Sister Gertrude Morgan was a self-taught African-American artist, musician, poet and preacher. Born in LaFayette, Alabama, she relocated to New Orleans in 1939, where she lived and worked until her death in 1980. Sister Morgan achieved critical acclaim during her lifetime for her folk art paintings. Her work has been included in many groundbreaking exhibitions of visionary and folk art from the 1970s onwards.
Irene Rice Pereira was an American abstract artist, poet and philosopher who played a major role in the development of modernism in the United States. She is known for her work in the genres of geometric abstraction, abstract expressionism and lyrical abstraction, as well as her use of the principles of the Bauhaus school. Her paintings and writings were significantly influenced by the complex intellectual currents of the 20th century.
Moses Ernest Tolliver was an American artist. He was known as "Mose T", after the signature on his paintings, signed with a backwards "s."
Purvis Young was an American artist from the Overtown neighborhood of Miami, Florida. Young's work, often a blend of collage and painting, utilizes found objects and the experience of African Americans in the south. Young gained recognition as a cult contemporary artist, with a collectors' following that included Jane Fonda, Damon Wayans, Jim Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and others. In 2006 a feature documentary titled Purvis of Overtown was produced about his life and work. His work is found in the collections of the American Folk Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the High Museum of Art, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Bakehouse Art Complex, and others. In 2018, he was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.
Gayleen Aiken was an American artist who lived in Barre, Vermont. She achieved critical acclaim during her lifetime for her naive paintings and her work has been included in exhibitions of visionary and folk art since the 1980s. She is considered an outsider artist.
Sybil Gibson was an American painter, she was self taught artist.
Thornton Dial was a pioneering American artist who came to prominence in the late 1980s. Dial's body of work exhibits formal variety through expressive, densely composed assemblages of found materials, often executed on a monumental scale. His range of subjects embraces a broad sweep of history, from human rights to natural disasters and current events. Dial's works are widely held in American museums; ten of Dial's works were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014.
Nellie Mae Rowe was an African-American artist from Fayette County, Georgia. Although she is best known today for her colorful works on paper, Rowe worked across mediums, creating drawings, collages, altered photographs, hand-sewn dolls, home installations and sculptural environments. She was said to have an "instinctive understanding of the relation between color and form." Her work focuses on race, gender, domesticity, African-American folklore, and spiritual traditions.
Royal Robertson, also known as the self-proclaimed Prophet Royal Robertson, was an American artist.
Anne Goldthwaite was an American painter and printmaker and an advocate of women's rights and equal rights. Goldthwaite studied art in New York City. She then moved to Paris where she studied modern art, including Fauvism and Cubism, and became a member of a circle that included Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. She was a member of a group of artists that called themselves Académie Moderne and held annual exhibitions.
John Bunion (J.B.) Murray was an abstract expressionist painter from Glascock County, GA. His work has been shown among folk art exhibitions and is included at the American Folk Art Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and has been featured in many museum exhibitions, including "Self-Taught Genius" at AFAM and "When the Stars Begin to Fall" at the Studio Museum. His work is best known for its codified use of colors and improvised script, called "spirit script," which could only be translated by the artist.
Hawkins Bolden (1914–2005) was an American artist known for his "scarecrow" assemblages made from pots, pans, leather belts, rubber hoses and other found materials.
Alice Williams Cling is a Native American ceramist and potter known for creating beautiful and innovative pottery that has a distinctive rich reds, purples, browns and blacks that have a polished and shiny exteriors, revolutionizing the functional to works of art. Critics have argued that she is the most important Navajo potter of the last 25 years.
Georgia Blizzard was an American ceramic artist from Virginia. She was self-taught and her work is in the permanent collections of several American art museums.
"Missionary" Mary L. Proctor is an American artist, best known for her visionary paintings, collages, and assemblages.
Lucy Marie (Young) Mingo is an American quilt maker and member of the Gee's Bend Collective from Gee's Bend (Boykin), Alabama. She was an early member of the Freedom Quilting Bee, which was an alternative economic organization created in 1966 to raise the socio-economic status of African-American communities in Alabama. She was also among the group of citizens who accompanied Martin Luther King Jr. on his 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
Joe Minter is an American sculptor based in Birmingham, Alabama. His African Village in America, on the southwest edge of Birmingham, is an ever-evolving art environment populated by sculptures he makes from scrap metal and found materials; its theme is recognition of African American history from the first arrivals of captured Africans to the present. Individual pieces from Minter's thirty-year project have been in major exhibitions in the United States and are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others.
Ralph Griffin (1925–1992) was an American sculptor known for his sculptures made from tree roots.
Charlie Lucas is a contemporary sculptor born in Prattville, Alabama, in the area known as Pink Lily, who now lives and works in Selma, Alabama. He is owner and operator of the Tin Man Studio, part gallery and part studio, in Selma.
Henry Speller (1900–1997) was an American artist and blues musician working in Memphis, Tennessee. His style of drawing and painting is characterized by ornate, colorful, intimidating figures which he likened to "characters from Dallas".
