Sean Scully is an Irish-born American-based artist working as a painter, printmaker, sculptor and photographer. His work is held in museum collections worldwide and he has twice been named a Turner Prize nominee. Moving from London to New York in 1975, Scully helped lead the transition from Minimalism to Emotional abstraction in painting, abandoning the reduced vocabulary of Minimalism in favor of a return to metaphor and spirituality in art.
Grayson Perry is an English contemporary artist, writer and broadcaster. He is known for his ceramic vases, tapestries and cross-dressing, as well as his observations of the contemporary arts scene, and for dissecting British "prejudices, fashions and foibles".
Richard William Hamilton CH was an English painter and collage artist. His 1955 exhibition Man, Machine and Motion and his 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, are considered by critics and historians to be among the earliest works of pop art. A major retrospective of his work was at Tate Modern until May 2014.
Richard Billingham is an English photographer and artist, film maker and art teacher. His work has mostly concerned his family, the place he grew up in the West Midlands, but also landscapes elsewhere.
Nicholas David Gordon Knight OBE is a British fashion photographer and founder and director of SHOWstudio.com. He is an honorary professor at University of the Arts London and was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by the same university. He has produced books of his work including retrospectives Nicknight (1994) and Nick Knight (2009). In 2016, Knight's 1992 campaign photograph for fashion brand Jil Sander was sold by Phillips auction house at the record-breaking price of HKD 2,360,000.
Richard Dean Tuttle is an American postminimalist artist known for his small, casual, subtle, intimate works. His art makes use of scale and line. His works span a range of media, from sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, and artist’s books to installation and furniture. He lives and works in New York City, Abiquiú, New Mexico, and Mount Desert, Maine.
Simeon Solomon was a British painter associated with the Pre-Raphaelites who was noted for his depictions of Jewish life and same-sex desire. His career was cut short as a result of public scandal following his arrests and convictions for attempted sodomy in 1873 and 1874.
Roy Arden is a Canadian artist, born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is part of the Vancouver contemporary photo art scene. He also creates sculpture from found objects, oil paintings, graphite drawings and collage, and curates and writes on contemporary art.
Stewart Brown is an English poet, university lecturer and scholar of African and Caribbean Literature.
Stanley Greaves is a Guyanese painter and writer who is one of the Caribbean's most distinguished artists. Writing in 1995 at the time of a retrospective exhibition to celebrate Greaves's 60th birthday, Rupert Roopnarine stated: "It may be that no major Caribbean artist of our time has been more fecund and versatile than Stanley Greaves of Guyana." Greaves himself has said of his own creativity:
I still don't talk about myself as making art! Other people do that. I am a maker of things. In the early days, I found empty matchboxes, cigarette boxes, bits of string, wire, empty boot-polish tins, whatever, and made things. Drawing was just another activity, and it still is. My favorite medium is still wood, of course. My hitherto secret preoccupation with writing poems, which has now come to light, is another form of making. Recently at the University of Birmingham, where I did a reading, I was asked if the paintings influenced the poetry, and I said, "No, they come from the same source."
Johnny Lee Coffelt born is an American artist who lives and works in Brooklyn New York City. Coffelt paints, sculpts, sews, makes book arts, and curates art exhibitions.
Thomas Tulis is an American photographer and painter living and working in Atlanta, Georgia. He was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Dhruva Mistry is an Indian sculptor.
Melvin "Mel" Edwards is an American contemporary artist, teacher, and abstract steel metal sculptor. Additionally he has worked in drawing and printmaking. His artwork has political content often referencing African-American history, as well as the exploration of themes within slavery. Visually his works are characterized by the use of straight-edged triangular and rectilinear forms in metal. He lives between Upstate New York and in Plainfield, New Jersey.
Karen Graffeo is an American artist based in Birmingham, Alabama. While specializing in photography, Graffeo is also a choreographer and installation artist. Early in her photography career, she worked as Jerry Uelsmann's assistant and model. She earned an undergraduate degree from Jacksonville State University and a Master of Arts in art education from the University of Alabama, where she also earned MFA degrees in photography and painting. She has taught at the University of Montevallo since 1990 and has also taught at University of Alabama at Birmingham. Graffeo is a founding member of Stare Studio along with Virginia Scruggs and Melissa Springer. From 1992 and until 2000, Graffeo was represented by Agnes in Birmingham, Alabama.
John Trobaugh in Lansing, Michigan is an American artist specializing in photography and based in Birmingham, Alabama. Trobaugh received his BFA in 1996 with honors from University of Alabama at Birmingham and went on to study photography at the School of Visual Arts. In 2003 he received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Nick Cave is an American fabric sculptor, dancer, and performance artist. Cave's family was large in size and always supportive of his artistic interests. He claims his upbringing gave him an artistic attentiveness to found objects and assemblages. Cave started his artistic journey by manipulating fabrics from older sibling's hand-me-downs. After he graduated from Hickman High School in 1977, he enrolled in the Kansas City Art Institute where he finished a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1982. He is best known for his Soundsuits – wearable fabric sculptures that are bright, whimsical, and other-worldly. He also trained as a dancer with Alvin Ailey. His later sculptures focused on color theory, mixed media, and large-scale installations. He currently resides in Chicago, Illinois, and is director of the graduate fashion program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He still continues to work on Soundsuits as well as works completed as a sculptor, dancer, and performance artist.
Ras Akyem is a Barbadian painter. A graduate of the Edna Manley School of Art in Jamaica, his work is heavily influenced by the Rastafari movement and bears resemblance to the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat. His work is frequently exhibited alongside that of Ras Ishi Butcher.
Vanley Burke is a British Jamaican photographer and artist. His photographs capture experiences of his community's arrival in Britain, the different landscapes and cultures he encountered, the different ways of survival and experiences of the wider African-Caribbean community. In 2021 he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society.
Alberta Whittle is a Barbadian-Scottish artist who works across media: film, sculpture, print, installation and performance. She lives and works in Glasgow. She was the winner of the Margaret Tait Award in 2018, winner of the Frieze Artist Award in 2020, received a Turner Prize bursary, also in 2020, and will represent Scotland at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2022.
