| Title | Ghana ThinkTank |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Christopher Robbins (author) |
| Maria del Carmen Montoya (author) | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.53288/0367.1.25 |
| Landing page | https://punctumbooks.com/titles/out-of-place-artists-pedagogy-and-purpose/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Christopher Robbins; Maria del Carmen Montoya |
| Publisher | punctum books |
| Published on | 2021-10-28 |
| Page range | pp. 265–279 |
| Print length | 15 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
Christopher Robbins has lived and worked in London, Tokyo, West Africa, the Fiji Islands, the United States, and former Yugoslavia, working on the uneasy cusp of public art, international development, and community organizing. As a way of probing the troubling power dynamics he witnessed in his cross-cultural work, he co-founded the Ghana ThinkTank in 2006. With the mission “Developing the First World,” they collect problems in the so-called “developed” world and send them to think tanks they established in Cuba, Ghana, Iran, Mexico, El Salvador, and the US prison system to analyze and solve. (The network continues to grow.) Then they work with the communities where the problems originated to implement those solutions, whether they seem impractical or brilliant. Christopher Robbins has an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and is the Director of the School of Art & Design at SUNY Purchase College.
Maria del Carmen Montoya operates in the contested ground between art and social activism. Her primary medium is the communal process of making meaning. She seeks ways to catalyze this natural social phenomenon with situations that insist on the power of human-scale intervention in the presumed inevitability of everyday life. Her methodology is dialogic and collaborative. She believes that art can be a potent crucible for social change. Thus, her work is often about resistance and challenging norms, inverting power hierarchies and breaking rules, but she also traffics in beauty, memory, humor, and other potentially radical forces for activating communities. She is a core member of Ghana ThinkTank, an international artist collective that “develops the first world” by flipping traditional power dynamics and asking people living in the so-called “third world” to intervene into the lives of the people living in the alleged “developed” world. Their innovative approach to public art reveals blind spots between otherwise disconnected cultures and challenges assumptions about who is “needy.”