Kehinde Wiley is an American portrait painter based in New York City. He is known for his naturalistic paintings of black people that reference the work of Old Master paintings. In 2017, Wiley was commissioned to paint former President Barack Obama's portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. The Columbus Museum of Art hosted an exhibition of his work in 2007 and describes his paintings as "heroic portraits which address the image and status of young African-American men in contemporary culture."
Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary African-American visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Thomas's collage work is inspired from popular art histories and movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, the Harlem Renaissance, and selected works by the Afro-British painter Chris Ofili. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art, and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender.
Derek Fordjour is an American interdisciplinary artist and educator of Ghanaian heritage who works in collage, video/film, sculpture, and painting. Fordjour lives and works in New York City.
Tim Okamura is a Japanese Canadian artist known for his contemporary realist portraits that combine graffiti and realism. His work has been on the cover of Time Magazine and has been featured in several major motion pictures. Okamura's paintings are featured in major permanent collections around the world such as London's National Portrait Gallery and Washington DC's National Portrait Gallery. He was also one of several artists to be shortlisted in 2006 for a proposed portrait of Queen Elizabeth of England.
Beginning with painter Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington, it has been tradition for the president of the United States to have an official portrait taken during their time in office, most commonly an oil painting. This tradition has continued to modern times, although since the adoption of photography as a widely used and reliable technology, the official portrait may also be a photograph.
Artis Lane is a Black Canadian sculptor and painter. Her bronze bust of Sojourner Truth is on display in Emancipation Hall at the Capitol Visitor Center in Washington, D.C. It was unveiled in 2009, and was the first statue in the Capitol to represent an African-American woman. Lane's sculpture of Rosa Parks is on display in the Oval Office of President Biden.
Drip painting is a form of art, often abstract art, in which paint is dripped or poured on to the canvas. This style of action painting was experimented with in the first half of the twentieth century by such artists as Francis Picabia, André Masson and Max Ernst, who employed drip painting in his works The Bewildered Planet, and Young Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non-Euclidean Fly (1942). Ernst used the novel means of painting Lissajous figures by swinging a punctured bucket of paint over a horizontal canvas.
Titus Kaphar is an American contemporary painter whose work reconfigures and regenerates art history to include the African-American subject. His paintings are held in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, New Britain Museum of American Art, Seattle Art Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and University of Michigan Museum of Art.
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.
President Barack Obama is an oil-on-canvas portrait of Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, completed by the artist Kehinde Wiley in 2018 for the National Portrait Gallery.
First Lady Michelle Obama, initially titled Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, is a portrait of former First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama, painted by the artist Amy Sherald. Unveiled in 2018, it hangs in the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Washington, D.C. The six-by-five-foot oil-on-linen painting shows Obama, rendered in Sherald's signature grisaille, resting her chin lightly on her hand, as a geometric print dress flows outward filling the frame against a sky-blue background.
Harmonia Rosales is an American artist from Chicago.
Portraits of the former President of the United States George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush were painted by the American portrait artist John Howard Sanden in 2011 and 2012 respectively. The paintings were unveiled in 2012 in a ceremony at the White House where they presently hang.
Doron Langberg is an American painter. Langberg paints in the style of genre painting and portraiture and addresses issues of gender and sexuality by making love and desire a shared experience through the surface and subjects of his paintings.
Ai-Da is described by its creator as "the world's first ultra-realistic humanoid robot" artist. Completed in 2019, Ai-Da is an artificial intelligence robot that makes drawings, painting, and sculptures. It is named after Ada Lovelace The robot gained international attention when it was able to draw people from sight with a pencil using her bionic hand and cameras in her eyes.
Michelle Smith is an American fashion designer. From 2000 to 2019, she was the designer at Milly, a contemporary womenswear line she cofounded. In 2020, she launched a new direct-to-consumer brand called Michelle Smith, for which she will design two collections annually.
Nikkolas Smith is an American contemporary artist, illustrator, and activist. He predominantly depicts African-American marginalized voices, as well as social justice in his works. His digital paintings are widely shared on social media and have been featured in Times Square, The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Sharon Sprung is an American painter based in Brooklyn, New York. She is primarily known for her portrait paintings such as Congressional portraits of Jeannette Rankin and Patsy Mink, as well as former First Lady Michele Obama's official White House portrait. She is an instructor at the Art Students League of New York.
Susan Chen is an artist and painter in New York City. Her portrait paintings survey communities, exploring topics on identity, the psychology of race, and social change.
