Episode Notes:

In this episode, we travel to Benin City, Nigeria, to speak with Ore Disu, a visionary cultural strategist and founding director of the Institute of the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA). Ore is reshaping how we understand history, art, and African identity. From childhood days spent leafing through family photo albums in Lagos to building a groundbreaking institution at the heart of Nigeria’s cultural resurgence, Ore’s journey is rooted in care and creative reclamation. In this conversation, she reflects on how objects, stories, and even food become vessels of memory and belonging—and why repatriation must mean more than the return of artifacts but also be about revitalizing artist spaces so African creativity can flourish.

Episode Transcript:

Darren Isom:

Welcome to Dreaming in Color, a space for social change leaders of color to reflect on how their unique life experiences, personal and professional, and prepare them to lead and drive the impact we all seek. I'm your host, Darren Isom.

This season, we're traveling to the continent to highlight African leaders and the continent's role as a key driver of global innovation and leadership. So, join us as we travel across the continent from South Africa to Tunisia, with stops in Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Senegal along the way, celebrating the diaspora and all this complexity and beautiful possibility. This is Dreaming in Color: Africa.

Today I'm in Benin City, Nigeria, talking with Ore Disu. Ore has led the Museum of West African Art, MOWAA, as the founding director of its institute since January 2022. MOWAA seeks to revisit how cultural values define focusing on pre-colonial African perspectives, geographical boundaries and practices of care and creativity before Eurocentric values shape these definitions.

Prior to this, she was the founding executive director of Nsibidi Institute, a nonprofit cultural think tank in Lagos, Nigeria, and a development practitioner. She was over a decade of experience in cultural programming, research and stakeholder engagement for early-stage organizations. She's a strong advocate for people-centered design, expansion of new public and talent development on the continent. Ore, welcome to Dreaming in Color.

It's great to chat with you today. Thanks for making time and space. As you know, I hand you the stage to start off the conversation with invocation. What do you have for us?

Ore Disu:

I have to search deep for this one. Darren, I will start with a bit of a confession actually, if you don't mind. I do not speak Yoruba fluently. This is my father's tongue. And to a large extent, it's indicative of a certain perception for middle-class Nigerians in a very new independent state whereby having to learn your own tongue was considered to be potentially endangering your ability to speak English well.

But nevertheless, I have dug deep and I came up with I think a saying that says a lot about my journey. So here it goes, Odò kí i sán ko gbàgbé ísun. This literally translates to “no matter how far a stream flows, it cannot forget its source.” And I think it's a really powerful way to both talk about how history and our connection to whether that land or community of origin really powerfully projects us into the future.

And if we can hold onto that, there's always an element of I think, groundedness that takes us into our future spaces. And it's been one of the reasons why I've always wanted to work in the culture and creative industry. It's one of the reasons why policy has also been a really part of the work that I've been doing over the last 15 odd years in Nigeria. But it also I think talks about humble beginnings and that's not always something that people, especially as we scale and go into spaces of more ambitious platforms, it's not always something that we can hold onto unless we remind ourselves of.

Darren Isom:

And that's a beautiful way to start the conversation. So many analogies there with the power of rivers and streams and we're all the product of small streams that became great rivers to some degree. I want to start going a little upstream then. I know that you grew up in Lagos.

Ore Disu:

Yes.

Darren Isom:

A city that I have not visited but heard wonderful things about. I would love for you just to share a little bit more about your early influences and experiences in Lagos and beyond that help shape your understanding of cultural heritage and the role of arts and society.

Ore Disu:

Absolutely. I will try not to be offended that you haven't visited Lagos.

Darren Isom:

I know, I know. Listen, the eye rolls are strong every time. Every time I know.

Ore Disu:

So, Lagos for me is home. It's where both my parents were born and to a large extent, it's I think a microcosm of Nigeria and all of the cross-cultural influences that have traversed that space and shaped into it into what it is today. I grew up in a really, I think unique and idyllic neighborhood called Ikeja, which actually was white, but having them just within proximity of my family home meant that I was always able to relate to people who didn't really look or sound like me.

