Career
Bey's collage work intertwines a host of materials such as caulking, resin, wood and fabric. [5] Focusing on Black women, Bey captures passion and strength, power and sensuality in her work, which explores the resilience of women and the hypocrisy of societal expectations where women are concerned. [6] Bey uses photographic images of Black female figures in contemporary culture such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Solange, Issa Rae, and Michaela Coel with text overlaid which speaks of the narratives Black women are currently creating about their identity. [2] Her work has been exhibited at Band of Vices Gallery, Coagula Curatorial, Liquid Courage Gallery and Barnsdall Art Park's Municipal Art Gallery. [7]
She is a tenured professor in the department of studio arts at Glendale Community College. [8]
April Bey's first solo museum exhibition titled, Atlantica, The Gilda Region opened on May 26, 2021, in Los Angeles at the California African American Museum. It is an immersive installation that discusses Afrofuturism, queerness, feminism, and internet culture in Black America. [9]
Jenny Holzer is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in Hoosick, New York. The main focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other structures, and illuminated electronic displays.
Lorraine O'Grady is an American artist, writer, translator, and critic. Working in conceptual art and performance art that integrates photo and video installation, she explores the cultural construction of identity – particularly that of Black female subjectivity – as shaped by the experience of diaspora and hybridity. O'Grady studied at Wellesley College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop before becoming an artist at age forty-five. Regarding the purpose of art, O'Grady said in 2016: "I think art’s first goal is to remind us that we are human, whatever that is. I suppose the politics in my art could be to remind us that we are all human."
Betye Irene Saar is an African American artist known for her work in the medium of assemblage. Saar is a visual storyteller and an accomplished printmaker. Saar was a part of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, which engaged myths and stereotypes about race and femininity. Her work is considered highly political, as she challenged negative ideas about African Americans throughout her career; Saar is best known for her art work that critiques American racism toward Blacks.
Lynn Hershman Leeson is a multimedia American artist and filmmaker. Her work combines art with social commentary, particularly on the relationship between people and technology. Leeson is a pioneer in new media, and her work with technology and in media-based practices helped legitimize digital art forms. Her interests include feminism, race, surveillance, and artificial intelligence and identity theft through algorithms and data tracking. She has been referred to as a "new media pioneer" for the prescient incorporation of new science and technologies in her work. She is based in San Francisco, California.
Lynda Benglis is an American sculptor and visual artist known especially for her wax paintings and poured latex sculptures. She maintains residences in New York City, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kastellorizo, Greece, and Ahmedabad, India.
Chitra Ganesh is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Ganesh's work across media includes: charcoal drawings, digital collages, films, web projects, photographs, and wall murals. Ganesh draws from mythology, literature, and popular culture to reveal feminist and queer narratives from the past and to imagine new visions of the future.
Mary Kelly is an American conceptual artist, feminist, educator, and writer.
Howardena Pindell is an American artist, curator and educator. She is known as a painter and mixed media artist, her work explores texture, color, structures, and the process of making art; it is often political, addressing the intersecting issues of racism, feminism, violence, slavery, and exploitation. She is known for the wide variety of techniques and materials used in her artwork; she has created abstract paintings, collages, "video drawings," and "process art."
Toyin Ojih Odutola is a Nigerian-American contemporary visual artist known for her vivid multimedia drawings and works on paper. Her unique style of complex mark-making and lavish compositions rethink the category and traditions of portraiture and storytelling. Ojih Odutola's artwork often investigates a variety of themes from socio-economic inequality, the legacy of colonialism, queer and gender theory, notions of blackness as a visual and social symbol, as well as experiences of migration and dislocation.
Ellen Lesperance is an American artist and educator, known for her paintings. Her works are typically gouache paintings that pattern the full-body garments of female activists engaged in Direct Action protests. She is based in Portland, Oregon, and has three children.
Akosua Adoma Owusu is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker and producer. Her films explore the colliding identities of black immigrants in America through multiple forms ranging from cinematic essays to experimental narratives to reconstructed Black popular media. Interpreting the notion of "double consciousness," coined by sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, Owusu aims to create a third cinematic space or consciousness. In her work, feminism, queerness, and African identities interact in African, white American, and black American cultural spaces.
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.
Deana Lawson (1979) is an American artist, educator, and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is primarily concerned with intimacy, family, spirituality, sexuality, and Black aesthetics.
Lisa Schulte is an American artist, also known as "The Neon Queen", who is best known for her work in expressive neon sculpture. Schulte started bending neon in the early 1980s, creating custom neon signs and neon prop rentals to the entertainment industry under her Los Angeles-based neon studio, Nights of Neon. She is recognized for working with light as an artist and designer, and owner of one of the largest neon collections in the world.
Janet Henry is a visual artist based in New York City.
Rujeko Hockley is a New York–based US curator. Hockley is currently the Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Lisa Diane Wedgeworth is an African-American visual artist, curator, and writer. Her work encompasses abstract painting, video, and performance works. She has been a teaching artist at several Los Angeles-area museums, including the California African American Museum, the Craft and Folk Art Museum, and LACMA. She earned her B.A. in studio art from California State University, Los Angeles, in 2002, and her M.F.A. in Studio Art from the same institution in 2014. In an interview with the magazine Curator in 2018, Wedgeworth cited childhood visits to the Barnsdall Art Park in the 1970s and 80s, and the Candice Bergen-narrated commercials for the Norton Simon Museum, as early influences. She also cites Lezley Saar, daughter of Betye Saar, as well as painter Suzanne Jackson and "outsider/self-taught artists." Wedgeworth's work is in the permanent collection of the California African American Museum.
Shadia Alem or Shādiyah 'Ālim or in Arabic: شادية عالم is a Saudi Arabian visual artist.
Maura Reilly is the director of the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, and previously served as the founding curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Reilly is also known for developing the concept of ‘curatorial activism’.
Elżbieta Jabłońska is a Polish contemporary visual artist, and professor. She has served as the Chair of Drawing and has taught art at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń since 1996. Jablonska is known for photography, film, installation art, and performance art. Her artwork engages with Polish stereotypes and myths of women, mothers, and the Catholicism. She lives in Bydgoszcz in northern Poland, in a farming cooperative.
