Global: Q&A with Laurie Reyman

Q&A

with Laurie Reyman MSW ’09, Certificate in NPML ’11

Interviewed by Laurie Anderson

Colors of Connection co-founders, Laurie Reyman (L), organizational development director and Christina Mallie (R), executive director, in front of the Development Through Education Mural at the Goudoubo Refugee Camp, Burkina Faso, West Africa, June 2014. Read more about and watch a video of the inspiring Colors of Connection murals at https://colorsofconnection.org/murals/.

Photo by Colors of Connection

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.

Interviewer: How did you get started?

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 on what had been an old cinema, we did a cultural mural bringing the positive aspects of the culture, promoting girls’ education. We painted on what had been the old electricity building, and painted the idea about bringing the energy back to Harper, both the electricity but also other forms of energy. And we painted on the wall around the hospital.

It gave the kids a lot of confidence and a lot of pride, and a lot of ownership of being seen differently by the community. They’d never had the opportunity to transform, to engage in their community in that way, to have such a powerful role in the community, or to develop the skills to do that.

Interviewer: Initially this was a one-time project in Harper. How did it become a nonprofit organization?

Reyman: Some more opportunities developed. One was murals in a refugee camp that had sprung up near Harper, Liberia with Ivorian refugees. We decided that we were on to something that was pretty amazing for these communities, so we wanted to make it a scalable model, and do more.

Interviewer: How would you say social justice is addressed through your work?

Reyman: We’re working to give these kids and the people in the community a chance to express their opinions in a platform that they may not have had before, and a lot of the issues that they’re dealing with are related to social justice – most recently sexual and gender-based violence, which is related to gender inequality. Social justice is the foundation of our work.

Interviewer: What did you learn here at the School of Social Work that you use the most?

Reyman: The education I received gave me the groundwork to continue with a community focus. That’s what drew me to social work. We’re very much based in social work—and the ideas of doing social work versus just doing art. It’s doing social work through art. Since the interview, coronavirus has prevented visits to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Reyman and Mallie hope to launch Shujaa—a sustainable, longterm program in east Congo—in 2021. In the meantime Colors of Connection is supporting its Congolese partner M’Shujarts, a girls’ art collective. For more information or to support Colors of Connection, visit colorsofconnection.org.