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.
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, and his team told her that discussions on social media gave them better insight into what was happening in the country. They saw how young citizens, especially those who regularly visited museums, understood what was missing from their museums compared to French ones. In 2021, France returned 26 royal treasures looted by French troops from King Behanzin’s palace in 1892. There is hope that France will return 40 more later this year.
In September 2006, about two decades before the restitution call, Zinsou started collecting archives on the Kingdom of Dahomey, in the present-day Republic of Benin, committing 10 euros every week to buying materials including newspapers, postcards and stamps about the kingdom. A month earlier, a director at the Paris-based Musée du Quai Branly had traveled to Benin under a policy by Jacques Chirac, president of France at the time, to discuss jointly hosting an exhibition in Africa of artifacts from countries represented in the museum’s collection. The exhibition was scheduled for December that year. As part of her preparation, Zinsou began buying anything and everything about Dahomey on eBay. A display of Beninese artifacts from the Musée du Quai Branly and archives from Zinsou’s collection became the “Béhanzin, King of Abomey” exhibition marking 100 years since the death of the last king of Dahomey. He is said to have fiercely resisted French colonial power and was forced into exile in 1894, four years after he ascended the throne. The exhibition, hosted by Fondation Zinsou’s museum—the only one in Cotonou at the time—welcomed close to 300,000 visitors in the first three months.
“I have been doing this for the last 20 years,” Zinsou said. “It was not [my intention] but I have created the most important archive on Dahomey.” It consists of about 800 photographs dating from 1891 to 1950, about 40 glass plates, between 400 and 500 French, English and Italian newspapers from 1763 to 1926, a large number of early 20th-century exhibition catalogues, 400 postcards, a 3D catalogue of the Musée de l’Homme from the 1940s and hundreds of stamps. In 2007, she started a working document listing the names of soldiers and others who served in the Dahomey colonial administration, then turned to her Facebook network for people interested in genealogy or with information about the heirs of those on her list. That led to connecting with a friend and eventually obtaining personal contact details. “I called people to say ‘Hi, I think you will be a bit surprised by my call but I am calling you from Benin. I think your great-great-grandfather was part of the Benin colonial war. Do you have anything left from him? And would you be okay to share it with me, show it to me or even sell it to me?” Zinsou recalled. Those calls generally went well, including one to an heir of Victor Ballot, a French colonial administrator and the first governor of Dahomey from 1894 to 1900. Zinsou met the heir in Paris in 2010 and collected a “very, very precious silk umbrella” belonging to Béhanzin, the last king of Dahomey, as well as Ballot’s photo albums documenting Cotonou. Those images were later displayed in an exhibition at the museum.
Zinsou’s interest in archives is expansive. One of the foundation’s earliest initiatives when she launched the foundation was to interview artists. In 2015, her ongoing interview series officially became a documentation project, Archives of the Present, which expanded to include curators and other figures in Benin’s art, culture and creative sectors. Interviews sometimes span several years and are later published as books. “We thought, when people work on Benin in 300 years, what will they look for?’ If we don’t produce our own archives today, people will look again to Europe. If they don’t find what they need from us, they will find it elsewhere,” she explained.
Zinsou was born in 1982 in Paris to a French professor mother and Lionel Zinsou, a French-Beninese professor, economist and investment banker who served as prime minister of Benin from June 2015 to April 2016. She is also the grandniece of Émile Derlin Zinsou, president of Benin from 1968 to 1969, who was deposed in a coup. (For political reasons, the Zinsou family could not live in Benin until 1991.) She studied in France and England, majoring in art history. At one point, unsure of what to do with her life, she decided to teach for a year after her great-uncle mentioned a friend who needed an instructor for her art school. In October 2003, Zinsou arrived in Benin to teach English and art history at the Village SOS in Abomey-Calavi. She wanted to take her students to museums to see exhibitions and learn more about Benin’s contemporary art scene and the broader West African art scene, but that wasn’t possible because there were none. She shared masterpieces with her students through virtual visits to Paris-based museums, the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, and her mother sent materials for her class, including posters of exhibitions she had seen in Paris and London. But it never felt like enough. “After one year, I was quite clear about the fact that I wanted to do something more,” she said. She spoke with her family and decided to start a museum to “offer this right to people because culture can’t be a luxury for the few who can go to the United States or to Europe.”
