Majno ’10 Impacts Ghana’s Arts Community

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

In Accra, Ghana, Lindsay Majno ’10 viewed a fractured arts community as an opportunity to catalyze cohesion. 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 Accra arts community for an international venture capital website.

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. An exhibition of the completed works, with text of the artists’ comments, was attended by more than 100 people. While the artists sold several paintings, profit was not the main goal.

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. I have the confidence that I can offer something and make a difference wherever I am.”