New York Times Features Artist Ibrahim Mahama, Speaker at CIMAM Annual Conference

Ibrahim Mahama, renowned artist and founder of the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) and Red Clay Studio in Ghana, will be one of the featured speakers at CIMAM's upcoming Annual Conference, to be held in Los Angeles from 6-8 December. The conference will explore the theme "Sustainable Futures: How? When? For Whom?"
Mahama will speak on the second day of the conference and present from the perspective of "Economies of Sustainability: Ethics, Values, and Resilience."

In an article by Siddhartha Mitter, published by The New York Times on September 19, Mahama discusses his community-centered approach at his Tamale-based institutions, and talks about "how he uses his earnings not only to pay the many assistants and local craftspeople who contribute to his projects, but to build and run whole new cultural institutions."

This is an excerpt from the interview with the New York Times:

"The idea is to reverse the capital," he said of the flow of resources. For decades, under both colonial and independent rule, regions like northern Ghana underwent extraction of all kinds, from commodities for export to the work of migrant laborers who built infrastructure and industry in the more prosperous south. Mahama's aim is to restore some of that value. The proposition is in part economic, moving money from the art world into local hands. But it's also conceptual, built on the idea that the material discards from failed or exhausted development models can trigger the imagination in completely new ways.

The art "that you produce from materials that are embedded with history," he said, generates capital to "create new forms of institutions in such a way that you're inviting school kids or people from the community to be part  of the making of things."

Read the full article here.

At CIMAM Annual Conference, Ibrahim Mahama, will be in conversation with Yesomi Umolu, Arts Leader and curator, London.