There is never just one way of seeing. And Nana Oforiatta-Ayim—writer, filmmaker, cultural historian, and institution builder—has spent her career proving exactly that.

For Nana, who founded the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge in Ghana and curated the country’s critically acclaimed first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019, art is not sealed off in white cubes but alive, porous, and connective.

In this episode, she opens up about the journey from proving worth to claiming inherent value in conversation with host Charlotte Burns. She speaks about the victories and challenges of her groundbreaking projects, including the Mobile Museum—which brings art into kiosks on street corners and tours it through local communities—and the 54-volume Cultural Encyclopedia, which reorders and re-presents knowledge, narratives, and representations from across the African continent, the first of which launches this year.

Fifty years after critic John Berger cracked open the canon of art history with Ways of Seeing, Nana is carrying the conversation forward with her own trilogy of books. She speaks candidly about reimagining Berger’s radical gesture for our time, reckoning with the limits of Western paradigms, and building from indigenous knowledge systems, oral storytelling, and the land itself.

What if the future of art looked more like a festival than a mausoleum?

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Find out more about The Art World: What If…?! at schwartzmanand.com/the-art-world.