Gifts from Ghana: Community Engagement & Transnational Solidarity Project
New Exhibition at Morgan Library Showcases Student Voices and Transnational Solidarity with Ghana
Fort Collins, Colo. – CSU Libraries presents Gifts from Ghana: Community Engagement and Transnational Solidarity Project, a new exhibition opening September 15, 2026, in CSU’s Morgan Library. On view through May 15, 2027, the exhibition documents a three-week immersion in Ghana undertaken as part of Colorado State University’s Ghana Community Engagement Project, a faculty-led initiative exploring transnational solidarity through youth development.
Organized by the Department of Race and Gender Studies, in collaboration with CSU Libraries and the Music Department in the University Center for the Arts, the exhibition emerges from a sustained institutional commitment to reciprocal knowledge exchange — one that positions CSU students and faculty not as outside observers, but as learners accountable to the communities they encountered during their time in Ghana, from December 27, 2025, to January 18, 2026.
Grounded in the premise that knowledge is not the exclusive province of academic institutions, the project brought participants into direct exchange with Ghanaian communities whose living traditions of storytelling, cultural memory, and collective meaning-making offer frameworks that challenge Western academic conventions and expand what scholarship can be. Students conducted interviews with community members who preserve and transmit culture and history orally, exploring how these stories are shared within communities and across the wider world.
The Ghana Community Engagement Project pairs eight weeks of coursework on Ghanaian history and culture with the three-week visit abroad. Following their return, participants spent additional months turning their experiences into artistic work, which was first shared with the campus community in April 2026 through a live event at the University Center for the Arts featuring drumming, dance, poetry, and a buffet of Ghanaian food alongside a photo and video exhibit. The Morgan Library exhibition builds on that same body of work, bringing it to a wider public audience.
A CSU Libraries initiative at the heart of the exhibition guided student participants in documenting their experiences through photography, video, written narrative, and digital storytelling. Exhibition Coordinator Silvia Minguzzi brought expertise in curation, inclusive storytelling, and transnational intersectionality to shape a body of work that is both academically rigorous and deeply personal.
The exhibition bears witness to a process of transformation — the intellectual and ethical reorientation that occurs when one genuinely listens across difference. It reflects a commitment to highlighting diverse lived experience and working toward a more equitable and just society, inviting visitors to encounter perspectives that unsettle familiar assumptions, reflect on the politics of knowledge production, and consider what it means to build solidarity across transnational boundaries.
Gifts from Ghana: Community Engagement and Transnational Solidarity Project is free and open to the public. The exhibition runs September 15, 2026, through May 15, 2027, in CSU’s Morgan Library and is part of CSU Libraries’ ongoing commitment to connecting the university’s collections with the broader Colorado community. This project was made possible in part through a grant from the Lilla B. Morgan Memorial Endowment, which supports the cultural development and atmosphere for the arts at Colorado State University.
Exhibition Details:
Gifts from Ghana: Community Engagement and Transnational Solidarity Project
September 15, 2026 – May 15, 2027
Morgan Library, Colorado State University
For more information, please visit lib.colostate.edu or contact Silvia Minguzzi, Designer and Exhibition Coordinator at CSU Libraries, at [email protected].