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.
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.
Lois Dodd, is an American painter and educator. Dodd was a key member of New York's postwar art scene. She played a large part and was involved in the wave of modern artists including Alex Katz and Yvonne Jacquette who explored the coast of Maine in the latter half of the 20th century.
Ming Fay is a Shanghai-born and New York City-based sculptor and professor. His work focuses on the concept of the garden as a symbol of utopia and the relationship between man and nature. Drawing upon an extensive knowledge of plants both Eastern and Western, real and mythical, Fay creates his own calligraphic floating forest of reeds, branches and surreal species. He is most well known for his sculpture and large scale installations and he currently teaches sculpture at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey.
Jean Shin is an American artist living in Brooklyn, NY. She is known for creating elaborate sculptures and site-specific installations using accumulated cast-off materials.
Whitfield Lovell is a contemporary African-American artist who is known primarily for his drawings of African-American individuals from the first half of the 20th century. Lovell creates these drawings in pencil, oil stick, or charcoal on paper, wood, or directly on walls. In his most recent work, these drawings are paired with found objects that Lovell collects at flea markets and antique shops.
Ezio Martinelli was an American artist who belonged to the New York School Abstract Expressionist artists, a leading art movement of the post-World War II era.
Sheila Pepe is an artist and educator living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She is a prominent figure as a lesbian cross-disciplinary artist, whose work employs conceptualism, surrealism, and craft to address feminist and class issues. Her most notable work is characterized as site-specific installations of web-like structure crocheted from domestic and industrial material, although she works with sculpture and drawing as well. She has shown in museums and art galleries throughout the United States.
Julia Kunin is an American sculpture and video artist. She was born in Vermont, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is inspired by organic forms, undersea creatures, and interior spaces, with a focus on the female body. She graduated from Rutgers University (M.F.A.) in 1993 and Wellesley College (B.A.) in 1984, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been featured in ARTnews, House and Garden, The Brooklyn Rail, and in Harmony Hammond's book Lesbian Art in America.
Jennie C. Jones is an African-American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been described, by Ken Johnson, as evoking minimalism, and paying tribute to the cross-pollination of different genres of music, especially jazz. As an artist, she connects most of her work between art and sound. Such connections are made with multiple mediums, from paintings to sculptures and paper to audio collages. In 2012, Jones was the recipient of the Joyce Alexander Wien Prize, one of the biggest awards given to an individual artist in the United States. The prize honors one African-American artist who has proven their commitment to innovation and creativity, with an award of 50,000 dollars. In December 2015 a 10-year survey of Jones's work, titled Compilation, opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas.
China Marks is an American artist creating process-directed sewn drawings and books.
Jacolby Satterwhite is an American contemporary artist who creates immersive installations. He has exhibited work at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, the New Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. In addition to MoMA, his work is in the public collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Seattle Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Kiasma, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Satterwhite has also served as a contributing director for the music video that accompanied Solange's 2019 visual album When I Get Home and directed a short film accompaniment to Perfume Genius's 2022 studio album Ugly Season.
Jina Valentine is a contemporary American visual artist whose work is informed by the techniques and strategies of American folk artists. She uses a variety of media to weave histories—including drawing, papermaking, found-object collage, and radical archiving.
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.
Kambui Olujimi is a New York-based visual artist working across disciplines using installation, photography, performance, tapestry, works on paper, video, large sculptures and painting. His artwork reflects on public discourse, mythology, historical narrative, social practices, exchange, mediated cultures, resilience and autonomy.
Tova Beck-Friedman is an American artist, sculptor, writer and filmmaker based in New York City. Her work has been exhibited in the United States, Australia, Israel, Europe, and Japan. Her work is in the collection of Grounds For Sculpture, Yeshiva University Museum, Newark Museum, Sculpture Garden, the Shoah Film Collection and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC.
Jerry Gant was an American visual artist, poet, performance artist and educator.
Kevin Blythe Sampson is an American artist and retired police officer living in Newark, New Jersey. He makes sculptures from discarded found objects that act as memorials for various people who have died. He has a studio based out of Newark.
Vincent DaCosta Smith was an American artist, painter, printmaker and teacher. He was known for his depictions of black life.
The Black Lunch Table (BLT) is a United States-based oral-history archiving project founded in 2005, focused on the lives and work of Black artists. Its work includes oral archiving, salons, peer teaching workshops, meetups, and Wikipedia edit-a-thons. The BLT brings people together to engage in dialogues about the writing, recording, and promoting inclusive art history. One of its aims is to address the racial and gender bias on Wikipedia by encouraging Wikipedia articles about African-American artists.
