Morris Louis Bernstein, known professionally as Morris Louis, was an American painter. During the 1950s he became one of the earliest exponents of Color Field painting. While living in Washington, D.C., Louis, along with Kenneth Noland and other Washington painters, formed an art movement that is known today as the Washington Color School.
Marisol Escobar, otherwise known simply as Marisol, was a Venezuelan-American sculptor born in Paris, who lived and worked in New York City. She became world-famous in the mid-1960s, but lapsed into relative obscurity within a decade. She continued to create her artworks and returned to the limelight in the early 21st century, capped by a 2014 major retrospective show organized by the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. The largest retrospective of Marisol's artwork, Marisol: A Retrospective has been organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and curated by Cathleen Chaffee for these museums: the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and the Dallas Museum of Art . Although it is supplemented by loans from international museums and private collections, the exhibition draws largely on artwork and archival material Marisol left to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum as a bequest upon her death.
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.
Zilia Sánchez Dominguez is a Puerto Rico-based Cuban artist from Havana. She started her career as a set designer and an abstract painter for theatre groups in Cuba before the Cuban revolution of 1953-59. Sanchez blurs the lines between sculpture and painting by creating canvases layered with three dimensional protrusions and shapes. Her works are minimal in color, and have erotic overtones.
Oscar Murillo is an artist working within the painting tradition. He currently lives and works in various locations.
Xaviera Simmons is an American contemporary artist. She works in photography, performance, painting, video, sound art, sculpture, and installation. Between 2019 and 2020, Simmons was a visiting professor and lecturer at Harvard University. Simmons was a Harvard University Solomon Fellow from 2019 to 2020. Simmons has stated in her lectures and writings that she is a descendant of Black American enslaved persons, European colonizers and Indigenous persons through the institution of chattel slavery on both sides of her family's lineage.
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.
Shinique Smith is an American visual artist, known for her colorful installation art and paintings that incorporate found textiles and collage materials. She is based in Los Angeles, California.
Henry Taylor is an American artist and painter who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He is best known for his acrylic paintings, mixed media sculptures, and installations.
Iman Issa is an Egyptian multi-disciplinary artist whose work looks at the power of display in relation to academic and cultural institutions at large.
Mark Flood is an American artist.
Hannah Greely is an American mixed media artist. She mainly creates site-specific sculptural works that seek to redefine the boundary between art and life. Her sculptures are colorful and often replicate ordinary objects or subjects, with subtle incongruencies in material or form. Her material experimentations lend the work an uncanny quality, as recognizable objects fade from real to fictional. Greely’s work explores open dialogue between object and environment, as well as the theatrical otherness of sculpture.
Sonia Gomes is a Brazilian contemporary artist who lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. Gomes frequently employs found objects and textiles in her works, twisting, stretching, and bundling them to fashion wiry or knotty sculptural forms.
Jennifer Rubell is an American conceptual artist known for her participatory sculpture, video, and food performances. Rubell has held performances and exhibitions at Foundation Beyeler in Riehen, Switzerland, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Performa, Dallas Contemporary, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Saatchi Gallery in London, and the Brooklyn Museum. Rubell lives and works in New York City.
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 focuses on untold stories and unheard voices, using portraiture, landscape, and design to explore the Western canon.
Juana Valdés is a multi-disciplinary artist and an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her works examine Afro-Cuban migration through the lens of material culture and personal experience. Valdés's work in ceramics, printmaking, video, and installation explores the colonial and imperial economies that tie the transoceanic movement of people and political ideologies across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Her installations and photographs of mass-produced decorative objects chart the history of colonial trade in conversation with her sub-Saharan and East Asian ancestry, demonstrating that the ancestry of black and brown populations is inextricably linked to trade and globalization. Valdés works with a wide range of source material that reflects the impact of global networks of exchange on contemporary issues of transcultural identity, displacement and migration, and the climate crisis.
Christina Quarles is a queer, mixed contemporary American artist and writer, living and working in Los Angeles, whose gestural, abstract paintings confront themes of racial and sexual identities, gender, and queerness. She is considered at the forefront of a generation of millennial artists and her works shatter the societal manners of physical classification.
Vaughn Spann is an American contemporary artist working primarily on printmaking and painting. His style moves between abstraction and figuration, and at times incorporates symbols such as the American flag or the letter X. He lives and works in Newark, New Jersey.
Jamilah Sabur is a Jamaican-born contemporary artist working across different disciplines and issues such as performance, installation, video, geography, identity, and language. Sabur lives in Miami, Florida.
Karon Davis, is an American visual artist, and a founder of the Underground Museum in Los Angeles. She is known as a sculptor and an installation artist touching on issues of race and identity in America through representations of the human body. Her artistic practice is influenced by dance, theater, and moving image.