So these were people who came from quite diverse backgrounds, but once you... As kids, you're in a space together, all of those trappings of social hierarchy don't tend to come to the fore as much. And I think that's in some ways what museums can do. They create spaces where you can connect to people who don't immediately have an obvious association or commonality with you. And I think that's been an important element of what I've tried to carry into every space that I've gone into in my career, including while I was studying architecture to working in public sector, to now working in this really amazing institution that is really trying to do something different with culture.

Darren Isom:

And I love this idea of in some ways modeling that museum world or curated space as a child and normalizing that in adulthood. So much of your work is about reclaiming, preserving African knowledge systems. Do you see yourself as continuing a lineage of thinkers, artists, or cultural stewards in your own family or community? Are you the family or community griot?

Ore Disu:

I'd like to think so. Thank you very much. I am definitely the child who spent countless hours pouring through family albums, bothering my great-uncles and aunts to tell me stories, got really close to my grandmother as a result of that, but also learned a lot more about my own family history and how it connects to the founding, so to speak, of Lagos Island, which some of our readers or listeners might know was actually a former British colony quite separate from the southern and northern protectorate states in Nigeria at the time.

But it's through these relationships that I was able to understand better a history that stems from my family, but also connects to the history of the city, the history of Nigeria and our connection globally. In many ways, I think what I'm doing within MOWAA Institute is providing that institutional backing and support to bring in other sources of knowledge and ground it both in memory but also in evidenced history.

Right now we are sitting in one of my favorite interim rooms. It's the pottery specialist room. And as you can see, there are countless of terracotta shards that have been dug up from across this site. I think sometimes when you think about research and about storytelling, we don't really connect to the materiality of it. It's a space that I think with the establishment of our material science lab with collections facilities, just by providing that space and the infrastructure and technologies to assess and interpret these materials, we can start to unravel more knowledge and get people to connect to history in a much more concrete way.

Darren Isom:

And this reminds me this beautiful Ted Chiang quote. Ted Chiang is a fiction writer back in the States, Chinese American. And he has this beautiful quote that I'm completely going to mess up, I'm sure, but of course quotes that you take inspiration from them. He talks about how this understanding of history as being a collection of facts is a very western concept.

Griots and bards around the world have always understood that the point of history was to remind a community of who they were, and as a result, sometimes the stories needed to change. And so hearing you talk about this idea of how you collect these various pieces and the stories you tell moving forward based on that is really powerful and meaningful and I hope that resonates for you.

Ore Disu:

For sure. I think there's always this tension between objectivity and storytelling, as you mentioned.

Darren Isom:

Very powerful. I want to jump in with your vision for MOWAA. A center to Propel scholarship and exchange of knowledge on the continent feels like a contemporary echo of Timbuktu, which once drew and influenced scholars and thinkers from across Africa and beyond. What lessons do you take from the past when thinking about how knowledge can be preserved, generated and shared today?

Ore Disu:

That's a really powerful and invocative, if I may say question. Benin has its own, I think historic resonance and I think that's been a really important part as to why we chose to establish this institution here. But I love this idea also of contemporary re-imagining of this citadel of knowledge, which as we know Timbuktu stood for. And this sense again that there were not just one or two nodes, but there were multiple nodes for knowledge, for trade, for various exchanges.

One of the most things that has occurred in Nigeria's recent past is this almost deprioritization of history as a subject of importance actually being taken out of the secondary school curriculum at one point in time. Again, just showing you this sense of disconnection between what matters when we think about economic development or progress history is often the things you do when you're nerdy, elite, well established, and you don't have to worry about your day-to-day.

And I think if we're taking lessons just from memory, how we've built and taking care of archives and libraries often now just left into disrepair, I think there does need to be that concentrated effort around organizing, managing, and sustaining these spaces.

Otherwise, you come into Nigeria or Ghana 50 years time from now on, there won't be anything left. So my big takeaway is that on the one hand, memory is something that you need to invest in. You need to take care of it. Otherwise, everything that Timbuktu stock stood for kind of falls away. But I also think that connecting to the realities of your locale and making sure it retains its relevance is a big part of how that story is shaped and how much that investment really gets dispersed.

Darren Isom:

And I want to jump in a little bit there. I think there's something powerful about also understanding history as an asset from a recreation perspective and a story perspective and not just a liability. Very often we want to let it go because it holds them back when in actuality it's the center of what makes us who we are.

