Koyo Kouoh: A Remembrance

We met in Los Angeles after much correspondence. That night at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Koyo Kouoh approached me with warmth and sisterly kindness. A woman on a beautiful mission.

Koyo Kouoh was a curator of the unseen. A weaver of new realities. She took the title of my series When They See Us and reshaped it into a call: When We See Us. She transformed the title of a filmed project on the criminal injustice system into an artful, global thesis on Black humanity across a century of painting. Brilliant. She built When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting not as a mere exhibition… but as a transfiguration. She shifted it. That’s what mavericks do before they make their exit. Change things.

My sister Jina DuVernay, who is a talented librarian for the city of Atlanta in charge of connecting communities to storytellers, crossed Koyo’s path through her work in Georgia. My sister Tera DuVernay, deputy director of the Equal Justice Initiative overseeing its memorials and museums, engaged with Koyo through her work on memory and justice in Alabama and visited her in South Africa. Three sisters, three different fields, three separate cities. At some point, all entered the orbit of one woman.

Koyo did not simply curate paintings. She assembled fresh ways of seeing. Not only to honor the past, but to reckon with it, uplift it and let it walk beside us into the future. She led not with noise, but with knowing. She walked into rooms full of old power and remade them in the image of what could be. And when she saw artists who had been overlooked, erased, forgotten, she did more than see them. She lifted them. She named them. She crowned them with visibility.

What does it mean to leave inspiration behind in death?

In the case of Koyo, it means that you never truly leave.

Blessings on your journey onward, Sister.

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