Marie Watt is a contemporary artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. Enrolled in the Seneca Nation of Indians, Watt has created work primarily with textile arts and community collaboration centered on diverse Native American themes.
Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan American visual artist, known primarily for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work. Born in Kenya, Mutu now splits her time between her studio there in Nairobi and her studio in Brooklyn, New York, where she has lived and worked for over 20 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.
Renée Stout is an American sculptor and contemporary artist known for assemblage artworks dealing with her personal history and African-American heritage. Born in Kansas, raised in Pittsburgh, living in Washington, D.C., and connected through her art to New Orleans, her art reflects this interest in African diasporic culture throughout the United States. Stout was the first American artist to exhibit in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art.
Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist working in text, fabric, audio, digital images and installation video, and is best known for her photography. She achieved prominence through her early 1990s photographic project The Kitchen Table Series. Her photographs, films and videos focus on serious issues facing African Americans today, including racism, sexism, politics and personal identity.
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.
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.
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.
Meryl McMaster is a Canadian and Plains Cree photographer whose best-known work explores her Indigenous heritage. Based in Ottawa, McMaster frequently practices self-portraiture and portraiture to explore themes of First Nations peoples and cultural identity, and incorporates elements of performance and installation to preserve her mixed heritage and sites of cultural history in the Canadian landscape.
Maia Cruz Palileo is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Their work consists of paintings, drawings and sculptures, and explores their Filipino, American heritagethrough the examination of memory, family photographs, and oral histories.
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. Salomé Gómez-Upegui describes Berrío's work and inspirations by stating, "Women, narratives of displacement, and ecology play a central role in Berrío’s striking compositions, which are very much inspired by Latin American magical realism." 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 characterized 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.
Suchitra Mattai is a Guyanese-born American multidisciplinary contemporary artist, of South Asian descent. Her art practice includes mixed media paintings, fiber works, sculptures, and large scale installations which draw upon myth, memory, and her ancestral history, and often invite critical reflection on the legacy of colonialism in the Indo-Caribbean. She lives in Los Angeles, California, and previously lived in Denver, Colorado, and Canada.
