African-American art is a broad term describing visual art created by African Americans. The range of art they have created, and are continuing to create, over more than two centuries is as varied as the artists themselves. Some have drawn on cultural traditions in Africa, and other parts of the world, for inspiration. Others have found inspiration in traditional African-American plastic art forms, including basket weaving, pottery, quilting, woodcarving and painting, all of which are sometimes classified as "handicrafts" or "folk art".
Faith Ringgold was an American painter, author, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, and intersectional activist, perhaps best known for her narrative quilts.
Ernest Crichlow was an American social realist artist known for his narrative paintings and illustrations from the Depression-era, which focused on social injustice and the realities faced by African Americans.
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.
Deborah Willis is a contemporary African-American artist, photographer, curator of photography, photographic historian, author, and educator. Among her awards and honors, she is a 2000 MacArthur Fellow. She is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts of New York University. In 2024, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Betty Blayton was an American activist, advocate, artist, arts administrator and educator, and lecturer. As an artist, Blayton was an illustrator, painter, printmaker, and sculptor. She is best known for her works often described as "spiritual abstractions". Blayton was a founding member of the Studio Museum in Harlem and board secretary, co-founder and executive director of Harlem Children's Art Carnival (CAC), and a co-founder of Harlem Textile Works. She was also an advisor, consultant and board member to a variety of other arts and community-based service organizations and programs. Her abstract methods created a space for the viewer to insert themselves into the piece, allowing for self reflection, a central aspect of Blayton's work.
"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 used 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.
Michael Arthur Cummings is an American visual artist and quilter. He lives in Harlem, New York.
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.
Vivian E. Browne was an American artist. Born in Laurel, Florida, Browne was mostly known for her painting series called Little Men and her Africa series. She is also known for linking abstraction to nature in her tree paintings and in a series of abstract works made with layers of silk that were influenced by her travels to China. She was an activist, professor, and has received multiple awards for her work. According to her mother, Browne died at age 64 from bladder cancer.
Otto Neals is an American painter and sculptor. Throughout his career, Neals worked as an illustrator at the Brooklyn Post Office while pursuing independent art projects in his spare time. He currently resides in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Emmett Wigglesworth is a muralist, painter, sculptor, fabric designer, poet and civil rights activist from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has resided in New York since 1958. Wigglesworth is known for his abstract and colorful murals that he says are inspired by his own cultural heritage and life experience.
Weusi Artist Collective is an organization of African-American artists, established in 1965, based in the Harlem section of New York City. Inspired by the Black Arts Movement, the members of the Weusi Artist Collective create art invoking African themes and symbols. The organization was a major driving force behind the development, production and dissemination of black art in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.
Steffani Jemison is an American artist, writer, and educator. Her videos and multimedia projects explore the relationship between Black embodiment, sound cultures, and vernacular practices to modernism and conceptual art. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and other U.S. and international venues. She is based in Brooklyn, New York and is represented by Greene Naftali, New York and Annet Gelink, Amsterdam.
Kay Brown (1932-2012) was an African American artist, Printmaker, published author, Graphic and Fashion designer. She graduated at New York City College in 1968, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. She was also a graduate at Howard University in 1986 with a Master of Fine Arts degree. Brown became the first woman awarded a membership into the Weusi Artist Collective, based in Harlem during the 1960s and 1970s. The Weusi Collective, named for the Swahili word for “blackness”, was founded in 1965, composed entirely of men. The fact that she was the only female member of this collective inspired her to seek out ways of representing the neglected Black female artists. She is widely acknowledged as one of the founders of the Where We At Black women artists' collective in New York City. Brown's works are credited for representing issues that affected the global Black community via her mixed media collages and prints. Brown's work was featured in the "We Wanted a Revolution" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.
Bisa Butler is an American fiber artist who has created a new genre of quilting that has transformed the medium. Although quilting has long been considered a craft, her interdisciplinary methods—which create quilts that look like paintings—have catapulted quilting into the field of fine art. She is known for her vibrant, quilted portraits celebrating Black life, portraying both everyday people and notable historical figures. Her works now count among the permanent collections at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Art Institute of Chicago, Pérez Art Museum Miami and about a dozen other art museums nationwide. She has also exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the Epcot Center, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and many other venues. In 2020, she was commissioned to quilt cover images for Time magazine, including the "Person of the Year" issue and its "100 Women of the Year" issue. With a multi-year wait list for private commissions, one of Butler's quilts sold at auction in 2021 for $75,000 USD.
Ann Graves Tanksley is an American artist. Her mediums are representational oils, watercolor and printmaking. One of her most noteworthy bodies of work is a collection based on the writings of African-American novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. The Hurston exhibition is a two hundred plus piece collection of monotypes and paintings. It toured the United States on and off from 1991 through 2010.
William "Bill" Lowell Howell was a graphic designer, painter, illustrator, set designer and photographer. He was an early member of the Weusi Artist Collective, a group of artists who helped birth the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s. He was art director for The New Lafayette Theatre in New York and its Black Theater magazine. He co-founded the Pamoja Studio Gallery in New York in 1967.
The Cinque Gallery (1969–2004) was co-founded by artists Romare Bearden, Ernest Crichlow, and Norman Lewis as an outgrowth of the Black power movement to "provide a place where the works of unknown, and neglected artists of talent …" — primarily Black artists — "would not only be shown but nurtured and developed". "Relying on a series of volunteers, Cinque hosted solo, group, and touring exhibitions," and sponsored an artist-in-residence program, which was inaugurated with collagist Nanette Carter.
The French Collection is a series of twelve quilt paintings by American artist Faith Ringgold completed between 1991 and 1997. Divided into two parts composed of eight and four quilts each, the series utilizes Ringgold's distinct style of story quilts to tell the fictional story of a young African American woman in the 1920s, Willia Marie Simone, who leaves Harlem for Paris to live as an artist and model. The stories, illustrated in acrylic paint and written in ink surrounding the paintings, narrate Willia Marie's journey as she befriends famous artists, performers, writers, and activists, runs a café and works as a painter, and develops a distinct Black feminist intellectual worldview based on her experiences and identity. Willia Marie's interactions with notable modernist artists and their oeuvres are an archetypical example of Ringgold's responses to the predominantly white male artistic canon, wherein she often directly invoked, embraced, and challenged the central figures of modernist art.
“Outspoken: Dindga McCannon, May 7, 2018