Lindsay Majno ’10 Impacts Ghana’s Arts Community

By Kevin Gray

In Accra, Ghana, Lindsay Majno ’10 created cohesion in a fractured arts community. She worked there for 18 months prior to her current position as a consultant in strategy and organization with Booz Allen Hamilton in metropolitan Washington, D.C.

After graduating with a double major in art and economics & business, she landed a fellowship in economic and business development with Frontline Capital Advisors, a start-up financial firm. Rexford Ahene, professor of economics, helped her secure the position.

One of her assignments was to write about the arts community for an international venture capital website.

“I found a gap between professional artists and others who did art to sell to tourists,” she says. “The local art community was very fragmented.”

Lindsay Majno ’10 (far left) with artists who participated in the Ghana project.

Majno launched an initiative based on a concept she had worked on at Lafayette—Do You See What I See?—to nurture collaboration between artists.

For the project, one artist would start a piece and then give the canvas to another artist to finish. The artists were interviewed at each stage of the process. They also created videos of the project’s progress.

View the first video
View the second video

An exhibition of the completed works, with text of the artists’ comments, was attended by more  than 100 people.

“We included a picture of each painting after phase one, before the second artist touched it, so the visitors could see how the piece had evolved,” says Majno.

While the artists sold some paintings, profit was not the main goal. The purpose was to encourage communication among the artists, provide exposure for their work, and broaden their perspectives of their art.

During a return visit to Ghana, one of the artists showed Majno his recent work.

“Before, he did a lot of landscapes, but now he had started to add people in the foreground. He explained that the way he thinks about his art has expanded,” says Majno, who hopes to create a similar collaborative art initiative on an international scale.

She credits Lafayette with nurturing her determination to explore her passions.

“Lafayette made me versatile and confident in my own fundamental abilities to take on new challenges,” she says. “I have the confidence that I can offer something and make a difference wherever I am.”