During a Junkanoo Wake, rain is understood as a bridge between the living and the dead — a signal that the spirit has permission to move on. At the 2026 Venice Biennale, Lavar Munroe painted every panel of his 11-part work with streaks of rain, imagining a procession for the late artist John Beadle.
That detail — rain as a conduit between worlds — gets at something larger about Bahamian creative practice. Not the rain itself, but what people do with what they have: cardboard, salvaged sail cloth, fishing line, the scraps of a Junkanoo costume, the front page of a newspaper obituary. The question this article pursues is not simply “what art do Bahamians make,” but rather how a long history of making do — with materials, with resources, with institutions — has shaped a distinct creative ethos. For travelers, collectors, and anyone curious about how small-island cultures sustain artistic communities, the Bahamian story offers a case study in transformation under constraint.
The Bahamian art of making something from almost nothing is less a folk tradition than a cultural logic — one rooted in the material realities of island life, the spiritual framework of Junkanoo, and the absence, until very recently, of any formal art market or infrastructure. It is not about “resourcefulness” as a feel-good label, but about a specific, inherited way of seeing value in discarded things, and it remains contested: some artists embrace it as identity, others resist it as a limitation they must transcend.
| Expression | Primary Materials | Key Figures | Institutional Backing | Cultural Root |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Venice Biennale Pavilion (2026) | Cardboard, salvaged Junkanoo costumes, sail cloth from Haitian sloops | Lavar Munroe, John Beadle, Dr. Krista Thompson | Baha Mar, NAGB | Junkanoo Wake, “carry your home” philosophy |
| ArtLucaya / Grand Bahama Art Festival | Oil, acrylic, canvas, wood, fabric, found objects | Sheldon Saint, Chantal Bethel, Veronica Dorsett | Grand Bahama Port Authority, Carnival Cruise Line | Post-hurricane resilience, grassroots community building |
| Junkanoo tradition | Cardboard, crepe paper, feathers, glue, found materials | Jackson Burnside, One Family Junkanoo group | Community-based, recently institutionalized | West African masquerade, Bahamian street parade, spiritual Wake |
These three expressions are not separate. They feed one another. The same cardboard that Beadle transformed into “Live Load” (2010) — a sculpture with a rudder and oar that first showed Munroe how cardboard could defy its mundane nature — is the same material that Junkanoo groups shape into elaborate costumes every Boxing Day. The connection is direct, and it is deliberate.
Junkanoo as the root practice
To understand the art of making something from almost nothing in the Bahamas, you have to start with Junkanoo — not as a tourist spectacle, but as a creative system. The festival, which takes place on Boxing Day and New Year’s Day in Nassau, and in more localized forms throughout the islands, involves groups (called “shacks”) building massive, wearable sculptures from cardboard, crepe paper, glue, and wire. The materials are deliberately temporary. After the parade, the costumes are dismantled or left to rot. That impermanence is part of the point.
Jackson Burnside, the late Bahamian artist and cultural leader, reframed Junkanoo not as a Bay Street parade but as a model for egoless, collaborative creativity — a community process where individual authorship mattered less than the collective rush. This ethos has directly shaped fine-art practice in the Bahamas. Munroe, who lived with Beadle during the 2010 Liverpool Biennial without knowing what a Biennale was at the time, learned from Beadle’s transformation of disposable materials into objects that carried emotional and political weight.
One detail that gets lost in outsider accounts: Junkanoo has always been a practice of constraint. Groups have limited budgets, limited storage space, limited time. The creativity comes from working within those limits. Beadle’s “Mobile Housing Scheme” (2012) — a wheelbarrow form made of wood, cardboard, and metal — literally carries the idea of home and culture on wheels. It is a sculpture about movement, impermanence, and making do.
Venice and the question of value
The Bahamas Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, curated by Dr. Krista Thompson and titled “In Another Man’s Yard,” marked the country’s return to the Biennale after a 13-year hiatus. The exhibition was built on-site in Venice over a single month. Its primary material was repurposed cardboard. Salvaged Junkanoo costumes were incorporated. Sail material from Haitian sloops appeared in the works. Beadle’s studio, after his passing in 2024, yielded artifacts that Munroe integrated directly into the installation — including tiny cardboard bird sculptures and the front page of Beadle’s obituary from The Nassau Guardian, which Munroe folded into his 11-panel painting.
