Mary Evans (born 1963) is a contemporary artist who lives and works in England and utilises in her subject matter both her African heritage and European upbringing.
Evans was born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1963. After a foundation course at St Helens College of Art & Design (1981–82), she studied painting for her B.A. at Gloucestershire College of Arts and Technology (1982–85), and attained her M.A. in Fine Art at Goldsmiths' College (1987–89). She subsequently did a postgraduate residency at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam (1991–93).
Evans has received a number of significant commissions, awards and residencies, including a Smithsonian Artists Research Fellowship, National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC, in 2010. [1] She typically uses paper as her medium, producing large-scale, site-specific work — sometimes with reference to highly charged subjects, such as lynching in the Deep South. [2] Her work has been exhibited extensively across the UK, as well as internationally — in the United States, the Netherlands, Mexico and China, including Farewell to Post-Colonialism at the 3rd Guangzhou Triennale in 2008, [3] Port City (2007) at the Arnolfini, Bristol, and A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad (2003), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. [4]
Reviewing her solo exhibition Cut and Paste (2012, Tiwani Contemporary, London), critic Stephanie Baptist wrote: "Her mixed media artworks reveal not just her story, but African ancestral stories that are not often told. I will liken Evans to a griot. This role is an important one, as she is both historian and storyteller. She carries the collective narratives of the village, the tragic and the triumphant. She who remembers can reinterpret the unwritten histories and share the untold stories of the un-namable that may have otherwise been forgotten." [5]
In 2020 Evans was included in the show Paper Routes: Women to Watch 2020 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. [6]
Evans is the director of the Slade School of Fine Art at UCL in London
Olu Oguibe is a Nigerian-born American artist and academic. Professor of Art and African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, Oguibe is a senior fellow of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, New York City, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. He is also an art historian, art curator, and leading contributor to post-colonial theory and new information technology studies. Oguibe is also known to be a well respected scholar and historian of contemporary African and African American art and was honoured with the State of Connecticut Governor's Arts Award for excellence and lifetime achievement on 15 June 2013.
Papel picado is a traditional Mexican decorative craft made by cutting elaborate designs into sheets of tissue paper. Papel picado is considered a Mexican folk art. The designs are commonly cut from as many as 40-50 colored tissue papers stacked together and using a guide or template, a small mallet, and chisels, creating as many as fifty banners at a time. Papel picado can also be made by folding tissue paper and using small, sharp scissors. Common themes include birds, floral designs, and skeletons. Papel picados are commonly displayed for both secular and religious occasions, such as Easter, Christmas, the Day of the Dead, as well as during weddings, quinceañeras, baptisms, and christenings. In Mexico, papel picados are often incorporated into the altars (ofrendas) during the Day of the Dead and are hung throughout the streets during holidays. In the streets of Mexico, papel picados are often strung together to create a banner that can either be hung across alleyways or displayed in the home.
Ghada Amer is a contemporary artist, much of her work deals with issues of gender and sexuality. Her most notable body of work involves highly layered embroidered paintings of women's bodies referencing pornographic imagery.
Minnie Eva Evans was an African-American artist who worked in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s. Evans used different types of media in her work such as oils and graphite, but started with using wax and crayon. She was inspired to start drawing due to visions and dreams that she had all throughout her life, starting when she was a young girl. She is known as a southern folk artist and outsider artist, as well as a surrealist and visionary artist.
The Nsukka group is the name given to a group of Nigerian artists associated with the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
Sylvia Snowden is an African American abstract painter who works with acrylics, oil pastels, and mixed media to create textured works that convey the "feel of paint". Many museums have hosted her art in exhibits, while several have added her works to their permanent collections.
Ndidi Dike was born in 1960 in London. She is a Nigeria-based visual artist working in sculpture and mixed-media painting. She is one of Nigeria's leading female artists, working in an artistic world typically designed for men. She is from Amaokwe Item in Bende local government of Abia State. She has three living sisters
Contemporary African art is commonly understood to be art made by artists in Africa and the African diaspora in the post-independence era. However, there are about as many understandings of contemporary African art as there are curators, scholars and artists working in that field. All three terms of this "wide-reaching non-category [sic]" are problematic in themselves: What exactly is "contemporary", what makes art "African", and when are we talking about art and not any other kind of creative expression?
Sue Williamson is an artist and writer based in Cape Town, South Africa.
Thomas Trevor is a British curator and writer on contemporary art.
Veronica Maudlyn Ryan is a Montserrat-born British sculptor. She moved to London with her parents when she was an infant and now lives between New York and Bristol. In December 2022, Ryan won the Turner Prize for her 'really poetic' work.
María Eugenia Chellet is a Mexican artist who has evolved from photography to mixed media and currently focuses mostly on performance. Her work focuses on exploring female archetypes and other images relating to femininity, often using herself in roles such as female Biblical figures, those in classical artwork and those from commercial mass media of the 20th century to the present. Her work has been recognized with membership in the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana.
Koyo Kouoh is Cameroonian-born curator who has been serving as Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town since 2019. In 2015, the New York Times called her "one of Africa’s pre-eminent art curators and managers", and from 2014 to 2022, she was annually named one of the 100 most influential people in the contemporary art world by ArtReview.
Uzo Egonu was a Nigerian-born artist who settled in Britain in the 1940s, only once returning to his homeland for two days in the 1970s, although he remained concerned with African political struggles. According to Rasheed Araeen, Egonu was "perhaps the first person from Africa, Asia or the Caribbean to come to Britain after the War with the sole intention of becoming an artist." According to critic Molara Wood, "Egonu's work merged European and Igbo traditions but more significantly, placed Africa as the touchstone of modernism. In combining the visual languages of Western and African art, he helped redefine the boundaries of modernism, thereby challenging the European myth of the naïve, primitive African artist."
Rita Keegan is an American-born artist, lecturer and archivist, based in England since the late 1970s. She is a multi-media artist whose work uses video and digital technologies. Keegan is best known for her involvement with in the UK's Black Arts Movement in the 1980s and her work documenting artists of colour in Britain.
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum is a visual artist. Her practice includes drawing, painting, installation, and animation. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including the GTA21 Triennial Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto, Canada; The Bronx Museum in New York, USA; The Wiels Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, Belgium; Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Kunsthaus Zürich, Germany; The Showroom in London, England; and the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Billie Zangewa is a Malawian artist who hand sews silk fabrics to create collage tapestries, and who now lives in Johannesburg. Since 2004, her art has been featured in international exhibitions including the Paris Art Fair at the Grand Palais in Paris.
ruby onyinyechi amanze, is a Nigerian-born British-American artist noted for drawings and works on paper which focus on cultural hybridity or "post-colonial non-nationalism." In addition to being an artist, she has also worked as a teacher and curator. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Ayana M. Evans is an African-American performance artist and educator based in New York City and an adjunct professor of visual art at Brown University. She also serves as editor-at-large of Cultbytes, an online art publication.
Joy Labinjo is a British–Nigerian artist based in London, England. Born in 1994, she is known for her large colorful figure paintings with flattened perspective that take inspiration from her collection of old family photos, found photos and historical archives. Her paintings usually explore themes of culture, identity, race and belonging through her depictions of Black individuals and families in everyday situations while also drawing from her experiences growing up as a British-Nigerian woman in the U.K.