Ghana ThinkTank

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.”