2017 Venice Biennale Exhibition Design:
Frank Walter: The Last Universal Man
Exhibition & Garden Design for the Inaugural National Pavilion of Antigua and Barbuda at the 57th International Venice Biennale Art Exhibition, Centro Culturale Don Orione Artigianelli, Venice, Italy
We created the exhibition space and exterior gardens for Antigua and Barbuda’s inaugural National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Fittingly situated in the tranquil setting of central Venice’s fifteenth-century monastery Don Orione Artigianelli, the exhibition extends outdoors to an Antiguan garden. This sets the contemplative mood of the featured artist’s actual retreat and paradisus terrestris, which he built above the southern Antiguan coastline in the last decades of his life.
Frank Walter: The Last Universal Man 1926–2009 marks Antigua and Barbuda’s inaugural representation at the 57th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. The story is complex, and the artwork that once filled Walter’s house and studio is inextricable from his postcolonial experience. Yet the issues he engaged with—such as identity, memory, and environment—resonate today.
The exhibition invites visitors to inhabit the creative world and humanist vision of seminal Caribbean artist Frank Walter through a selection of his paintings, sculpture, audio recordings, and writing—as well as through video exploration of his entire oeuvre consisting of 5,000 works of art and a 25,000-page archive. The Last Universal Man is also conceived of as a space to inspire dialogue—a posthumous fulfillment of Walter’s intention to open his house and studio as a center for art.
