Lois Mailou Jones (1905–1998) was an artist and educator. Her work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Muscarelle Museum of Art, and The Phillips Collection. She is often associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
Lorna Simpson is an American photographer and multimedia artist whose works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally. In 1990, she became the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. She came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with photo-text installations such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal that questioned the nature of identity, gender, race, history and representation. Simpson continues to explore these themes in relation to memory and history using photography, film, video, painting, drawing, audio, and sculpture.
Louis Jessup Delsarte III was an African-American artist known for what has sometimes been called his "illusionistic" style. He was a painter, muralist, printmaker, and illustrator.
Sanford Biggers is a Harlem-based interdisciplinary artist who works in film/video, installation, sculpture, music, and performance. An L.A. native, he has lived and worked in New York City since 1999.
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."
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.
Dindga McCannon, born on July 31, 1947, is an African-American artist, fiber artist, muralist, teacher author and illustrator.
Maren Hassinger is an African-American artist and educator whose career spans four decades. Hassinger uses sculpture, film, dance, performance art, and public art to explore the relationship between the natural world and industrial materials. She incorporates everyday materials in her art, like wire rope, plastic bags, branches, dirt, newspaper, garbage, leaves, and cardboard boxes. Hassinger has stated that her work “focuses on elements, or even problems—social and environmental—that we all share, and in which we all have a stake…. I want it to be a humane and humanistic statement about our future together.”
Clifford Owens is an African-American mixed media and performance artist, writer and curator. Owens was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1971 and spent his early life in Baltimore. Owens is known for his works which center on the body and often include interactions with the audience and spontaneity.
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.
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 explores the Western canon through the elements of non-Western reading.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is an American writer, educator, and artist from East Palo Alto, California. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts known for her work in installations, book arts, immersive text-based installations, large-scale public text pieces, publications, collage, and audio recordings. Rasheed's art explores memory, ritual, discursive regimes, historiography, and archival practices through the use of fragments and historical residue. Based in Brooklyn, NY, she is currently the Arts Editor for SPOOK magazine. In 2021 her work was featured in an Art 21 documentary, "The Edge of Legibility."
Paula Wilson is an African American "mixed media" artist creating works examining women's identities through a lens of cultural history. She uses sculpture, collage, painting, installation, and printmaking methods such as silkscreen, lithography, and woodblock. In 2007 Wilson moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Carrizozo, New Mexico, where she currently lives and works with her woodworking partner Mike Lagg.
Ming Smith is an American photographer. She was the first African-American female photographer whose work was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Scherezade García is a Dominican-born, American painter, printmaker, and installation artist. She is a co-founder of the Dominican York Proyecto GRÁFICA Collective. García is an Advisor to the Board of Directors of No Longer Empty and sits on the board of directors of the College Art Association (CAA) for the period of 2020–2024. She is assistant professor of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Austin, Texas and is represented by Praxis Art in New York, and Ibis Contemporary Art Gallery in New Orleans.
Nanette Carolyn Carter, born January 30, 1954, in Columbus, Ohio, is an African-American artist and college educator living and working in New York City, best known for her collages with paper, canvas and Mylar.
Deborah Roberts is an American contemporary artist living and working in Austin, Texas. Roberts is a mixed media collage artist whose figurative works depict the complexity of Black subjecthood and explores themes of race, identity, and gender politics taking on the subject of otherness as understood against the backdrop of existing societal norms of race and beauty. Her work has been exhibited internationally across the US and Europe. Roberts’s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California. Roberts was named 2023 Texas Medal of Arts Award Honoree for the Visual Arts. Roberts was selected to participate in the Robert Rauschenberg Residency (2019) and is a recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman Grant (2018), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2016), and the Ginsburg-Klaus Award Fellowship (2014). She received her MFA from Syracuse University, New York. She lives and works in Austin, Texas. Roberts is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, and Vielmetter Los Angeles.
Rico Gatson is a multidisciplinary artist working in Brooklyn, New York, whose work draws from his African-American background. Through his art, he provides social commentary on significant moments in African-American history. His work combines abstract patterns with vibrant colors, which creates confrontational work that references African American culture and history.
Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room is an art exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The exhibit, which opened on November 5, 2021, uses a period room format of installation to envision the past, present, and future home of someone who lived in Seneca Village, a largely African American settlement which was destroyed to make way for the construction of Central Park in the mid-1800s.
James Little is an American painter and curator. He is known for his works of geometric abstraction which are often imbued with exuberant color. He has been based in New York City.
