Kara Elizabeth Walker is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, print-maker, installation artist, filmmaker, and professor who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Walker was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 1997, at the age of 28, becoming one of the youngest ever recipients of the award. She has been the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University since 2015.
Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-born American visual artist, known primarily for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work. Born in Kenya, she has lived and established her career in New York City for more than twenty years. Mutu's work has directed the female body as subject through collage painting, immersive installation, and live and video performance while exploring questions of self-image, gender constructs, cultural trauma, and environmental destruction and notions of beauty and power.
Rina Banerjee is an Indian-American artist and sculptor. She currently lives and works in New York City. Her ambitious mid-career survey exhibition, Make Me a Summary of the World––co-organized by and exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the San Jose Museum of Art––opened in 2018 and is slated to travel to the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, TN, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC through July 2021.
Barkley L. Hendricks was a contemporary American painter who made pioneering contributions to Black portraiture and conceptualism. While he worked in a variety of media and genres throughout his career, Hendricks' best known work took the form of life-sized painted oil portraits of Black Americans.
Ebony Grace Patterson is a Jamaican-born visual artist and educator. She is known for her large and colorful tapestries created out of various materials such as, glitter, sequins, fabric, toys, beads, faux flowers, jewelry, and other embellishments. Her "Gangstas for Life series" of dancehall portraits, and her garden-inspired installations.
Sonya Clark is an American artist of Afro-Caribbean heritage. Clark is a fiber artist known for using a variety of materials including human hair and combs to address race, culture, class, and history. Her beaded headdress assemblages and braided wig series of the late 1990s, which received critical acclaim, evoked African traditions of personal adornment and moved these common forms into the realm of personal and political expression. Although African art and her Caribbean background are important influences, Clark also builds on practices of assemblage and accumulation used by artists such as Betye Saar and David Hammons.
Caribbean art refers to the visual as well as plastic arts originating from the islands of the Caribbean. Art in the Caribbean reflects thousands of years of habitation by Arawak, Kalinago, and other people of the Caribbean followed by waves of immigration, which included artists of European origins and subsequently by artists with heritage from countries all around the world. The nature of Caribbean art reflects these diverse origins, as artists have taken their traditions and adapted these influences to reflect the reality of their lives in the Caribbean.
Terry Roger Adkins was an American artist. He was Professor of Fine Arts in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Nasher Museum of Art is the art museum of Duke University, and is located on Duke's campus in Durham, North Carolina, United States.
Nirith Nelson is a contemporary art and design curator and art educator. She is the art director of the Residency Program of the Jerusalem Center for the Visual Arts.
Andrea Chung is an American artist born in Newark, NJ and currently works in San Diego, CA. Her work focuses primarily on island nations in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean sea; specifically on how outsiders perceive a fantastic reality in spaces deemed as “paradise”. In conjunction, she explores relationships between these cultures, migration, and labor - all within the context of colonial and postcolonial regimes. Her projects bring in conscientious elements of her own labor and incorporate materials significant to the cultures she studies. This can be seen in works such as, “Bato Disik”, displayed in 2013 at the Helmuth Projects, where the medium of sugar represents the legacy of sugar plantations and colonial regime.
Firelei Báez is a Dominican Republic-born, New York City-based artist known for intricate works on paper and canvas, as well as large scale sculpture. Her art focuses on untold stories and unheard voices, using portraiture, landscape, and design to explore the Western canon.
Radcliffe Bailey was an American contemporary visual artist noted for mixed-media, paint, and sculpture works that explore African-American history. He was based in Atlanta, Georgia.
Nadia Huggins was born in 1984 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. She now resides in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Nadia Huggins is a self-taught photographer and graphic designer who has worked extensively throughout the Caribbean. She was awarded the Festival Caribbeen de L'image du Mémorial Acte Jury Prize in Guadeloupe in 2015.
Debra Drexler is an American painter, installation artist, curator and professor. Her work is informed both by participating in the contemporary resurgence of abstraction coming out of New York, and by living in the Post Colonial Pacific since 1992. She has participated in over 30 solo and over 100 group exhibitions in national and international venues. Drexler is a professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she is chair of the Drawing and Painting Area. She maintains studios in Brooklyn, New York, and Kailua, Hawaii.
María Berrío is a Colombian-born visual artist working in Brooklyn, New York. The LA Times wrote that Berrío's large-scale collage works, "meticulously crafted from layers of Japanese paper, reflect on cross-cultural connections and global migration seen through the prism of her own history." She is known for her use of Japanese print paper, which she cuts and tears to create collages with details painted in with watercolour. Berrío, who spent her childhood in Colombia and moved to the US in her teens, draws from Colombian folklore and South American literature. In her interview with The Georgia Review in 2019, the artist discusses the tradition of aluna of the Kogi people in her work Aluna (2017). Berrío's collages are characterised by representations of mainly women, who often stare back at the viewer.
Lauren Haynes is an American curator who is senior curator of contemporary art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Previously, she was director of artist initiatives and curator of contemporary art at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Momentary in Arkansas.
Allison Janae Hamilton is a contemporary American artist who works in sculpture, installation, photography and film.
Tamika Galanis is a Black Bahamian multimedia artist and documentarian examining topics of Bahamian identity and culture, tourism, and archival histories.
Oindrilla Maity Surai is an Indian independent curator, art critic, and pedagogue based in Kolkata. She has curated exhibitions beyond the paradigms of the commercial gallery. Her major contributions lie in her converting the exhibition spaces as sites of resistances in the post-Covid 19 era, following the country's political conditions and experimenting with the anatomy of what may be termed as the biennale mode of exhibition making in the city's public sphere. She has also participated in several community- based art projects as an artist.