As you've noted before, in other conversations, much of how we talk about restitution, heritage and even art itself has been shaped by European frameworks. What does it mean to recenter African perspectives, not just as a counterpoint to the west, but as the starting point altogether?

Ore Disu:

When we created, whether built our homes or developed technologies, whether a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, we did that for our own societies as a spark for creativity. Whether you're talking about the textile and fashion industry or music and Nollywood product design, you have fantastic designers like Nifemi Bello or Shea Dallow who are all reconnecting with not just materials but techniques and bringing that into spaces where we can not only empower these creatives, would actually take that forward as almost like ambassadorial products. So I think that for me is a key starting point.

Darren Isom:

I think it speaks to as well, recognizing that as an anchor in itself, not something on the side, but something that you can actually anchor on and more than enough, which is really a beautiful way to think about the work. You've called for a broader lens on how we define cultural value. What does it look like to ground cultural value in pre-colonial African worldviews rather than Eurocentric ones?

Ore Disu:

So I think cultural value can be ascribed in so many different ways. Sometimes it's based on who defines that space and whether it's your auction houses that tell you that a particular work of art is worth a thousand dollars or a million dollars or it's someone who says, we're giving you this platform because we think what you're producing should be on a stage. Oftentimes that attention and the qualification of it is what has typically generated cultural value.

I think if you are looking to dream and find out how we constructed our own definitions of value, and one of the things that is incredible when you think about even the way we built cities was that there was always a lot of the materials that were used were quite organic. You had mud wall and various timber structures, and there was a certain idea that things didn't need to be fixed in time. It wasn't the permanence that gave them value necessary. It was the acts of community, building, and creation that the sense that every season or so you would have to come together to rebuild and remake these spaces. And that itself was an act of coordination, an act of patronage. Those I think are elements that again, give us a sense or some clues as to how do we rethink cultural value.

Similarly, we think about environmental assets. So everyone talks about climate change now it's becoming a bigger and bigger topic, but when you translate into this space, Africans have always had a relationship with forests and rivers and cultivated offerings for spiritual deities who were seen as both custodians, but also provided instruction and wisdom as to how we lived our lives.

So we've had to in some ways unlearn that. And now we're being asked, or at least, we're granted an opportunity to relearn what these more ancestral connections could mean and perhaps it'll help us solve problems not just for today but for future generations. So I think it's really about understanding at its core, as you say, the anchor to your own indigenous value systems.

Darren Isom:

And this has come up in other conversations. It's great to hear you bring it up here, this idea, sometimes it takes a sense of unlearning what we thought the answer was and completely repositioning other answers as the right answer, things that we knew already from a health perspective, from a community perspective. And I would love for you just to chat a little bit more, this concept you just brought up, this idea of us, I wouldn't say devaluing, but rethinking about permanence as the answer, right? Maybe sometimes temperance, there's a temporal nature. I mean things are seasonal and that's fine that's success and what is it like from a cultural perspective, we can rethink what success looks like from a time perspective. Is that something that resonates for you from a thinking perspective?

Ore Disu:

It does. And I suppose on some level working within a museum, you're effectively, your core responsibility to sustain, is to create a degree of permanence so that whatever you are handling can be experienced and reviewed by future generations. So there is a bit of a tension for sure with this idea, as we said, of unlearning and also thinking about the permanence versus continuity.

I think one example is if you look at the guilds, Benin is known now maybe more popularized around the brass casters, but at a time there were up to 20, 30 artisanal guilds that were creating various objects and utensils for the benefit of the kingdom and for the civilizations that were based here. But some of them have either just become a bit obsolete because of that notion of if you were an elephant tusk cover, obviously the banning of poaching and just the lack of tusks to hunt for has meant that that vocation is no longer as relevant.

But again, there's this question as to what do you do with that skill set? How do you translate it? Is there a way to actually bring it into new relevance? Similarly, if you go to the guilds and you look at the lost wax customer that these are skills that have been passed on for generations, but the ideas or the inspiration behind what's being created is of a contemporary relevance.

