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For Collector Marie-Cécile Zinsou, Building a Museum in Benin Was Just the Beginning

"Beninese people are very interested in art, just like Parisians, Americans or English people. They understand that a museum is a very important tool for education, as well as a tool for development, because it changes the image of a country."

When art collector and 2025 Yale Directors Forum fellow Marie-Cécile Zinsou first started looking into the feasibility of opening a contemporary art museum in Benin, she was met with a lot of resistance. “People told me that there was no need for a museum because there was no public for that. My intuition was that people were not going to the museum because there were no museums,” she told Observer. With her family’s support, the Franco-Beninese art historian, curator and entrepreneur founded Fondation Zinsou in June 2005 in Cotonou, Benin’s economic capital and largest city. Her ambitions included not only opening a space but also encouraging museum visits, especially for children as an important educational tool, and expanding access to both contemporary art and art education.

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It was, she admitted, an uphill battle—even after she’d established the foundation. The space’s first visitor left almost immediately after entering, having seen only paintings on the walls and assumed the building was not in use. To encourage locals to visit and engage, Zinsou’s team started mounting exhibitions outside the foundation’s halls. “I told them, ‘Let’s go to every place where people go,'” she recalled. That meant the streets, beaches on weekends and stadiums near the busy bus stops used by people traveling to countries such as Burkina Faso, Niger and Togo. In collaboration with the mayors of Cotonou, Porto Novo and Ouidah, they showed works by Malian photographer Malick Sidibé, Beninese sculptor and painter Cyprien Tokoudagba and Congolese photographer Baudouin Mouanda from the foundation’s collection, which has since grown to encompass 1,500 artworks. And with every exhibition, the pitch to visitors was the same: there was more to see in the museum.

There was also Les Petits Pinceaux, a series of free workshops for children ages 5 to 13. For many, it was their first introduction to visual arts education, since art wasn’t part of Benin’s school curriculum when the foundation started. The workshops drew large numbers of children, who were followed by curious parents looking to understand why their children enjoyed spending time at the foundation. Initially, the foundation also faced resistance from schools that thought taking pupils to museums was not a good use of their time. Zinsou and her team had to convince school administrators, teachers, professors and other stakeholders of the importance of integrating the arts into Benin’s education system. Since then, though, the program has welcomed over 7 million children.

All that outreach and advocacy paid off. More than a decade later, when Benin officially began asking France in 2016 to return objects looted during colonial rule, those efforts were supported by young, energized Beninese people on social media—many of whom had visited museums and learned about the importance of those objects during the foundation’s tours. According to Zinsou, Emmanuel Macron, who became French president in 2017,........

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