The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) is a private art and design college in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1826 as the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts, it is regarded as one of the oldest art colleges in the United States.
Edward Henry Berge (1876–1924) was an American sculptor. He is mainly known for his bronze monumental works and figures, created in the traditional manner in contrast with the avant-garde work of his contemporaries.
Nnenna Okore is an Australian-born Nigerian artist who lives and works in Chicago at North Park University, Chicago. Her largely abstract sculptural forms are inspired by richly textured forms and colors within the natural environment. Okore's work frequently uses flotsam or discarded objects to create intricate sculptures and installations through repetitive and labor-intensive processes. She learnt some of her intricate methods, including weaving, sewing, rolling, twisting and dyeing, by watching local Nigerians perform daily domestic tasks. In her more recent works, Okore uses plant-based materials to create large bioplastic art forms and installations. Her work has been shown in galleries and museums within and outside of the United States. She has won several international awards, including a Fulbright Scholar Award in 2012. and the Australian Creative Victoria Award in 2021.
Phoebe Boswell, is a multi-media artist and film maker based in London, UK. She has won awards in the UK and Ukraine.
Mary Evans is a contemporary artist who lives and works in England and utilises in her subject matter both her African heritage and European upbringing.
Arturo Lindsay is a Panamanian-born artist and professor of art and art history at Spelman College. His scholarship specializes in ethnographic research on African spiritual and aesthetic retentions in contemporary American cultures. His Panamanian/American identity is reflected in his art, which focuses on African culture in America.
Martha Jackson Jarvis is an American artist known for her mixed-media installations that explore aspects of African, African American, and Native American spirituality, ecological concerns, and the role of women in preserving indigenous cultures. Her installations are composed using a variety of natural materials including terracotta, sand, copper, recycled stone, glass, wood and coal. Her sculptures and installations are often site-specific, designed to interact with their surroundings and create a sense of place. Her works often focus on the history and culture of African Americans in the southern United States. In her exhibition at the Corcoran, Jarvis featured over 100 big collard green leaves, numerous carp and a live Potomac catfish.
Joyce J. Scott is an African-American artist, sculptor, quilter, performance artist, installation artist, print-maker, lecturer and educator. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016, and a Smithsonian Visionary Artist in 2019, Scott is best known for her figurative sculptures and jewelry using free form, off-loom beadweaving techniques, similar to a peyote stitch. Each piece is often constructed using thousands of glass seed beads or pony beads, and sometimes other found objects or materials such as glass, quilting and leather. In 2018, she was hailed for working in new medium — a mixture of soil, clay, straw, and cement — for a sculpture meant to disintegrate and return to the earth. Scott is influenced by a variety of diverse cultures, including Native American and African traditions, Mexican, Czech, and Russian beadwork, illustration and comic books, and pop culture.
Maren Hassinger is an African-American artist and educator whose career spans four decades. Hassinger uses sculpture, film, dance, performance art, and public art to explore the relationship between the natural world and industrial materials. She incorporates everyday materials in her art, like wire rope, plastic bags, branches, dirt, newspaper, garbage, leaves, and cardboard boxes. Hassinger has stated that her work “focuses on elements, or even problems—social and environmental—that we all share, and in which we all have a stake…. I want it to be a humane and humanistic statement about our future together.”
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.
Clifford Owens is an African-American mixed media and performance artist, writer and curator. Owens was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1971 and spent his early life in Baltimore. Owens is known for his works which center on the body and often include interactions with the audience and spontaneity.
Catherine Elizabeth Cooke is an American designer whose career has lasted more than 73 years. She is principally known for her jewelry. She has been called "an icon within the tradition of modernist jewelry" and "a seminal figure in American Modernist studio jewelry". Her pieces have been shown nationally and internationally and are included in a number of museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. She is regarded as an important role model for other artists and craftspeople.
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.
Deana Haggag is an American arts organization leader. She is the program officer in arts and culture at Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Formally, Haggag was the President and CEO of United States Artists (2017–2020), and was Executive Director of The Contemporary (2013–2017) in Baltimore, Maryland.
Amy Sherald is an American painter. She works mostly as a portraitist depicting African Americans in everyday settings. Her style is simplified realism, involving staged photographs of her subjects. Since 2012, her work has used grisaille to portray skin tones, a choice she describes as intended to challenge conventions about skin color and race.
Zohra Opoku is a German-born Ghanaian textile artist and photographer. She used textile patterns to inform her photographed portraits. She was born in Altdöbern, Germany, and she lives in Accra. She is known for her installations, performances, textile designs, photographs and videos.
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.
Lina Iris Viktor is a British-Liberian visual artist based in New York. The New York Times described her paintings as "queenly self-portraits with a futuristic edge". The artist is represented by Pilar Corrias, London.
Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi is a South African-American painter and multi-media artist. In 2019, she won the 15th Tollmand Award, an annual South African award for visual artist.
LaToya M. Hobbs is an American painter and printmaker best known for her large-scale portraits of black women. Hobbs moved to Baltimore, MD later in her life where she works as a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She gained recognition for her portraiture and figurative imagery in the 2010s, receiving several travel grants and awards in the late twenty teens. Her work addresses the ideas of black beauty and cultural identity that center around being a woman.
