G LOB A L
Q&A with Laurie Reyman MSW ’09 Certificate in NPML ’11 Interviewed by Laurie Anderson
Interviewer: How did you get started?
Laurie Reyman is the co-founder and organizational development director of Colors of Connection. The nonprofit engages marginalized and conflictaffected youth in sub-Saharan Africa in public mural-making and art projects that cultivate well-being and advocate for social justice. Since its establishment in 2011, Colors of Connection projects have directly benefited more than 200 young people and reached an estimated 200,000 residents in West and Central Africa. Projects have addressed gender equality, sexual violence, health promotion, peaceful cohabitation between ethnic groups, education for girls and human rights. Reyman, who grew up in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, was interviewed in February 2020 at the Art and Education for Social Justice Symposium hosted by the Lamar Dodd School of Art and the School of Social Work.
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SPRING
2021
Reyman: As a student, I knew that I wanted to work internationally—specifically in Africa—so I sought out an internship that would put me in that realm. For my MSW, I interned at the Carter Center at Atlanta. When I graduated, I got a two-year contract job with the Carter Center in Liberia, in West Africa. Liberia was a post-conflict country, very devastated. The area I was in, the southeast region, in a little town called Harper, was still very war-torn. Every third building was a burnt-out shell of what it had been, and there just wasn’t much development or energy happening there. I wondered if we could change these structures by painting murals of things that people wanted for the future. What would that do for the people who could see that instead of just a burnt-out shell? So I contacted my friend Christina Mallie, who is an artist I met in South Africa. She was interested in working in Africa with youth. I proposed the idea to her, and she liked it, and so [in 2011] we developed the idea of the program. Interviewer: What was the effect of the murals? Reyman: It transformed the spaces. One of them was on the main market, this building with a sort of triangular top. We painted that, and it transformed the way the market felt, the way it looked. We painted
