by Daniel Johnson
May 11, 2025
Kouoh’s husband, Phillipe Mall, said that his wife died of cancer, which she had only recently been diagnosed with.
Koyo Kouoh, the influential Cameroonian curator who became a powerful advocate for Black artists globally, died unexpectedly on May 10 in Basel, Switzerland, just days before she was scheduled to reveal the theme for the 2026 Venice Biennale. In 2024, she made history as the first African woman chosen to curate the world’s most prestigious art exhibition.
According to The New York Times, Kouoh’s husband, Phillipe Mall, said his wife died of cancerwhich she had only recently been diagnosed with.
A press release from the organizers of the Venice Biennale referred to the death of Kouoh as an “immense void” in the art world, and they extended their heartfelt condolences and sympathies to Kouoh’s friends, family, and contemporaries.
“Koyo Kouoh worked with passion, intellectual rigor, and vision on the conception and development of the Biennale Arte 2026. The presentation of the Exhibition’s title and theme was due to take place in Venice on 20 May,” the organizers wrote.
They continued, “Her passing leaves an immense void in the world of contemporary art and in the international community of artists, curators, and scholars who had the privilege of knowing and admiring her extraordinary human and intellectual commitment.”
Kouoh had established a reputation as a torchbearer for Black artists from Africa, but she considered her ambitions as a curator to be global in nature. In addition to this, her work in revitalizing Cape Town’s Zeitz MOCAA, guiding it through the pandemic following a crisis of leadership, earned her accolades from peers and artists who had never felt welcomed by the institution.
Kouoh also staged a number of acclaimed shows and art exhibitions, one of which was a Tracey Rose retrospective that was transferred to the Queens Museum in New York in 2024, and another, “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting,” another retrospective that included work by 120 Black artists that opened in February 2025 at Brussels’ Center for Fine Arts where it will remain until Aug. 10.
As Emily LaBarge, the Times’ art critic wrote of the exhibition in a review“Her contribution, “When We See Us,” adapts its title from Ava DuVernay’s 2019 Netflix mini-series about the Central Park Five, a group of Black and Latino teenagers who were wrongfully accused of rape and assault. But where DuVernay’s story of violence and brutality had “They” — “When They See Us” — Kouoh has “We,” pointing to the importance of Black self-expression, or the ability to tell one’s own story. The art on show here does not only exist in relation to oppression or otherness, but also on its own expansive, frequently gorgeous, terms.”
According to Oluremi C. Onabanjo, an associate curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, Kouoh was an institution builder, not just a curator.
“I thought it was amazing that she was not just a curator but an institution builder. A global thinker, rooted in Africa.” Kouoh, she said, “enlivened and expanded a sense of possibility for a generation of African curators across the globe.”
Kouoh, judging by her own words, agreed with Onabanjo’s assessment, saying in a 2023 interview that “I am part of that generation of African art professionals who have pride and knowledge about the beauty of African culture, which has often been defined by others in so many wrong ways. I don’t believe we need to spend time correcting those narratives. We need to inscribe other perspectives.”
Kouoh is survived by her husband, Mall, a son, Djibril Schmed, her mother, Agnes Steidl, and her stepfather, Anton Steidl. She will undoubtedly be mourned and remembered by the wider art community and artists across the globe for the opportunities she afforded to change how the art world approached art by Black artists during her lifetime.
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