That painting — “No Matter How Dreary and Gray, We People of Flesh and Blood Would Rather Live Here, Than in Another Man’s Yard” — anchors the pavilion. Every panel is streaked with rain. It imagines a Junkanoo procession for Beadle, the living seeing off the dead with the materials they have at hand.
It is easy to romanticize cardboard as a “humble” material and miss the point. Beadle and Munroe are not making art from poverty. They are making choices about material, process, and meaning. Beadle’s “Live Load” was the first time Munroe saw cardboard “defy its mundane nature” — the material was chosen for what it could say, not what it lacked. Reduce this work to a “turning trash into treasure” narrative and you erase the intentionality.
Funding for the pavilion came from Baha Mar, the Nassau resort complex. John Cox, executive director of arts and culture at Baha Mar, knew both artists from their College of The Bahamas days. He described the funding as a nation-building move with no immediate return on investment. The tension here — between resort money and artistic independence — is real, and Munroe has spoken about the difficulty of creating art markets in a country where few understand pricing. He mentioned a specific comparison: a painting at $18,000 versus bathroom door handles at $10,000. Different value systems, different worlds.
ArtLucaya: building a scene from scratch
While the Venice Biennale represents the Bahamas on a global stage, the Grand Bahama Art Festival — called ArtLucaya — operates on a different scale entirely. In its fourth year in 2026, with the theme “Dream Big,” the festival takes place in Freeport, the quieter cousin to Nassau. Organizers call it “The Art Basel of The Bahamas,” which is aspirational but not inaccurate: it houses the largest collection of Grand Bahamian artists ever assembled, with over 60 local participants from students to established artists.
Before ArtLucaya, there were no galleries in Freeport. No annual festivals. No reason for international collectors to land at Grand Bahama International Airport. Artists like Chantal Bethel, a founding member, used to travel to Nassau to exhibit, renting tents and hoping for sales. Her work — “Presence of Absence: Peace Chimes” and “Peace Tower” — is an interactive installation with a bell and lotus, drawing on her Buddhist practice and Haitian heritage. “Sometimes when things are very chaotic,” she said, “rather than getting mad and shouting, you need to go back to your peaceful time.”
The festival’s funding model is unusual. The Grand Bahama Port Authority has covered core costs all four years. Carnival Cruise Line sponsored performing arts and student exhibitions in the second year. But critically, ticket sales ensure sustainability, and $10,000 is given back each year to public and private schools for art supplies — some of which had no art classes before. Fatima Zahra Kaboob, Chair of ArtLucaya, stated that 100% of funds go into funding art programs. It is a closed-loop economy of cultural reinvestment.
ArtLucaya takes place in Freeport at MOSAIC, a local art and cultural hub that became the festival’s permanent home in 2026. If you visit, the Saturday Artist Tour led by Armova Curatorial includes a conversation with returning Toronto-based artist Veronica Dorsett and a meditative workshop with Claudette Dean. The Sunday session is reserved for student work — often the most inventive use of limited materials.
Sheldon Saint, a founding member with 34 years of watercolor practice, put it directly: “We are putting the island in the limelight, not just on a national stage, but on an international level.” His painting “Sugar Apple Guinep” — a portrait of his nephew eating native fruit in front of a blue door — is rooted in everyday Bahamian life: a child in summer, a conch shell, the space between silence and noise. The work does not need cardboard or found objects to be about making something from nothing. It needs only attention to what is already there.
The post-hurricane context matters here. Devastating hurricanes have hit Grand Bahama in recent years, and the arts movement has acted as a way to move past tragedy and look toward the future. The festival’s theme, “Dream Big,” is not a slogan. It is a necessity.