And I think there are ways to both bring to look at permanence or look at the notion of intergenerational transfer as something that can be preserved, but how do you intersect it with new ideas? Because quite frankly, I don't think Africa wants to be locked and sort of frozen in a particular time. If you look around and you look at how technologies are being harnessed by young Africans who are finding platforms to tell their stories, there's a lot of real interest in exploring and examining new ways of being present in the world.

Priorities for me is not to allow ourselves to become villagized. And I say this with a degree of, I would say assertiveness because having worked for over a decade especially in a combination of international development and not-for-profit space, one of the things that I have noticed is a curation of the topics that are considered to be relevant and also the spaces where Africans are allowed to go and interact and tell their stories.

I don't see any reason why we cannot have a conversation on the continent about Haitian art or think about Mesoamerica and draw some linkages to what's been happening on the continent in this time. So I know you're starting to point in the direction of diaspora connections, but I also want to even broaden that to more global because fundamentally what is subtly being or has been transferred across was this notion that you should stay in your place. And, that the stories and the ideas and the knowledge that we have as Africans is not something that can be either transferred or compared to things that have happened from a broader global perspective. So that for me is a really important starting point.

Beyond that, I think we have this incredible opportunity to explore the continent in a way that perhaps hasn't really been as...

Darren Isom:

Intentional.

Ore Disu:

Intentional, exactly. Africa has not necessarily been the easiest place to travel. You often hear about, Oh, there's insecurity, or the visa application processes are really cumbersome, or finding connecting flights is stressful. But we're starting to see a shift in places like Ghana and Ivory Coast and Senegal and certainly in Nigeria where even governments are repositioning their markets to be more inviting. And that's a longer term play.

But I do think that now that you have platforms like ArtX, like to travel to Benin City or to travel to Dakar and actually experience art in a different way, you're also seeing a lot more collaborations and some of this has been facilitated through artists who have perhaps were well established in parts of the US and in Europe wanting to come back and put some roots down and create a platform that actually pulls other people up.

So whether you're looking at gas residencies or Abraham Mohammed's studio in Ghana, these become spaces for, I would say creative collaboration for exchange. That is, I think of relevance and important to both African and Black diaspora as well as anyone really who is interested in learning about a different way of engaging.

Darren Isom:

And I have a question there. It's not really well-formed, but I would love your thoughts. So bear with me. I think that very often as well, it can be really hard. I wouldn't say really hard. I think very often there's a lack of unified narrative around a place as well. And so with that lack of narrative, there's a lack of belonging. And even as we plan this season and thinking about the various places that we were traveling to, sometimes going from one place to another made complete sense to me and I just realized how does that fit into that narrative? How does that into that story? And so I would love your thoughts on what does it look like to ground cultural value? Well, let's say cultural value, but what does it look like for art to play a restoring role in offering people a sense of belonging or cultural memory for those whose histories have been in some ways removed or erased or fragmented, but also is important.

We see it play out across South America. We see it play across Black Americans as well. We're all in different places, but we've used art and culture as a way to create a culture. Clearly African countries have their own cultures, but there's a way that we can use art to kind of unite that narrative. Does that make sense? Is that something that you feel passionate about?

Ore Disu:

Yeah, so I would say art and material culture more broadly speaking offers an opportunity to almost erase those artificial lines that were drawn up as colonial boundaries and to actually start to place histories in relation to each other. And I'll start from one simple example, which is of glass bead making an interesting research topic that we've been uncovering here at MOWAA, but also drawing a research from Dr. Tunde Babalola who trained here at the University of Ibadan and is now in the UK working on a fellowship.

And just by looking at this one material you're seeing through scientific research, through archeological, excavations, how this bead has traveled or bead making, I should say, has been exported and traded across different parts of ancient Nigerian civilizations. So, places like Ife all the way to parts of Senegal. So again, having to think about what were those connections prior to our sense of understanding of this being Nigeria and this being Senegal.

So I think on the one hand it's showing that these, whether trade or technological relations did exist and were thriving, and that innovation was something that was considered to be valuable to these communities and has persevered over time.

But it also reminds me of a recent trip I took about 10 years ago to India where I saw really these amazing monuments. I was in the southern part of the country, what were we building as Africans at this time? Where were our architects, our urban planners? What did they look like? What has been erased and what still remains? So part of what I think we could do is help to reconstruct these histories, give people a sense of the Africa that was as well as project that, and hopefully use it as a way to think into the future as to what a new African identity could look like.

