Stephen J. Powers is an American contemporary artist and muralist. He is also known by the name ESPO, and Steve Powers. He lives in New York City.
Mary Kelly is an American conceptual artist, feminist, educator, and writer.
Sharon Hayes is an American multimedia artist. She came to prominence as an artist and an activist during the East Village scene in the early '90s. She primarily works with video, installation, and performance as her medium. Using multimedia, she "appropriates, rearranges, and remixes in order to revitalize spirits of dissent". Hayes's work addresses themes such as romantic love, activism, queer theory, and politics. Hayes works to develop "new representational strategies that examine and interrogate the present political movement, not as a moment without historical foundation but as one that reaches simultaneously backwards and fowards." She incorporates texts from found speeches, recordings, songs, letters, and her own writing into her practice that she describes as “a series of performatives rather than performance.”
Creative Capital is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization based in New York City that supports artists across the United States through funding, counsel, gatherings, and career development services. Since its founding in 1999, Creative Capital has committed over $50 million in project funding and advisory support to 631 projects representing 783 artists and has worked with thousands more artists across the country through workshops and other resources. One of the "most prestigious art grants in the country," their yearly Creative Capital Awards application is open to artists in over 40 different disciplines spanning the visual arts, performing arts, moving image, literature, technology, and socially-engaged art.
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 to 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.
Laylah Ali (born 1968) is an American contemporary visual artist. She is known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and is a professor at Williams College.
Tomie Arai is a public American artist, printmaker, and community activist living and working in New York City. Her works consist of temporary and permanent multimedia site-specific art pieces that deal with topics of gender, community, and racial identity, and are influenced by her Japanese heritage and the urban experience of living in New York. She is highly involved in community discourse, co-founding the Chinatown Art Brigade. Her work is nationally exhibited and can be found in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Japanese American National Museum, the Williams College Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum.
Blanka Amezkua is a Mexican-American Latino inter-disciplinary contemporary artist. Collaboration, radical pedagogy, and community building are central to her art making and projects. Formally trained as a painter, her creative practice is greatly influenced and informed by folk art and popular culture, from papel picado to comic books.
Martine Syms is an American artist residing in Los Angeles, specializing in various mediums including publishing, video, installation, and performance. Her artistic endeavors revolve around themes of identity, particularly the representation of the self, with a focus on subjects like feminism and black culture. Syms frequently employs humor and social commentary as vehicles for exploration within her work. In 2007, she introduced the term "Conceptual Entrepreneur" to describe her artistic approach.
Jennie C. Jones is an African-American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been described, by Ken Johnson, as evoking minimalism, and paying tribute to the cross-pollination of different genres of music, especially jazz. As an artist, she connects most of her work between art and sound. Such connections are made with multiple mediums, from paintings to sculptures and paper to audio collages. In 2012, Jones was the recipient of the Joyce Alexander Wien Prize, one of the biggest awards given to an individual artist in the United States. The prize honors one African-American artist who has proven their commitment to innovation and creativity, with an award of 50,000 dollars. In December 2015 a 10-year survey of Jones's work, titled Compilation, opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas.
Jacolby Satterwhite is an American contemporary artist who creates immersive installations. He has exhibited work at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, the New Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. In addition to MoMA, his work is in the public collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Seattle Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Kiasma, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Satterwhite has also served as a contributing director for the music video that accompanied Solange's 2019 visual album When I Get Home and directed a short film accompaniment to Perfume Genius's 2022 studio album Ugly Season.
Jenelle Porter is an American art curator and author of numerous exhibition catalogs and essays about contemporary art and craft. She has curated important exhibitions that have helped studio craft to gain acceptance as fine arts. These include the exhibitions Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in 2009 and Fiber: Sculpture 1960–Present at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2014.
Kevin Beasley is an American artist working in sculpture, performance art, and sound installation. He lives and works in New York City. Beasley was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial in 2014 and MoMA PS1's Greater New York exhibition in 2015.
Janet Henry is a visual artist based in New York City.
Esperanza Cortés is a Colombian-born American visual artist who lives and works in New York City. Her paintings, sculptures and installations explore the themes of social injustice and cultural invisibility. She draws on the folk traditions of the Americas, including their rituals, music, dance and art.
Meg Onli is an African-American art curator and writer who has held curatorial roles at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art. Her curatorial work primarily revolves around the black experience, language, and constructions of power and space. Her writing has been published in Art21, Daily Serving, and Art Papers. In September 2022, it was announced that Onli would co-curate the 2024 Whitney Biennial with Chrissie Iles.
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.
Shalom Gorewitz is an American visual artist. Gorewitz was among the first generation of artists who used early video technology as an expressive medium. Since the late 1960s, he has created videos that "transform recorded reality through an expressionistic manipulation of images and sound". His artworks often "confront the political conflicts, personal losses, and spiritual rituals of contemporary life". Gorewitz has also made documentary and narrative films.
Guadalupe Maravilla, formerly known as Irvin Morazan, is a transdisciplinary visual artist, choreographer, and healer. At the age of eight, Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. In 2016, Maravilla became a U.S. citizen and adopted the name Guadalupe Maravilla in solidarity with his undocumented father, who uses Maravilla as his last name. As an acknowledgment to his past, Maravilla grounds his practice in the historical and contemporary contexts belonging to undocumented communities and the cancer community. Maravilla's studio is located in Brooklyn, New York.
Michelle Jaffé is an American interdisciplinary artist, known for her immersive participatory installations combining sculpture, sound, and performative video. Symbols, forms, and concepts in her work are often influenced by political, spiritual, and psychological themes. Prior to her career as an artist, Jaffé was notable in the New York City fashion scene for her hat and accessory designs.
