Nick Cave is an American sculptor, dancer, performance artist, and professor. He is best known for his Soundsuit series: wearable assemblage fabric sculptures that are bright, whimsical, and other-worldly, often made with found objects. He also trained as a dancer with Alvin Ailey and often incorporates dance and performance into his works. His later sculptures have focused on color theory and included mixed media and large-scale installations. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, and directs the graduate fashion program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He continues to work on Soundsuits as well as works completed as a sculptor, dancer, and performance artist.
Jeff Donaldson was a visual artist whose work helped define the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Donaldson, co-founder of AfriCOBRA and contributor to the momentous Wall of Respect, was a pioneer in African-American personal and academic achievement. His art work is known for creating alternative black iconography connected to Africa and rooted in struggle, in order to replace the history of demeaning stereotypes found in mainstream white culture.
Wadsworth Aikens Jarrell is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker. He was born in Albany, Georgia, and moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he attended the Art Institute of Chicago. After graduation, he became heavily involved in the local art scene and through his early work he explored the working life of African-Americans in Chicago and found influence in the sights and sounds of jazz music. In the late 1960s he opened WJ Studio and Gallery, where he, along with his wife, Jae, hosted regional artists and musicians.
Theaster Gates is an American social practice installation artist and a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, where he still lives and works.
AfriCOBRA is an African-American artists' collective formed in Chicago in 1968. The group was founded by Jeff Donaldson, Wadsworth Jarrell, Jae Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Nelson Stevens, and Gerald Williams.
The Organization of Black American Culture (OBA-C) was conceived during the era of the Civil Rights Movement by Hoyt W. Fuller as a collective of African-American writers, artists, historians, educators, intellectuals, community activists, and others. The group was originally known as Committee for the Arts (CFA), which formed in February 1967 in Southside Chicago, Illinois. By May 1967, the group became OBAC and included Black intellectuals Hoyt W. Fuller, the poet Conrad Kent Rivers, and Gerald McWorter. OBAC aimed to coordinate artistic support in the struggle for freedom, justice and equality of opportunity for African Americans. The organization had workshops for visual arts, drama, and writing, and produced two publications: a newsletter, Cumbaya, and the magazine Nommo.
Turtel Onli is an American artist, entrepreneur, author, art therapist, educator, and publisher.
Kavi Gupta is a contemporary art gallery owned by gallerist Kavi Gupta. Headquartered in the West Loop neighborhood of Chicago, the gallery operates multiple exhibition spaces as well as Kavi Gupta Editions, a publishing imprint and bookstore.
Elaine "Jae" Jarrell is an American artist best known for her fashion designs and her involvement with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s.
The Wall of Respect was an outdoor mural first painted in 1967 by the Visual Arts Workshop of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC). It is considered the first large-scale, outdoor community mural, which spawned a movement across the U.S. and internationally. The mural represented the contributions of fourteen designers, photographers, painters, and others, notably Chicago muralist William Walker, in a design layout proposed by Laini (Sylvia) Abernathy. Some of the artists would go on to found the influential AfriCOBRA artists collective. The work comprised a montage of portraits of heroes and heroines of African American history painted on the sides of two story, closed tavern building at the corner of Chicago's East 43rd Street and South Langley Avenue, in Bronzeville, Chicago, sometimes called the Black Belt. Images included Nat Turner, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Gwendolyn Brooks, W.E.B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, Aretha Franklin, and Harriet Tubman, among others. While it only lasted a few years, until the building was torn down in 1972, it inspired community mural projects across the United States and internationally.
Barbara Jones-Hogu was an African-American artist best known for her work with the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) and for co-founding the artists' collective AfriCOBRA.
Norman Parish was an American artist and art dealer. He was the founder and director of the Parish Gallery in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC. The gallery was described by The Washington Post as an art gallery "that spotlighted African American artists at a time when few other galleries concentrated on showing their work."
Carolyn Mims Lawrence is a visual artist and teacher known for her role in the Chicago Black Arts Movement. She earned a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s degree in 1968 from the Illinois Institute of Technology with a thesis entitled “Teaching Afro-American Culture through the Visual Arts.” In 1967 Lawrence joined OBAC to create the Wall of Respect, a mural composed of portraits of African American heroes located on the South Side of Chicago. Lawrence collaborated with muralist William Walker to paint the section of the wall honoring Black Muslims.
Tom Lloyd (1929–1996) was an American sculptor, activist and community organizer.
Napoleon Jones-Henderson is an American weaver and multimedia artist most known for his role in AfriCOBRA, an artist collective established in Chicago, Illinois, in 1968. Jones-Henderson joined AfriCOBRA in 1969, a year after its founding.
Kevin Cole is an African-American artist and educator. He has created more than 45 public art works including a 55-foot long installation for the Atlanta International Airport, and the Coca-Cola Centennial Olympic Mural for the 1996 Olympic games.
Billy Abernathy (1939–2016) was an American photographer. He was married to Laini (Sylvia) Abernathy, an artist and activist.
Robert Paige is a multi-disciplinary artist and arts educator working across textile design, painting, collage, and sculpture based in Woodlawn, Chicago. As an artist and textile designer allied with the Black Arts Movement, Robert E. Paige trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and worked at the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Sears Roebuck & Company and Fiorio Milano design house in Italy. Paige was raised in Chicago's South Side where he continues to live and work, further developing his longstanding career in the decorative arts. His work visually and conceptually interrogates political and cultural themes that reflect both historical and contemporary African American art references, as well as traditional textile practices of West Africa.
Nelson Stevens was an artist known for his involvement with Chicago-based Black art collective AfriCOBRA. Stevens' works are held by institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Tate.
Sherman Beck is an American artist born, raised, and based in Chicago, Illinois, known for his brightly-colored kaleidoscopic paintings. Beck was one of the founding members of the Black arts collective AFRICOBRA in the 1970s.
