koyo Kouoh With a Monumental Venice Portrait
Venice has gained a new image of remembrance ahead of the 2026 Venice Biennale: a large portrait of the late curator Koyo Kouoh by American artist Derrick Adams (b. 1970). Installed on a building facing the Rio della Tana, near the Arsenale, the work, Heavy is the head that wears the crown (2026), was spearheaded by Francesco Bonami and places Kouoh’s legacy directly into the city’s public space.
Adams, whose practice is widely associated with vivid depictions of Black joy, approaches Kouoh with a palette of browns and golds punctuated by pink. The portrait is flattened and close-cropped, giving her the presence of a Byzantine icon. Most striking is the crown, which Adams transforms into the word “JOY,” with beams of golden light radiating outward. The gesture links the burden of leadership to the possibility of collective uplift.
The title draws on a phrase from William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, and its meaning is sharpened by Kouoh’s role in contemporary art. She died of cancer at 57 in May last year, but not before helping shape some of the most consequential platforms for African art in recent decades. Kouoh served as a curatorial advisor for documenta 12 and 13, helped develop the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, and later became executive director and chief curator of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, South Africa.
She was also the first African woman to curate the Venice Biennale. Her 2026 edition, titled In Minor Keys, was conceived as a space for solace and reflection, a counterpoint to the pace of modern life. Adams’s installation extends that vision into the city itself, turning tribute into a visible part of the Biennale’s unfolding story.
In Venice, where monuments and exhibitions often blur into one another, the work offers a rare combination of intimacy and scale: a portrait that is both personal memorial and public statement, anchored in the language of Black joy and curatorial legacy.
