Art Professor Receives Artist Exchange Grant for Research in Ghana

Professor of Art Lydia C. Thompson has received a Lighton International Artists Exchange Program award for travel to conduct research in the West African country of Ghana.

Founded in 2000, the Lighton International Artists Exchange Program (LIAEP) provides support for mid-career visual artists and arts professionals “who create work of exceptional quality” to travel internationally, bringing foreign artists to the United States and sending American artists abroad. The mission, the organization says, is “to make the world a smaller place by allowing artists of different cultures to work together, in the hope that lasting friendship and understanding will develop.”

Thompson will spend three weeks in Ghana, June 22 through July 11, where she will research traditional adobe vernacular architecture structures. She is particularly interested in adobe homes in the Sirigu Village, in which the women paint vivid patterns and designs on the exterior of their homes (pictured below). 

Thompson will also visit craft centers in local villages, such as the Afari Pottery Center, where traditional utilitarian pottery methods are practiced. She will document these experiences through photographs, journaling, and video recording. She will also present a public lecture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in the city of Kumasi, Ghana.

 In Fall 2025, Thompson will be an artist-in-residence at Starworks in Star, North Carolina, where she will develop a new body of work inspired by the adobe structures and traditional art forms she documents during her travels in Ghana. At Starworks, she will experiment with atmospheric kilns and develop new surfaces for her work.  

Thompson is a mixed media artist specializing in ceramics that focus on her cultural narratives. She has won grants and residencies across the U.S. and in countries as diverse as Nigeria, Canada, and Denmark, and her work is in private and public collections in the U.S., New Zealand, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy. Most recently, Thompson was named a South Arts 2025 State Fellow for Visual Arts representing North Carolina. Along with an unrestricted cash prize of $5000, the State Fellows for Visual Arts will be featured in a traveling group exhibition and will have the opportunity to compete for the larger Southern Prize for Literary Arts and Visual Arts awards.

“My current work is an investigation of migration and residual ancestral memories that examine space and place of human existence,” Thompson writes in her artist statement.  “Geographical landscapes have provided resources for the continuous mobility of humans, to create communities and construct abodes. These works are reminders of the past and current lessons to learn about the persistence and preservation of one’s own culture.”

See Thompson’s work at her website.

Images: Lydia Thompson at work in her studio; Sirigu murals from “Ritual ecology and Sirigu Mural Paintings: Interrogating the Intersection of Art and Culture,” by Francis Ankyiah (December 2023); three works from Thompson’s “Mounds” series, 2023.