The John Jay College of Criminal Justice is a public college focused on criminal justice and located in New York City. It is a senior college of the City University of New York (CUNY). John Jay was founded as the only liberal arts college with a criminal justice and forensic focus in the United States. The college is known for its criminal justice, forensic science, forensic psychology, criminology, and public affairs programs. The college has a 46% graduation rate within 6 years for Bachelors degree, one of the lowest in the CUNY system.
Spelman College is a private, historically Black, women's liberal arts college in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. The college is part of the Atlanta University Center academic consortium in Atlanta. Founded in 1881 as the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, Spelman received its collegiate charter in 1924, making it America's oldest private historically black liberal arts college for women.
African-American art is a broad term describing visual art created by Americans who also identify as Black. The range of art they have created, and are continuing to create, over more than two centuries is as varied as the artists themselves. Some have drawn on cultural traditions in Africa, and other parts of the world, for inspiration. Others have found inspiration in traditional African-American plastic art forms, including basket weaving, pottery, quilting, woodcarving and painting, all of which are sometimes classified as "handicrafts" or "Folk Art."
Faith Ringgold is an American painter, writer, mixed media sculptor, and performance artist, best known for her narrative quilts.
Johnnetta Betsch Cole is an American anthropologist, educator, museum director, and college president. Cole was the first female African-American president of Spelman College, a historically black college, serving from 1987 to 1997. She was president of Bennett College from 2002 to 2007. During 2009–2017 she was Director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art.
Michele Faith Wallace is a black feminist author, cultural critic, and daughter of artist Faith Ringgold. She is best known for her 1979 book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. Wallace's writings on literature, art, film, and popular culture have been widely published and have made her a leader of African-American intellectuals. She is a Professor of English at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).
Mary Schmidt Campbell, is an American academic administrator and museum curator. She began her tenure as the 10th president of Spelman College on August 1, 2015. Prior to this position, Schmidt Campbell held several positions in New York City's cultural sector.
Selma Hortense Burke was an American sculptor and a member of the Harlem Renaissance movement. Burke is best known for a bas relief portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt that inspired the profile found on the obverse of the dime. She described herself as "a people's sculptor" and created many pieces of public art, often portraits of prominent African-American figures like Duke Ellington, Mary McLeod Bethune and Booker T. Washington. In 1979, she was awarded the Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet was an American artist of African-American and Native American ancestry, known for her sculpture. She was the first African-American graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1918 and later studied at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the early 1920s. She became noted for her work in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1934, Prophet began teaching at Spelman College, expanding the curriculum to include modeling and history of art and architecture. Prophet died in 1960 at the age of 70.
Camille Olivia Cosby is an American television producer, philanthropist, and the wife of comedian Bill Cosby. The character of Clair Huxtable from The Cosby Show was based on her. Cosby has avoided public life, but has been active in her husband's businesses as a manager, as well as involving herself in academia and writing. In 1990, Cosby earned a master's degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, followed by a Ph.D. in 1992.
Amalia K. Amaki is an African-American artist, art historian, educator, film critic and curator who recently resided in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she was Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa from 2007 to 2012.
Betty Blayton was an American activist, advocate, artist, arts administrator and educator, and lecturer. As an artist, Blayton was an illustrator, painter, printmaker, and sculptor. She is best known for her works often described as "spiritual abstractions". Blayton was a founding member of the Studio Museum in Harlem and board secretary, co-founder and executive director of Harlem Children's Art Carnival (CAC), and a co-founder of Harlem Textile Works. She was also an advisor, consultant and board member to a variety of other arts and community-based service organizations and programs. Her abstract methods created a space for the viewer to insert themselves into the piece, allowing for self reflection, a central aspect of Blayton's work.
The Spelman College Museum of Fine Art is a museum located on the Spelman College campus in Atlanta. The museum is housed in the Camille O. Hanks Cosby Academic Center named after philanthropist Camille Cosby, who had two daughters attend Spelman College. The museum states that it is the only museum in the nation dedicated to art by and about women of the African diaspora.
"Where We At" Black Women Artists, Inc. (WWA) was a collective of Black women artists affiliated with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It included artists such as Dindga McCannon, Kay Brown, Faith Ringgold, Carol Blank, Jerri Crooks, Charlotte Kâ (Richardson), and Gylbert Coker. Where We At was formed in the spring of 1971, in the wake of an exhibition of the same name organized by 14 Black women artists at the Acts of Art Gallery in Greenwich Village. Themes such as the unity of the Black family, Black female independence and embodiment, Black male-female relationships, contemporary social conditions, and African traditions were central to the work of the WWA artists. The group was intended to serve as a source of empowerment for African-American women, providing a means for them to control their self-representation and to explore issues of Black women's sensibility and aesthetics. Like AfriCobra, a Chicago-based Black Arts group, the WWA was active in fostering art within the African-American community and using it as a tool of awareness and liberation. The group organized workshops in schools, jails and prisons, hospitals, and cultural centers, as well as art classes for youth in their communities.
Valerie Maynard is an African-American sculptor, teacher, printmaker, and designer. Maynard's work frequently deals with themes of social inequality and the civil rights movement.
Dindga McCannon, born July 31, 1947, is an African-American artist, fiber artist, muralist, teacher author and illustrator.
Clarissa T. Sligh is an African-American book artist and photographer based in Asheville, North Carolina. At age 15, she was the lead plaintiff in a school desegregation case in Virginia. In 1988, she became a co-founder of Coast-to-Coast: A Women of Color National Artists' Project, which focused on promoting works completed by women of color.
Moira Roth was a feminist art historian and art critic who was Trefethen Professor of Art History at Mills College in Oakland, California from 1985 to 2017. She taught at the University of California, San Diego from 1974 to 1985. She was educated at the London School of Economics in England, and received a B.A. in sociology and an M.A. from New York University and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974. She wrote extensively on contemporary art, editing The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America 1970-1980, A Source Book, published by Astro Artz (1983). Her collection of essays, Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, was published, with a commentary by Jonathan D. Katz, by Psychology Press (1998), exploring the construction of masculinity and conflicting identities. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for Art in 1997, and the National Recognition in the Arts Award from the College Art Association in 2006. She appears in Lynn Hershman Leeson's 2010 documentary film !Women Art Revolution.
Nanette Carolyn Carter, born January 30, 1954 in Columbus, Ohio, is an African American artist and college educator living and working in New York City, best known for her collages with paper, canvas and Mylar.
Ann Graves Tanksley is an American artist. Her mediums are representational oils, watercolor and printmaking. One of her most noteworthy bodies of work is a collection based on the writings of African-American novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. The Hurston exhibition is a two hundred plus piece collection of monotypes and paintings. It toured the United States on and off from 1991 through 2010.