Darren Isom:

And I also wonder how do you use it in some ways to give Africa credit as well for so much that it's actually shaped that it's been given credit to others. I joke that, and I've used this, tell the team this all the time and may have even other conversations how some three years or so ago, there's been an explosion of African and Caribbean restaurants in New Orleans, and it's a city that's known for fine dining. And a New York Times writer came to the city. He interviewed the chef of one of the Senegalese restaurants, Dakar NOLA, James Beard Ward, and doing all the things, and he asked him was it hard to get New Orleanians to eat African food? And the guy looked at him and was like, "You do realize that New Orleans food-

Ore Disu:

Is African.

Darren Isom:

...is African food with French names?" And even me as someone who's from New Orleans, I recognized our food was for the most part Caribbean and African, but even I visited places like Savannah or Charleston and thought to myself, this feels quite familiar. I wonder were they colonized by the French too. Even I didn't see that the common thread there was Africa, not France. I've given France the benefit of the connection when in many ways there's an African thread or an African story that can be told that we have to honor and have to tell.

Ore Disu:

So I'm a big foodie. One of the amazing things about food is that it's such an accessible element of culture and it's easily transportable. It's emotive. It's something that as you've just relayed, can become part of both community practice and global exploration. When you look at Brazilian food today, a lot of it, as you said, it comes back to parts of West Africa. You're taking the same porridge or mash and you're creating something else and calling it a different name. But as you said, it falls back to this idea of this came from a continent. This is where, as you said, this is where the credit goes to.

Darren Isom:

It's really beautiful. So you've taken such a bold, imaginative approach to repatriation, one that moves beyond the return of objects and towards something much deeper. If we allowed ourselves to dream bigger. So space to dream endless dreaming spaces, what could true repatriation look like, not just for institutions, but for communities, artists, and future generations?

Ore Disu:

Dream big. I hope that restitution doesn't stop as the photo op of returning objects, and I don't say that lightly in the sense of there is a gravity towards that symbolic physical transfer as well as the legal ownership, which I think is an important full stop to put into the history books. But if we dig that and didn't go further into revitalizing the communities that on the artisan spaces that were disrupted by colonialism itself, we would be doing ourselves a disservice.

I would want to see a powerful re-energizing of artisanal spaces across West Africa. I would love to have jobs be created for young curators, for artists, for technologists who are looking for other ways to interpret what may be called art, but actually was in its own time an instrument of technology. So I think really thinking about that realization that we can have not only are these objects here on the continent or will be here and have already started making their journey back, but that they can move us beyond this moment to becoming more creators of tomorrow.

Darren Isom:

And what's the role of the social sector in making that happen? Folks didn't see that eye roll, but yes.

Ore Disu:

Well, let me ask you this. When you think about what the role of a social sector should be, what would you see as priority?

Darren Isom:

I mean that language there was intentional. So I think that we have some very, very high expectations of the social sector, but I would imagine that it's the conversation that's broader than the social sector itself. And I would even argue that the social sector's role is to not get in the way of the work. But I would love your thoughts there.

Ore Disu:

I think that sometimes the most dynamic and impressive things that are happening on the continent happen because there's a young business-savvy person who sees an opportunity and goes after it. I say that whilst understanding that there is an institutional role for education and that that needs to be something that we take seriously.

But I would also hope that we are increasingly coming to an understanding that sometimes what we need to do is actually provide resources in a way that is accessible for a variety of skills and for people. Right now just kind of maybe taking it back to your base, which is the US, we are seeing-

Darren Isom:

Do we have to? Do we have to?

Ore Disu:

This is an exchange, but you're seeing how policy shifts and sometimes radically, disrupts decades of building and investing in creative and social spaces. So I think to an extent, you have to be able to be flexible and to pivot and to understand that there are different points of intervention. There are movements or actions that can be done that are maybe more artist-led or people-led. There are spaces for more the concentration of and coordination of effort that may be led by businesses.

And then of course there's policy. And when you have those three areas hopefully working and coordinating together, then you have a space of vibrance. But it's difficult and by no means is Nigeria getting that right. We have for a long time disinvested in places for culture. Nigeria is probably one of the only countries in the world that does not have a national museum in its capital. Just to give you a sense of how in some ways disconnected policymaking spaces can be from supporting social development.

