Wifredo Óscar de la Concepción Lam y Castilla, better known as Wifredo Lam, was a Cuban artist who sought to portray and revive the enduring Afro-Cuban spirit and culture. Inspired by and in contact with some of the most renowned artists of the 20th century, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Lam melded his influences and created a unique style, which was ultimately characterized by the prominence of hybrid figures. This distinctive visual style of his also influences many artists. Though he was predominantly a painter, he also worked with sculpture, ceramics and printmaking in his later life.
Ursula von Rydingsvard is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for creating large-scale works influenced by nature, primarily using cedar and other forms of timber.
Dana Frankfort is an artist based in Houston and a painting professor at University of Houston. Her work often engages with the history of abstract art and features bright colors, gestural brushwork, and text.
Teresita Fernández is a New York-based visual artist best known for her public sculptures and unconventional use of materials. Her work is characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking. Her experiential, large-scale works are often inspired by landscape and natural phenomena as well as diverse historical and cultural references. Her sculptures present spectacular optical illusions and evoke natural phenomena, land formations, and water in its infinite forms.
Luis Camnitzer is a German-born Uruguayan artist, curator, art critic, and academic who was at the forefront of 1960s Conceptual Art. Camnitzer works primarily in sculpture, printmaking, and installation, exploring topics such as repression, institutional critique, and social justice.
José Braulio Bedia Valdés is a Cuban painter currently residing in Florida.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons is a Cuban-born artist based in Nashville, Tennessee. Campos-Pons works primarily in photography, performance, audiovisual media, and sculpture. She is considered a "key figure" among Cuban artists who found their voice in a post-revolutionary Cuba. Her art deals with themes of Cuban culture, gender and sexuality, multicultural identity as well as interracial family (Cuban-American), and religion/spirituality.
María Brito is a Cuban-American artist specializing in painting, sculpture and installations.
Ernesto Oroza is a Cuban artist and designer.
María Elena González is a Cuban-American sculptor based in Brooklyn and the Bay Area. She is known for objects, installations and public art that interweave post-minimalist form, conceptual art and concern for materials and craft. Her early work explored themes of memory, family, identity, loss and dislocation through formal, architectural and mapping modes that address site, place and social circumstances; her later work makes connections between nature and art, engaging a broad range of media and sensory experience. In 2020, artist and scholar Ellen Levy wrote "González's art re-invents nature as culture" through an "exquisite attunement" that uncovers formal and thematic analogies between both realms and synesthetic connections between visual and aural senses.
Antonia Eiriz Vázquez (1929–1995) was an influential Cuban painter whose work was known for its Expressionist qualities and was exhibited throughout Latin America during her life.
Sandra Ramos is a Cuban contemporary painter, printmaker, collagist, video and installation artist who explores nationality, gender, and identity in her work. She is known for works featuring her character of the Cuban Pioneer girl, who is composed of a self-portrait and an appropriated portion of an old illustration from 1895' L' illustration French magazine. Ramos currently lives in Miami, Florida, and serves as an artist in residence at Bakehouse Art Complex. Previously, she was a resident artist at The Foutain Head Art Studios. She is also a renowned curator in Cuba, and she won a national award for her curatorial work on the exhibition La Huella Múltiple in 2003 from the Consejo Nacional de las Artes Plásticas (CNAP) in Havana, Cuba.
Sigrid Sandström is a Swedish artist and a professor of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. Her work is characterized by graphic abstraction, an embrace of color and difference in scale, and an array of techniques used to apply paint and other materials to canvas, ranging from cloths and rugs, to masking with tape, squeegee-ing and smearing, and collaging. She has also worked in film and video, most notably for her 2005 exhibition Her Black Flags at the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland, CA, and in sculpture and installation. Artforum critic Naomi Fry, reviewing a 2007 show at Edward Thorp Gallery, cited the artist's interest in landscape as subject and noted that Sandström "also grapples here with painting’s essential difficulty in the face of the sublime. As the works consistently teeter on the verge of abstraction, the interplay between a more traditional naturalism and geometric fragmentation provides a salient tension."
Carlos Alfonzo (1950–1991) was a Cuban-American painter known for his neo-impressionistic style. His work has been collected by Whitney Museum of American Art and Smithsonian Institution.
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.
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.
José María Mijares was a Cuban contemporary visual artist. He began drawing in his adolescent years and entered the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts on a scholarship at the age of 16. His greatest influences were the artists of the "Havana School": Carlos Enríquez, René Portocarrero, Cundo Bermúdez, as well as his professors, most notable being modernist painter Fidelio Ponce. He was also a part of the influential group, Los Diez Pintores Concretos, or as they are usually referred to, Los Diez. Although the group had a relatively short life, 1959–1961, and exhibited together only a few times, they remain an important part of Cuba's art history especially in the pre-Castro years and leading up to the revolution. He left Cuba in 1968, resigning his teaching position at the academy when Fidel Castro came into power. Based in Miami, he continued to be a prolific painter and until his death in 2004, at the age of 82.
María Emilia Castagliola is a Cuban-American painter and a conceptual artist. Born in Havana, Cuba, she immigrated to the United States in 1961. Her early work stressed her Cuban roots with the use of Catholic and Renaissance icons; her more recent projects have been installation and community-based.
William Cordova is a contemporary cultural practitioner and interdisciplinary artist currently residing between Lima, Peru; North Miami Beach, Florida; and New York.
Nyugen Smith is an American artist and educator based in Jersey City whose works responds to the legacy of European colonial rule in African diaspora and considers imperialist practices of oppression, violence, and intergenerational trauma. Smith's work has been featured in exhibitions at key galleries and museums which include the El Museo del Barrio and the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
