“It’s always difficult to locate art and politics. The goal is to recognize our interdependency. This interdependency is something that makes it extremely urgent to continuously and restlessly push for better situations.”

These are observations by curator Koyo Kouoh (1967–2025), not about her upcoming Venice Biennale exhibition In Minor Keys but in regards to the Vera List Center for Art and Politics’ Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Politics, whose jury she chaired in 2018. At the VLC, Kouoh’s extraordinary curatorial practice has been a blessing and deeply influential. In this special edition of our newsletter, VLC director Carin Kuoni reflects on the many meaningful intersections between her work and the Vera List Center and key moments in our history as we pay tribute to her and celebrate with her team and the artists she assembled in Venice.

Interdependence for Kouoh went far beyond a conventional curatorial practice. “Curators are storytellers who use grammars and vocabularies provided by art(ists),” she noted in one of our exchanges. Without fail and consistently emphasizing the primacy of the artist, she was simultaneously committed to institution-building, field-building, critical discourse, long-term research, and history writing as essential companions to artistic production. As a friend and collaborator of the VLC, this commitment played out in different ways across different platforms: in 2012, she helped launch the VLC Prize for Art and Social Justice at dOCUMENTA (13), for which she served as a curatorial advisor. All of her engagements were always accompanied by writing and critical discourse. In 2015, she contributed an essay on Issa Samb to our anthology Entry Points: The Vera List Center Field Guide on Art and Social Justice. In 2016, the VLC visited Kouoh at RAW Art Space in Dakar, Senegal, as part of the 56th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, at the invitation of Ingrid Schaffner, where she later curated Dig Where You Stand. This was just as RAW re-emerged with a renewed focus on education, residencies, and publishing from an institutional sabbatical, inspiring—years later—our own institutional sabbatical in 2024.

Kouoh served as jury chair for the 2017–2019 Jane Lombard Prize cycle, which selected the Pan-African artist collective Chimurenga. In June 2019, when we visited Chimurenga in Cape Town, she welcomed us to Zeitz MOCAA, shortly after she began her tenure as the museum’s executive director and chief curator. When the VLC celebrated Chimurenga in New York through the exhibition Chimuranga: Pan African Space Station later that year, Kouoh responded to the prompt If Art is Politics (our 2017–2019 VLC Focus Theme) with her usual clarity: “It’s not just about setting the record straight. The goal is to uncover, unveil that which has been occluded, to reclaim certain imaginaries.”

At the 2026 Venice Biennale, we see Kouoh’s vision realized with In Minor Keys. In the exhibition, we are thrilled to see artists who we’re proud to have presented through VLC programs and initiatives over the years, among them Kader Attia, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Alfredo Jaar, Nina Katchadourian, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo and Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Uriel Orlow, Tiona Nekkia McClodden as well as VLC Fellows Carolina Caycedo and Walid Raad.

We congratulate them, as well as the 2025–2027 Jane Lombard Prize recipient, Rosana Paulino, representing Brazil alongside Adriana Varejão, and Jane Lombard Fellow Jenna Sutela, representing Finland. Join us at the VLC this fall, as we celebrate Paulino as well as Sutela and the other Jane Lombard Fellows: ArTree Nepal, Stephanie Dinkins, and Jason Edward Lewis at the annual VLC Forum.

View an archive featuring some of Koyo Kouoh’s contributions to the Vera List Center below.