Bedford–Stuyvesant, colloquially known as Bed–Stuy, is a neighborhood in the northern section of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. Bedford–Stuyvesant is bordered by Flushing Avenue to the north, Classon Avenue to the west, Broadway to the east, and Atlantic Avenue to the south. The main shopping street, Fulton Street, runs east–west the length of the neighborhood and intersects high-traffic north–south streets including Bedford Avenue, Nostrand Avenue, and Stuyvesant Avenue. Bedford–Stuyvesant contains four smaller neighborhoods: Bedford, Stuyvesant Heights, Ocean Hill, and Weeksville. Part of Clinton Hill was once considered part of Bedford–Stuyvesant.
Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary African-American visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Thomas's collage work is inspired from popular art histories and movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, the Harlem Renaissance, and selected works by the Afro-British painter Chris Ofili. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art, and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender.
Lorna Simpson is an American photographer and multimedia artist whose works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally. In 1990, she became the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. She came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with photo-text installations such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal that questioned the nature of identity, gender, race, history and representation. Simpson continues to explore these themes in relation to memory and history using photography, film, video, painting, drawing, audio, and sculpture.
Thelma Golden is the Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City, United States. She is noted as one of the originators of the term post-blackness. From 2017 to 2020, ArtReview chose her annually as one of the 10 most influential people in the contemporary art world.
"Where We At" Black Women Artists, Inc. (WWA) was a collective of Black women artists affiliated with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It included artists such as Dindga McCannon, Kay Brown, Faith Ringgold, Carol Blank, Jerri Crooks, Charlotte Kâ (Richardson), and Gylbert Coker. Where We At was formed in the spring of 1971, in the wake of an exhibition of the same name organized by 14 Black women artists at the Acts of Art Gallery in Greenwich Village. Themes such as the unity of the Black family, Black female independence and embodiment, Black male-female relationships, contemporary social conditions, and African traditions were central to the work of the WWA artists. The group was intended to serve as a source of empowerment for African-American women, providing a means for them to control their self-representation and to explore issues of Black women's sensibility and aesthetics. Like AfriCobra, a Chicago-based Black Arts group, the WWA was active in fostering art within the African-American community and using it as a tool of awareness and liberation. The group organized workshops in schools, jails and prisons, hospitals, and cultural centers, as well as art classes for youth in their communities.
Shantell Martin is a British visual artist, intuitive philosopher, cultural facilitator, teacher, choreographer, songwriter, performer, and more. Best known for her large scale, black-and-white line drawings, she performs many of her drawings for a live audience. Born in Thamesmead, London, Martin lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. Along with exhibitions and commission for museums and galleries, Martin frequently collaborates with international commercial projects, both private and public.
Simone Leigh is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States. She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society. Leigh has often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
Rashida Bumbray is an American curator, choreographer, author, visual and performing arts critic who lives and works in New York City. Bumbray's choreographic work Run Mary Run was included in The New York Times list of the Best Concerts of 2012. In 2014, she was nominated for the distinguished Bessie Award for “Outstanding Emerging Choreographer," and in the same year she was recipient of the Harlem Stage Fund for New Work. Bumbray is currently the Senior Program Manager of the Arts Exchange at The Open Society Foundations the Open Society Foundations.
Elissa Blount-Moorhead is a Baltimore-based producer, artist, writer, curator and lecturer. Blount-Moorhead is an advocate for social change through her interdisciplinary work in visual art, music, design, and film. She has produced public art events, gallery exhibitions, films screenings, and education programs since the early 90s.
Nicole Awai is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York and Austin, Texas. Her work captures both Caribbean and American landscapes and experiences and engages in cultural critique. She works in many media including painting, photography, drawing, installations, ceramics, and sculpture as well as found objects.
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."
Amy Sherald is an American painter. She works mostly as a portraitist depicting African Americans in everyday settings. Her style is simplified realism, involving staged photographs of her subjects. Since 2012, her work has used grisaille to portray skin tones, a choice she describes as intended to challenge conventions about skin color and race.
Lola Flash is an American photographer whose work has often focused on social, LGBT and feminist issues. An active participant in ACT UP during the time of the AIDS epidemic in New York City, Flash was notably featured in the 1989 "Kissing Doesn't Kill" poster.
Alva Rogers is an American playwright, composer, actor, vocalist, and arts educator. She is known for the use of dolls and puppetry in interdisciplinary work. Rogers performed in the role of Eula Peazant in Julie Dash's 1991 film Daughters of the Dust. and was a vocalist in the New York City alternative rock band Band of Susans.
Chloë Bass is an American conceptual artist who works in performance and social practice. Bass' work focuses on intimacy. She was a founding co-lead organizer of Arts in Bushwick from 2007-2011, the group that organizes Bushwick Open Studios. She is an Assistant Professor of Art and Social Practice at Queens College, CUNY, and holds a BA from Yale University and an MFA from Brooklyn College. Bass was a regular contributor to Hyperallergic until 2018. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates.
Aisha Tandiwe Bell is an American visual artist known for her work that creates myth and ritual through mixed media including sculpture performance, video, sound, drawing, and installation that addresses themes of fragmentation, shape-shifting, code-switching, hyphenated identities and multiple consciousness, marginalization, and lack of agency people in the African Diaspora struggle with. Through her mixed media, Aisha Tandiwe Bell's art focuses on and looks at the societal constraints of sex, race, and class. She uses each piece of her art to look at the norms that society has created around sex, race, and class and the limitations that people have placed upon themselves when it comes to these ideas. As a Jamaican-American woman in the United States, Bell uses her art to represent the displacement that she feels and the alter egos that black women have to uphold publicly and privately. The sculptures that Bell creates are intentionally cracked, fragmented, and imperfect to reflect her fractured identity.
Margaret Rose Vendryes was a visual artist, curator, and art historian based in New York.
Adama Delphine Fawundu is a Sierra Leonean-American multi-disciplinary photographer and visual artist promoting African culture and heritage, a co-founder and author of MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora – a journal and book representing female photographers of African descent. Her works have been presented in numerous exhibitions worldwide. She uses multiple mediums to create works with themes about identity, utopia, decolonization, and stories of the past, present and future. She is a Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University.
Fabiola Jean-Louis is a Haitian artist working in photography, paper textile design, and sculpture. Her work examines the intersectionality of the Black experience, particularly that of women, to address the absence and imbalance of historical representation of African American and Afro-Caribbean people. Jean-Louis has earned residencies at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD), New York City, the Lux Art Institute, San Diego, and the Andrew Freedman Home in The Bronx. In 2021, Jean-Louis became the first Haitian woman artist to exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fabiola lives and works in New York City.
Nyeema Morgan is an American interdisciplinary and conceptual artist. Working in drawing, sculpture and print media, her works focus on how meaning is constructed and communicated given complex socio-political systems. Born in Philadelphia, she earned her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art and her MFA from the California College of the Arts. She has held artist residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Smack Mellon. Morgan's works are in the permanent collections of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Menil Collection.
