The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) is a contemporary art museum in San Francisco, California. MoAD holds exhibitions and presents artists exclusively of the African diaspora, one of only a few museums of its kind in the United States. Located at 685 Mission St. adjacent to the St. Regis Hotel in the Yerba Buena Arts District, MoAD is a nonprofit organization as well as a Smithsonian Affiliate. Prior to 2014, MoAD educated visitors on the history, culture, and art of the African diaspora through permanent and rotating exhibitions. After a six-month refurbishment in 2014 to expand the gallery spaces, the museum reopened and transitioned into presenting exclusively fine arts exhibitions. MoAD does not have a permanent collection and instead works directly with artists or independent curators when developing exhibitions.
Alison Saar is a Los Angeles, California based sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist. Her artwork focuses on the African diaspora and black female identity and is influenced by African, Caribbean, and Latin American folk art and spirituality. Saar is well known for "transforming found objects to reflect themes of cultural and social identity, history, and religion."
Thelma Golden is the Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City, United States. She is noted as one of the originators of the term post-blackness. From 2017 to 2020, ArtReview chose her annually as one of the 10 most influential people in the contemporary art world.
Saya Woolfalk is an American artist known for her multimedia exploration of hybridity, science, race and sex. Woolfalk uses science fiction and fantasy to reimagine the world in multiple dimensions.
Arnold J. Kemp is an American artist who works in painting, print, sculpture, and poetry. Kemp received a BA/BFA from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and an MFA from Stanford University.
Mequitta Ahuja is a contemporary American feminist painter of African American and South Asian descent who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Ahuja creates works of self-portraiture that combine themes of myth and legend with personal identity.
Laylah Ali (born 1968) is a contemporary visual artist known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format.
Jefferson Pinder is an African-American performance artist whose work provokes commentary about race and struggle.
Jina Valentine is a contemporary American visual artist whose work is informed by the techniques and strategies of American folk artists. She uses a variety of media to weave histories—including drawing, papermaking, found-object collage, and radical archiving.
Elia Alba (1962) was born in Brooklyn, New York. She is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Queens, New York. Alba's ongoing project The Supper Club depicts contemporary artists of color in portraits, and presents dinners where a diverse array of artists, curators, historians and collectors address topics related to people of color and to women.
Michael Paul Britto is a New York contemporary artist who explores the consequences of racial inequality through photography, video, collage, sculpture and performance. Britto shines a light on important racial issues using contemporary art. His work has been exhibited predominantly in New York, but also internationally, with exhibitions in Spain, Poland, and England. In 2004, he won the Individual Artist grant from New York State Council of The Arts, and in 2005, he was awarded the Media Arts Fellowship Grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Nicole Awai is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York and Austin, Texas. Her work captures both Caribbean and American landscapes and experiences and engages in cultural critique. She works in many media including painting, photography, drawing, installations, ceramics, and sculpture as well as found objects.
Kevin Blythe Sampson is an American artist and retired police officer living in Newark, New Jersey. He makes sculptures from discarded found objects that act as memorials for various people who have died. He has a studio based out of Newark.
Carlos Rolón, also known professionally under the pseudonym Dzine, is an American contemporary visual artist of Puerto Rican descent. Rolón's work has been shown at museums and galleries internationally, including the Bass Museum of Art, Miami, Marta Herford Museum, Germany, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico, New Orleans Museum of Art, and the 2007 Venice Biennale.
Cecile Chong is an American artist based in Brooklyn, New York, whose work addresses the process of cultural assimilation and the development of individual identity. For many years she has contributed to New York City public school art programs as a teaching artist.
Paul Claude Gardère was a Haitian-born, Brooklyn-based visual artist whose work explored "post-colonial history, cultural hybridization, race, and identity, in and beyond the Haitian diaspora." Gardère's work has been widely exhibited throughout the United States, including at institutions such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Figge Art Museum, Lehigh University, Pomona College Museum of Art, and the Jersey City Museum, and is included in a number of prominent institutional collections, including that of Thea Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Milwaukee Art Museum, the Figge Art Museum, the Columbus Museum, the Beinecke Library at Yale University and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University.
Michi Meko is an American multidisciplinary artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. He is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and the Atlanta Artadia Award as well as a finalist for the 2019 Hudgens Prize. His work incorporates the visual language of naval flags and nautical wayfinding, combined with romanticized objects of the American South. Throughout his various platforms, his work engages contradictions and paradoxes that he uncovers through examining his personal history, African American folk traditions, and narratives that confront or circumvent established narratives.
Beili Liu is a Chinese-born US-based visual artist who makes large-scale, process-driven sculptural environments that examine themes of migration, cultural memory, materiality, labor, social and environmental concerns. Through unconventional use of commonplace materials and elements such as thread, needle, scissors, feather, salt, wax, and cement, Liu extrapolates complex cultural narratives through a hybrid work form that merges site-responsive installation, sculpture, public art, and performance. Liu lives and works in Austin, Texas. Liu is the Leslie Waggener Professor in the Fine Arts and is a University of Texas System Regents' Outstanding Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Cullen Washington, Jr. is an African-American contemporary abstract painter. Washington lives and works in 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.