Zinsou set to work putting in place the necessary plans for a museum, including finding and renting a building, and learning on the job. In the second half of her second year of teaching, she was also working at the museum; her students were some of the first visitors.
For the debut exhibition at the museum in 2005, Zinsou approached Romuald Hazoumè, a Beninese artist whose work she had seen in Düsseldorf and who was showing globally at biennials and exhibitions but not at home in Benin at the time. “He was a bit puzzled in the beginning because I told him the truth, which was that I had limited experience; at first he was not very enthusiastic,” she recalled. But within an hour, Zinsou had convinced him. It also mattered to him to show his work at home. “What I hadn’t realized was how important that was going to become with artists”, referring to artists from Africa and its diaspora wanting to show their work on the continent when there was a distinct lack of spaces. Zinsou and Hazoumè have worked together on other shows since then. She pointed to the growth of artist-led spaces in Africa as part of an evolution she’s first noticed in 2005, and highlighted how influential women have been in transforming the contemporary art landscape in Africa, mentioning Cécile Fakhoury, founder of the eponymous gallery with spaces in Abidjan, Dakar and Paris, and Caline Chagoury, founder of Lagos-based Art Twenty One, founded in 2013.
In November 2013, Fondation Zinsou opened Musée Ouidah, Benin’s first contemporary art museum, in the renovated Villa Ajavon, built in 1922 by descendants of enslaved Africans returning from Bahia, Brazil, and located about 40 kilometers from Cotonou. Ouidah is a smaller city and a major center of the transatlantic slave trade. Today, the foundation continues to expand free access to the arts for citizens of Benin via not just Musée Ouidah but also Le Jardin d’Essai, the Cotonou Lab and other initiatives. It also supports Beninese artists’ practice through programming such as workshops, school partnerships, social initiatives, publishing, residencies and exhibitions led by Zinsou.
Over the past two decades, Fondation Zinsou has shown the work of American Jean-Michel Basquiat, American Keith Haring, Malian Malick Sidibé, Cameroonian-born Nigerian Samuel Fasso, Malagasy Joël Andrianomearisoa, Tunisian Aïcha Snoussi, Franco-Beninese Jérémy Demester, Beninese Cyprien Tokoudagba, Ivorian Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Beninese Ishola Akpo and Ghanaian Ibrahim Mahama in solo and group shows in its spaces. The foundation often gives young artists their first museum shows, while also coordinating exhibitions at other institutions around the world, as well as at the 2015 London edition of Touria El Glaoui’s 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair.
Zinsou’s unflinching drive has helped shift the general attitude toward the arts in Benin. Visual artists have become some of the most popular people in the country, a status once reserved for musicians. An art market has emerged and several different people claim to have the country’s most important art collection. The national cultural policy has also changed over the past decade, from a non-factor considered the domain of private entrepreneurs to a lynchpin of major government development strategies and a tool for better branding of the country. Benin has built new museums, debuting at the 2024 Venice Biennale with a national pavilion featuring work by Hazoumè, Akpo, Moufouli Bello and Chloé Quenum, and in December 2025, the Council of Ministers approved a contract for the construction of a Cotonou-based Cultural and Creative Quarter on 12 hectares of land to help transform the country’s creative and cultural ecosystem. Benin has also been at the forefront of African countries calling for the West to return looted artifacts to Africa, with Zinsou playing a leading role in that advocacy.
Zinsou was a recipient of the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture and Communication in 2021. In 2014, the Japan Art Foundation awarded Fondation Zinsou the Praemium Imperiale, a prestigious annual international arts prize. She leads the boards of cultural organizations and frequently serves as an awards jury member.
“I think we’ve proved that people are very interested [in art] and that Beninese people are 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,” she said. “The conversations with artists have been the greatest honor of my life and the greatest pride I have to be working with this generation of artists who have changed everything. And I’m very conscious of how lucky I am to be surrounded by all these artists who trust us, help us, work with us and exhibit with us.”
Art collector interviews