Context and comparison: two models of cultural production
The Venice Biennale Pavilion and ArtLucaya represent two different answers to the same question: how does Bahamian art sustain itself without a domestic market? One answer is global institutional validation, with resort funding and a curator from Northwestern University. The other is grassroots reinvestment, with volunteer labor and school supplies. Both are real. Both have limitations.
| Dimension | Venice Biennale Pavilion | ArtLucaya |
|---|---|---|
| Scale | International biennale, single exhibition | Local festival, 60+ artists |
| Funding source | Baha Mar (resort corporation) | Grand Bahama Port Authority, Carnival, ticket sales |
| Primary audience | Art world professionals, collectors | Local community, cultural travelers |
| Material approach | Cardboard, salvaged objects, sail cloth | Oil, acrylic, canvas, mixed media, digital collage |
| Cultural transmission | Intergenerational (Beadle → Munroe) | Intergenerational (students → emerging → established) |
| Risk | Dependence on single corporate patron | Volunteer burnout, limited international reach |
One thing both models share: they respond to the absence of infrastructure by building it themselves. The Venice pavilion had not happened in 13 years. Freeport had no galleries. In both cases, artists and organizers created the conditions for their own work to exist.
- Bahamian art’s material logic — cardboard, salvaged cloth, found objects — is not a poverty aesthetic but a deliberate practice with roots in Junkanoo’s temporary, collaborative making.
- The Venice Biennale Pavilion and ArtLucaya represent complementary strategies for cultural sustainability: global institutional access versus local grassroots reinvestment.
- The “making something from almost nothing” ethos is real, but it is also contested — some Bahamian artists embrace it, others see it as a stereotype they need to outgrow.
The idea that all Bahamian art is “recycled” or “found object” work is wrong. Many Bahamian artists work in oil, acrylic, digital media, and installation art using conventional materials. The cardboard-and-salvage approach is one strand — the one that got international attention at Venice — but it does not define the entire scene. Sheldon Saint’s watercolors and Veronica Dorsett’s paper collages use different materials and different logics.
Questions readers ask
Is Junkanoo just a street parade, or is it art?
It is both. Outsiders often see Junkanoo as a tourist attraction, but within Bahamian creative communities it is treated as a serious artistic practice — one with its own material vocabulary, collaborative structure, and spiritual dimension. Jackson Burnside reframed it as “egoless collaboration,” and that framing has shaped fine artists like Munroe and Beadle.
Can I buy Bahamian art, and how do I know what it’s worth?
Yes, but the market is small and pricing can be inconsistent. Munroe has noted that few people in the Bahamas understand art pricing — a painting might be $18,000 while a bathroom door handle costs $10,000. At ArtLucaya, works are more accessible. The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas in Nassau is a reliable entry point. Buy what you can verify, and ask about provenance.
Why does cardboard appear so often in Bahamian art?
Cardboard is the primary material of Junkanoo costume construction — it is cheap, available, and temporary. Artists like John Beadle elevated it to fine art, showing that it could carry conceptual weight. But not all Bahamian artists use it. The choice is specific, not representative.
How has hurricane damage affected the art scene in Grand Bahama?
Severely. The hurricanes destroyed homes, studios, and infrastructure. ArtLucaya emerged partly as a response — a way to rebuild community and create economic opportunity. The festival’s “Dream Big” theme in 2026 was explicitly about refusing to succumb to tragedy. The recovery is ongoing.
The practice of carrying home
John Beadle had a concept that runs through everything described here: “whenever you go, you carry your home. Your culture moves with you.” It is a phrase that Munroe and Cox both return to, and it reframes the entire question of making something from almost nothing. The materials change — cardboard in Nassau, sail cloth in Venice, watercolor in Freeport — but the logic stays the same: you work with what you have, you carry what matters, and you build the structures that do not yet exist.
The Bahamian art of making something from almost nothing is not, finally, about the materials. It is about the recognition that you are always already carrying home, and that home is something you make, not something you find. For a deeper look at one specific craft tradition that follows this same logic — transforming discarded shells into intricate objects — read about the intricate craft of shell art in The Bahamas.
Sources and further reading
Interview Magazine. “At the Venice Biennale, Lavar Munroe Conjures the Legacy of John Beadle.” 2026. 🔗
Whitehot Magazine. “At the Grand Bahama Art Festival ArtLucaya.” 2026. 🔗
Related reading on IslandHopperGuides
Why Goombay Rhythm Still Shapes Bahamian Music — Junkanoo’s musical cousin and how rhythm carries cultural memory.
Beyond Paradise: Discovering the Spiritual World of Obeah in Bahamian Beliefs — another layer of Bahamian cultural practice that operates below the tourist radar.
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