Darren Isom:

I mean, you jump right in there thinking about funding and what it's like to fund the work. And you've spoken candidly about the challenges of funding in the creative space and how even well-meaning support often comes with strings attached, limiting what creative institutions can actually do. Staying the dreaming space, if you could design the ideal kind of support, what would truly liberating unrestricted funding for African creatives institutions look like?

Ore Disu:

Hope the donors are listening in.

Darren Isom:

I bet they are.

Ore Disu:

I think more listening is needed. Oftentimes when funders come into a space, there are, and I understand this because once you're running an institution at scale, you have to have guidelines, you have to have templates, you have to have criteria. But where I've seen donor support work best for MOWAA has been when there's another person, not just a bot on the other side of the table. And I think this needs to be done at different scales. Simple things like just providing travel grants on the other side of a flight to get to that place and then be able to build and to create something from that.

One of the things that has been really important is finding supporters who are willing not just to focus on programming, which, those are the things that are more interactive. You want to do the events, the exhibitions, the workshops, the seminars, but we need more people willing to put money down for infrastructure, for spaces that can actually support in a more sustainable way the interactions to happen on our own turf.

And that is not something that a lot of institutions feel brave enough to do. And perhaps that's because of political uncertainty or just the degree of, should I say, familiarity with understanding how to oversee construction projects, or even understanding what the local regulatory environment is for the development of especially more specialist facilities. But that simple act I think would really help to, I think, transform the landscape and enable more initiatives to emerge and thrive.

Darren Isom:

And so I'd like to end on a bit of hope from a conversation perspective. And when you think about the future of arts and culture on the continent, what excites you most and more importantly, what role do you see yourself in playing in building that and making that happen, making that a reality?

Ore Disu:

I'll start from the last point.

Darren Isom:

Of course.

Ore Disu:

I'm here, I would say as a messenger, as a conduit. I'm so excited to be here and be alive at this moment. I don't think many people understand just how special it is to have this confluence of enthusiasm and attention and resources come onto the continent and start to revive these spaces. Everywhere I go, I'm seeing new pop-up spaces, I'm seeing more creative products where you're talking about film, fashion, music, and you see the pride and the sense of, I would say self-esteem and reawakening that Africa is doing things on its own terms. And for me, that is incredibly valuable.

I hope that what we have... My dream is that it doesn't become a fad. Because there's such a great danger in this being the restitution moment as opposed to a new era of African creativity and enterprise, which I think is a much more powerful game-changing essence that really will go beyond this moment. And that is why it's really important that when we think and we talk about politically weighty subjects like restitution, we go beyond just the acts of, should I say Eurocentric return and that idea of, should I say guilt washing.

Darren Isom:

Or even centering Europe in the process.

Ore Disu:

Exactly. And then we ask ourselves as Africans, as Black people, as human beings, what do we want out of this moment and how do we make it really about us?

Darren Isom:

It's a beautiful way to end the conversation. So one, first and foremost, huge applause and carrying through with a really powerful and beautiful conversation over two locations, through construction as we sit here in the room with relics, it was really beautiful. And as you noted earlier in the conversation, this idea of the stream and the river. I think I mentioned in one of my earlier podcasts, how as a child, my grandfather would take me fishing and at the end of the conversation or the end of the fishing session, he always made us stop and listen for the river. As a reminder to remember where we're coming from, that we're coming down and how we're all products of that river and you're doing it beautifully, so thank you for your time and for the conversation.

Ore Disu:

Thank you. I hope you'll come back soon.

Darren Isom:

Well, I hear I need to come back for a grand opening.

Ore Disu:

You have to.

Darren Isom:

Very exciting.

Ore Disu:

November is when it's at.

Darren Isom:

Of course. Thanks a bunch.

Cora Daniels:

Hello, Dreaming in Color family. My name is Cora Daniels. I'm a senior editorial director at Bridgespan based in New York City. I've been part of the podcast production team since our first season. If you listen through the credits, Darren has given me the honor of dubbing me his partner in good trouble, and in that role I traveled with him and Elizabeth across the continent for this season's episodes. I typically remain behind the scenes, but Darren has passed me the mic to do the outro for this episode. He has some big storytelling shoes to fill, and I thank you for your grace as I give it a shot.

