The Studio Museum in Harlem is an American art museum devoted to the work of artists of African descent. The museum's galleries are currently closed in preparation for a building project that will replace the current building, located at 144 West 125th Street between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, with a new one on the same site. Founded in 1968, the museum collects, preserves and interprets art created by African Americans, members of the African diaspora, and artists from the African continent. Its scope includes exhibitions, artists-in-residence programs, educational and public programming, and a permanent collection.
Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist working in text, fabric, audio, digital images and installation video, and is best known for her photography. She achieved prominence through her early 1990s photographic project The Kitchen Table Series. Her photographs, films and videos focus on serious issues facing African Americans today, including racism, sexism, politics and personal identity.
The Block Museum of Art is a free public art museum located on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The Block Museum was established in 1980 when Chicago art collectors Mary and Leigh B. Block donated funds to Northwestern University for the construction of an art exhibition venue. In recognition of their gift, the university named the changing exhibition space the Mary and Leigh Block Gallery. The original conception of the museum was modeled on the German kunsthalle tradition, with no permanent collection, and a series of changing temporary exhibits. However, the Block Museum soon began to acquire a permanent collection as the university transferred many of its art pieces to the museum. In recognition of its growing collection and its expanding programming, the Gallery became the American Alliance of Museums accredited Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art in 1998. The Block embarked on a major reconstruction project in 1999 and reopened in a new facility in September 2000.
Barkley L. Hendricks was a contemporary American painter who made pioneering contributions to Black portraiture and conceptualism. While he worked in a variety of media and genres throughout his career, Hendricks' best known work took the form of life-sized painted oil portraits of Black Americans.
Dario Robleto is an American transdisciplinary artist, researcher, writer, and teacher. His research-driven practice results in intricately handcrafted objects that reflect his exploration of music, popular culture, science, war, and American history.
Annalee Davis is a visual artist from Barbados whose occupation consists of drawing, painting, object making, art installation and video production. She works a hybrid practice of jobs as a visual artist, instigator, cultural producer, educator and writer. Davis works on the intersection of biography and history, focusing on post-plantation economies by engaging with a particular landscape on Barbados. Concerned with representing migratory displacement, postcolonial recovery, and conceptions of "longing and belonging", Davis uses art and form to capture "an understanding of the shifting terrain in our minds and on our lands, through video, wall-based work, and installations."
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 2019-2020. 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.
Andrea Chung is an American artist born in Newark, NJ and currently works in San Diego, CA. Her work focuses primarily on island nations in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean Sea; specifically on how outsiders perceive a fantastic reality in spaces deemed as “paradise”. In conjunction, she explores relationships between these cultures, migration, and labor - all within the context of colonial and postcolonial regimes. Her projects bring in conscientious elements of her own labor and incorporate materials significant to the cultures she studies. This can be seen in works such as, “Bato Disik”, displayed in 2013 at the Helmuth Projects, where the medium of sugar represents the legacy of sugar plantations and colonial regime.
Radcliffe Bailey was an American contemporary visual artist noted for mixed-media, paint, and sculpture works that explore African-American history. He was based in Atlanta, Georgia.
David Stuart Rubin is an American curator, art critic, and artist.
Jim Roche is an American contemporary artist, known for his "outsider art" chronicling Southern culture in sculptures, graphics, and performance art since the 1960s. His work, which often adopts the folk motifs of contemporary Southern culture, has occasioned descriptions as both "standing for the far right" and ... "confront[ing] hypocrisy and social injustice ... aligned [] with the downtrodden, disenfranchised and working class populations."
Maia Cruz Palileo is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Their work consists of paintings, drawings and sculptures, and explores their Filipino, American heritagethrough the examination of memory, family photographs, and oral histories.
William Cordova is a contemporary cultural practitioner and interdisciplinary artist currently residing between Lima, Peru; North Miami Beach, Florida; and New York.
María Berrío is a Colombian-born visual artist working in Brooklyn, New York. The LA Times wrote that Berrío's large-scale collage works, "meticulously crafted from layers of Japanese paper, reflect on cross-cultural connections and global migration seen through the prism of her own history." She is known for her use of Japanese print paper, which she cuts and tears to create collages with details painted in with watercolour. Berrío, who spent her childhood in Colombia and moved to the US in her teens, draws from Colombian folklore and South American literature. Salomé Gómez-Upegui describes Berrío's work and inspirations by stating, "Women, narratives of displacement, and ecology play a central role in Berrío’s striking compositions, which are very much inspired by Latin American magical realism." In her interview with The Georgia Review in 2019, the artist discusses the tradition of aluna of the Kogi people in her work Aluna (2017). Berrío's collages are characterized by representations of mainly women, who often stare back at the viewer.
Lauren Haynes is an American curator who is senior curator of contemporary art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Previously, she was director of artist initiatives and curator of contemporary art at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Momentary in Arkansas.
William Bryan Jordan Jr. was an American art historian who facilitated acquisitions, curated exhibitions, and authored publications on Spanish artists and still life paintings, particularly from the Golden Age.
Allison Janae Hamilton is a contemporary American artist who works in sculpture, installation, photography and film.
Stacy Lynn Waddell is an American artist.
Michael P. Mezzatesta is an American art historian, curator, and museum director. He served as the Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from 1987 to 2003.
Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art was a landmark exhibition held at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art from November 10, 1994 until March 5, 1995. Organized by curator Thelma Golden, Black Male was a survey of the changing representations of black masculinity in contemporary art from the 1970s to the 1990s. The show included almost seventy works by twenty-nine artists of varying race, gender, and ethnicity. It also featured an extensive film and video program that explored representations of blackness in Hollywood, the independent cinema, video, and television. Black Male was widely labelled controversial and heavily criticized for its political subject matter.
