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.
Pamela Z is an American composer, performer, and media artist best known for her solo works for voice with electronic processing. In performance, she combines various vocal sounds including operatic bel canto, experimental extended techniques and spoken word, with samples and sounds generated by manipulating found objects. Z's musical aesthetic is one of sonic accretion, and she typically processes her voice in real time through the software program Max on a MacBook Pro as a means of layering, looping, and altering her live vocal sound. Her performance work often includes video projections and special controllers with sensors that allow her to use physical gestures to manipulate the sound and projected media.
Lesley Dill is an American contemporary artist. Her work, using a wide variety of media including sculpture, print, performance art, music, and others, explores the power of language and the mystical nature of the psyche. Dill currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Beatrice Were is a Ugandan AIDS activist.
Shigeyuki "Yuki" Kihara is an interdisciplinary artist of Japanese and Samoan descent. In 2008, her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; it was the first time a New Zealander and the first time a Pacific Islander had a solo show at the institution. Titled Shigeyuki Kihara: Living Photographs, the exhibition opened from 7 October 2008 to 1 February 2009. Kihara's self-portrait photographs in the exhibitions included nudes in poses that portrayed colonial images of Polynesian people as sexual objects. Her exhibition was followed by an acquisition of Kihara's work for the museum's collection.
Fiona Tan is a visual artist primarily known for her photography, film and video art installations. With her own complex cultural background, Tan's work is known for its skillful craftsmanship and emotional intensity, which often explores the themes of identity, memory, and history. Tan currently lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Toyin Ojih Odutola is a Nigerian-American contemporary visual artist known for her vivid multimedia drawings and works on paper. Her unique style of complex mark-making and lavish compositions rethink the category and traditions of portraiture and storytelling. Ojih Odutola's artwork often investigates a variety of themes from socio-economic inequality, the legacy of colonialism, queer and gender theory, notions of blackness as a visual and social symbol, as well as experiences of migration and dislocation.
Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet and artist based in New York and Santiago, Chile.
Zarina Hashmi, known professionally as Zarina, was an Indian American artist and printmaker based in New York City. Her work spans drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. Associated with the minimalist movement, her work utilized abstract and geometric forms in order to evoke a spiritual reaction from the viewer.
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.
Katrín Sigurdardóttir is a New York-based artist who works in installation and sculpture. Katrin studied at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts, Reykjavík and received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She creates complex structures built to be viewed in exhibition settings but not used as functional architecture. Conceptually, her work reflects issues of intimacy and memory in built spaces, historical recreations, and disorienting shifts in scale. Her work has appeared at the 2013 Icelandic Pavilion of the 55th Venice Biennale, the 33rd São Paulo Bienal, in 2018, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sculpture Center, and PS1 Contemporary Art Center.
Elyn Zimmerman is an American sculptor known for her emphasis on large scale, site specific projects and environmental art. Along with these works, Zimmerman has exhibited drawings and photographs since graduating with an MFA in painting and photography at University of California, Los Angeles in 1972. Her teachers included Robert Heineken, Robert Irwin, and Richard Diebenkorn.
Peju Alatise is a Nigerian artist, poet, writer, and a fellow at the National Museum of African Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution. Alatise received formal training as an architect at Ladoke Akintola University in Oyo State, Nigeria. She then went on to work for 20 years as a studio artist.
Ann Lewis is a multidisciplinary activist artist often working in public spaces. She focuses her attention on social justice and environmental issues and is best known for her politically charged and sometimes uncommissioned takeovers of public space. She is a 2018 artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute Residency for Equal Justice. She lives and works between Detroit, MI and Brooklyn, NY.
Pamela Rosenkranz is a Swiss multimedia artist who uses light and liquid to demonstrate her concepts along with performance, sculpture, painting, and installation art. Her work explores ideas and concepts of what it means to be human, its ideologies, emptiness and meaninglessness, as well as globalization and consumerism. She is represented by Karma International, Zurich / Los Angeles; Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; and Sprüth Magers Berlin, London and Los Angeles.
Namubiru Rose Kirumira. is a Ugandan sculptor and senior lecturer at the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts (MTSIFA), Department of Visual Arts, College of Engineering Design Art and Technology, at Makerere University. She specializes in human form, sculpted wood, clay and concrete monumental sculptures. Her works include the statue King Ronald Mwenda Mutebi where she assisted the sculptor and professor Francis Nnaggenda at Bulange Mengo, and Family at Mulago Hospital in Kampala.
Dr. Corina L. Apostol is an art curator, educator and writer from Constanța, Romania. She currently serves as an assistant professor of social practice in contemporary art and culture at the University of Amsterdam. Between 2019 and 2023 she was a curator at the Tallinn Art Hall. In 2022 she was appointed the curator of the Estonian pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale held in the Dutch pavilion. Her work has been recognised with nominations for the 2015 Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco Prize, the 2016 Kandinsky Prize, the 2020 Sergey Kuryokhin Award and the 2022 Igor Zabel Award.
Leilah Babirye is a Ugandan artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Outed in her native country as a lesbian and underground LGBTQ+ activist, Babirye's work is of large-scale ceramics, wooden sculptures, African masks, as well as drawings and paintings on paper. Babirye has had exhibitions at the Gordon Robichaux Gallery and the Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, as well as the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London. She has also produced work for Heidi Slimane for Celine's Art Project.
Pamela Elizabeth Acaye Kerunen, is a Ugandan writer, poet, actress, performance artist, installation artist, and art activist. She is the founding director of KEBU forum. She was the first female Ugandan artist to exhibit under the first ever Ugandan pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of Biennale di Venezia (2022).
The Afriart Gallery (AAG) is an art gallery located on the 7th Street Industrial Area in Kampala in Uganda that was established in 2002. It represents and manages careers of contemporary artists living and working on the African continent. AAG showcases artists at major international art exhibitions and art fairs. There is a gallery space exhibiting temporary exhibitions on ground. It is where the launch for the Artfest magazine happened.