My father raised us to be a museum family. For fun, some families watch sports together, others cook together, some families kick back listen to music and dance a bit together. My family goes to art museums together. He felt there was no need to ever attempt to see an entire museum in one visit because museums are a part of life, like air and water, and you will always be back.

Instead, he taught us to enter a gallery room and walk through quickly only stopping at the artwork that speaks to you, but when you find a work that grabs your eye in soul, don't rush the conversation. Spend some time with it, and only then do you look at who the artist is and the name of the work holding it in your memory so you can always bring up the feelings that the piece originally served to stop you in your tracks. He was teaching us not to be influenced by the cultural value, as Ore says, that is ascribed by others, but instead develop our own definition of what is great art for ourselves.

My father passed away when I was in my twenties, and the last conversation I ever had with him was the very morning when he called to ask me directions to a museum about an hour away that he and my mom were supposed to drive to the next day. Most New Yorkers take road trips to see nature. My parents would take road trips to see art. Or actually to see more art, since as New Yorkers, we are spoiled to have access to museums and galleries that people travel from all over the world to see.

My father was an artist, a painter. He studied at the famed Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s. One of very few Black faces at the time allowed through its doors. However, because he ran out of money, he never graduated. I think one of his biggest frustrations in life was he could never support our family as an artist. Forced to use his hands for manual labor jobs instead.

He was always painting and drawing, though. The first naked body I ever saw was when I was about six or seven years old, making my brother only three or four. And my dad took us to a figure drawing class he was taking at night. The model came out and immediately disrobed and every adult in the room started sketching her naked body at their easels, without saying a word. My dad handed us each some colored pencils, silently insisting we start drawing too.

My house now is filled with my dad's paintings. It is how my kids know their grandfather since he passed before both were born. Modernist in every way, his paintings are absent of people or landscape. Instead, they play with color and light space and geometric shape, tempting your eye to find patterns that don't exist. My dad's paintings challenge what Black American art is expected to look like since most might see no overt conversation about race.

However, mastery of color is a powerful expression of Black joy, assertion of Black taste and style, Black taking of space, and demanding to be seen. I was thinking about all this when Ore was challenging us to dream big when it comes to art restitution, warning that this moment should not only be about reclaiming the past, but revitalizing artists' spaces. So African creativity, Black creativity can flourish.

For Darren's conversation with Ore, we all sat in an interim pottery workroom at the Museum of West African Art as it was still being built all around us. Every tabletop in the room was overflowing with some warm terracotta shards unearthed from the soil of the site. Beautiful reminders of the great history of creativity that once thrived here.

For a museum kid like me it was a special moment as they weren't simply artifacts, they were echoes, whispering stories still being uncovered. Standing there, I wished I could call my dad and give him directions to join me at Ore's museum.

Listening to Ore, I began to understand more clearly why my dad insisted we be a museum family. These monumental homes of art are not just about preserving the past. They're about possibility. As Ore reminded us, true restitution isn't just about returning what was taken, but about revitalizing the creative spaces and futures that were interrupted. Artists reimagine our realities and help us see worlds that still need to be built. My dad knew that. Art is both memory and map, and now it's up to us to not only see it, but to carry it forward.

Darren Isom:

Once again, we put some music with the magic, collecting the theme songs from our season's, guests and collaborators to create a Spotify playlist for our listeners to enjoy. Find it on Spotify under Dreaming in Color: The Continent. Thanks for listening to Dreaming in Color.

A special shout out to all the folks who make the magic happen from Africa Insight Communications. Our wonderful producers Mudzithe Phiri and Tom Kirkwood. Production coordinator Godec Orimba. Audiovisual editor, Omamo Gikho, graphic designer, Ernest Chikuni, and amazing production crews on the ground in each country.

A huge shout-out to my Bridgespan production colleagues. Cora Daniels, my ever brilliant partner in good trouble. And Elizabeth McCombie, my JoBurg-based season co-host. And of course, our fabulous creative director, Ami Diané. What a squad y'all. Be sure to rate, subscribe, and review wherever you listen to podcasts. Catch you next time.