Cultivating Climate Activism through Storytelling and Art with Guest Speaker Isaac Murdoch - University of Waterloo

The sheep appeared in Lalanne’s U.S. museum debut 60 years ago.

One Sunday last year, the Cameroonian-Guadeloupean-French artist Roxane Mbanga was relaxing in bed when she received a message that made her sit up. It was about working on an art history project. Growing up in Paris, she had been a regular at Maasai Mara, the now defunct restaurant owned by her father, where Africans in the diaspora, including the artists whom he helped organise exhibitions, convened to eat and chat. Thus the concept of a book, attempting for the first time to comprehensively compile and document key players in Cameroon’s vast visual art history, made obvious sense to her. “It’s a magical reconnaissance, being recognised by my peers and being in the same book as people I look up to,” says the 30-year-old artist. “This idea of creating spaces, as with the book, is incredibly important because it allows us to build from there and leave traces for people that will come after. I really lacked that growing up … spaces like books, podcasts or whatever, where I could really see people that resemble me, that do things similar to me.”The first African woman to curate the Venice Biennale … Koyo Kouoh.