Mardi Gras Indian in Venice

Demond Melancon, a New Orleans bead artist and Big Chief in the Young Seminole Hunters, has been invited to the 2026 Venice Biennale’s main exhibition. (labiennale.org) La Biennale di Venezia announced 111 invited participants on February 25, 2026, for the 61st International Art Exhibition, “In Minor Keys.” The show opens May 9 and runs through November 22 in the Giardini, the Arsenale, and other Venice sites. (labiennale.org) Melancon’s own site says he will show work in the International Exhibition at both the Central Pavilion in the Giardini and the Corderie in the Arsenale. It says curator Koyo Kouoh selected him before her death in May 2025. (demondmelancon.com) Melancon is known in New Orleans as a Black Masker, part of a Carnival tradition in which neighborhood “tribes” spend months hand-sewing elaborate suits covered in glass beads, feathers, and rhinestones. Historians trace the practice to the 1800s, when Black New Orleanians built their own masking traditions outside White-led krewes. (cbsnews.com) The tradition also honors Native people in Louisiana who, in community accounts passed down through generations, sheltered enslaved people who escaped bondage. That history is one reason many Black Maskers describe the suits as both art and ceremony. (hyperallergic.com) Melancon began beading in 1992 after joining New Orleans Black Masking culture, according to New Orleans & Company. Since 2017, he has also turned the same needle-and-thread method into framed contemporary artworks that center Black subjects often left out of museum collections. (neworleans.com) His work has already traveled well beyond Carnival routes. New Orleans & Company says his beadwork has appeared at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston. (neworleans.com) In February 2025, the Gibbes Museum of Art awarded Melancon the 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art and a $10,000 cash prize. Hyperallergic reported that the museum began a year-long display of his beadwork on February 7, 2025. (hyperallergic.com) CBS News reported on April 5, 2026, that Melancon’s Mardi Gras suit this year stood 10 feet tall and weighed 120 pounds. He told the program that wearing it means being “ready to honor everything that I was taught by my elders.” (cbsnews.com) For Venice, the invitation puts a practice built in New Orleans neighborhood streets into one of the art world’s biggest recurring exhibitions. The Biennale opens in less than a month, with previews scheduled for May 6, 7, and 8. (labiennale.org)