The Studio Museum in Harlem is an American art museum devoted to the work of artists of African descent. The museum's galleries are currently closed in preparation for a building project that will replace the current building, located at 144 West 125th Street between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, with a new one on the same site. Founded in 1968, the museum collects, preserves and interprets art created by African Americans, members of the African diaspora, and artists from the African continent. Its scope includes exhibitions, artists-in-residence programs, educational and public programming, and a permanent collection.
Artstar is an unscripted reality television series set in the New York City art world, considered to be the first in the visual arts. Selected from an open call of over 400 applicants, eight artists participate in a group exhibition at Deitch Projects with the opportunity for a solo exhibition as well. The program documents the selected artists as they interact with leading critics, curators, collectors, and artists in New York, while making new works as part of the collaborative exhibition.
Judy Pfaff is an American artist known mainly for installation art and sculptures, though she also produces paintings and prints. Pfaff has received numerous awards for her work, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004 and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts. Major exhibitions of her work have been held at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Denver Art Museum and Saint Louis Art Museum. In 2013 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Video interviews can be found on Art 21, Miles McEnery Gallery, MoMa, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and other sources.
María Elena González is a Cuban-American sculptor based in Brooklyn and the Bay Area. She is known for objects, installations and public art that interweave post-minimalist form, conceptual art and concern for materials and craft. Her early work explored themes of memory, family, identity, loss and dislocation through formal, architectural and mapping modes that address site, place and social circumstances; her later work makes connections between nature and art, engaging a broad range of media and sensory experience. In 2020, artist and scholar Ellen Levy wrote "González's art re-invents nature as culture" through an "exquisite attunement" that uncovers formal and thematic analogies between both realms and synesthetic connections between visual and aural senses.
Martha Friedman is a sculptor and college professor residing in New York City. Her work has been exhibited throughout the world in both solo and group exhibitions. Her primary exhibitor is Wallspace in New York. She has taught classes at The Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, Princeton University, Rutgers University, Wesleyan University and Yale University.
Saya Woolfalk is an American artist known for her multimedia exploration of hybridity, science, race and sex. Woolfalk uses science fiction and fantasy to reimagine the world in multiple dimensions.
Xaviera Simmons is an American contemporary artist. She works in photography, performance, painting, video, sound art, sculpture, and installation. Between 2019 and 2020, Simmons was a visiting professor and lecturer at Harvard University. Simmons was a Harvard University Solomon Fellow from 2019-2020. Simmons has stated in her lectures and writings that she is a descendant of Black American enslaved persons, European colonizers and Indigenous persons through the institution of chattel slavery on both sides of her family's lineage.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport is Artistic Director and Martin Friedman Chief Curator at Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York City. She is responsible for the outdoor public sculpture program of commissioned work by contemporary artists. With an exhibition of Martin Puryear's work, Martin Puryear: Liberty/Libertà, Rapaport served as Commissioner and Curator of the United States Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Rapaport frequently speaks on and moderates programs on contemporary art and issues in public art. She also writes for Sculpture magazine where she is a contributing editor. She lives in New York City and is the mother of three sons.
Laylah Ali (born 1968) is a contemporary visual artist known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format.
Candida Alvarez is an American artist and professor, known for her paintings and drawings.
Steffani Jemison is an American artist, writer, and educator. Her videos and multimedia projects explore the relationship between Black embodiment, sound cultures, and vernacular practices to modernism and conceptual art. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and other U.S. and international venues. She is based in Brooklyn, New York and is represented by Greene Naftali, New York and Annet Gelink, Amsterdam.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is an American writer, educator, and artist from East Palo Alto, California. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts known for her work in installations, book arts, immersive text-based installations, large-scale public text pieces, publications, collage, and audio recordings. Rasheed's art explores memory, ritual, discursive regimes, historiography, and archival practices through the use of fragments and historical residue. Based in Brooklyn, NY, she is currently the Arts Editor for SPOOK magazine. In 2021 her work was featured in an Art 21 documentary, "The Edge of Legibility."
Vladimir Cybil Charlier is an American visual artist who lives and works in New York City. Her works reflect the complex dynamics linking two important geographic markers: The Caribbean and the United States. Her parents' migration into the United States allowed her to receive an education in fine arts and become a mix media artist. Her work includes paints, drawings, sculptures and others. Today she has a variety of work collections that have been displayed in numerous exhibitions within the United States and abroad.
Jordan Casteel is an American painter. Her landscapes and figurative portraits utilize gestural brushwork and often bold color choices. She typically paints portraits of friends and family members as well as neighbors and strangers in her surrounding community. Casteel lives and works in the Catskill Mountain region and Harlem, New York.
Senam Okudzeto is an American and British artist and educator who lives and works in Basel, London, Ghana and New York City.
Iliana Emilia García is a Dominican-born, American visual artist and sculptor known for large-scale paintings and installations. She is a co-founder of the Dominican York Proyecto GRÁFICA (DYPG) Collective. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Lauren Halsey is a contemporary American artist. Halsey uses architecture and installation art to demonstrate the realities of urban neighborhoods like South Central, Los Angeles.
Karyn Olivier is a Philadelphia-based artist who creates public art, sculptures, installations and photography. Olivier alters familiar objects, spaces, and locations, often reinterpreting the role of monuments. Her work intersects histories and memories with present-day narratives.
Legacy Russell is an American curator, writer, and author of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, published by Verso Books in 2020. In 2021, the performance and experimental art institution The Kitchen announced Russell as the organization's next executive director and chief curator. From 2018 to 2021, she was the associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Allison Janae Hamilton is a contemporary American artist who works in sculpture, installation, photography and film.
