Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an American activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. The United States Congress has honored her as "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement". Parks became a NAACP activist in 1943, participating in several high profile civil rights campaigns. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake's order to vacate a row of four seats in the "colored" section in favor of a White passenger, once the "White" section was filled. Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation, but the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) believed that she was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws, and she helped inspire the Black community to boycott the Montgomery buses for over a year. The case became bogged down in the state courts, but the federal Montgomery bus lawsuit Browder v. Gayle resulted in a November 1956 decision that bus segregation is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Nancy Spero was an American visual artist. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Spero lived for much of her life in New York City. She married and collaborated with artist Leon Golub. As both artist and activist, Nancy Spero had a career that spanned fifty years. She is known for her continuous engagement with contemporary political, social, and cultural concerns. Spero chronicled wars and apocalyptic violence as well as articulating visions of ecstatic rebirth and the celebratory cycles of life. Her complex network of collective and individual voices was a catalyst for the creation of her figurative lexicon representing women from prehistory to the present in such epic-scale paintings and collage on paper as Torture of Women (1976), Notes in Time on Women (1979) and The First Language (1981). In 2010, Notes in Time was posthumously reanimated as a digital scroll in the online magazine Triple Canopy. Spero has had a number of retrospective exhibitions at major museums.
Brightmoor is a neighborhood located in Detroit, Michigan, near the northwest border of the city. Brightmoor is defined by the Brightmoor Alliance as being bordered by Puritan Road to the north, the CSX railway to the south, Evergreen Road to the east, and Outer Drive West, Dacosta Street, and Telegraph Road to the west. However, the demographics given here for the neighborhood are the city's statistical Master Plan Neighborhood area, which consists of eight census tracts that includes some areas outside of the Alliance's boundaries, but does not include some areas within its boundaries.
Dana Schutz is an American artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Schutz is known for her gestural, figurative paintings that often take on specific subjects or narrative situations as a point of departure.
David John Nash, OBE RA is a British sculptor based in Blaenau Ffestiniog. Nash has worked worldwide with wood, trees and the natural environment.
Etel Adnan was a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist. In 2003, Adnan was named "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today" by the academic journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.
Barthélémy Toguo is a Cameroonian painter, visual and performing artist born in 1967. He currently splits his time living and working in both Paris, France and Bandjoun, Cameroon. He works in a variety of media aside from visual and performing arts including photographs, prints, sculptures, videos, and installations.
Zilia Sánchez Dominguez is a Puerto Rico-based Cuban artist born in Havana in 1926. She started her career as a set designer and an abstract painter for radical theatre groups in Cuba before the Cuban revolution of 1953-59. Sanchez blurs the lines between sculpture and painting by creating canvases layered with three dimensional protrusions and shapes. Her works are minimal in color, and have erotic overtones.
Nora Chapa Mendoza is a Texas-born artist. She has been named Michigan Artist of the Year and in 1999 she received the Governor's Arts Award. In 1996, she was one of eight artists that participated in the renovation of Detroit's Music Hall.
Petah Coyne is a contemporary American sculptor and photographer best known for her large and small scale hanging sculptures and floor installations. Working in innovative and disparate materials, her media has ranged from the organic to the ephemeral, from incorporating dead fish, mud, sticks, hay, hair, black sand, specially-formulated and patented wax, satin ribbons, silk flowers, to more recently, velvet, taxidermy, and cast wax statuary. Coyne's sculptures and photographs have been the subject of more than 30 solo museum exhibitions.
Carla Accardi was an Italian abstract painter associated with the Arte Informel and Arte Povera movements, and a founding member of the Italian art groups Forma (1947) and Continuità (1961).
Matt Mullican is an American artist and educator. He is the child of artists Lee Mullican and Luchita Hurtado. Mullican lives and works in both Berlin and New York City.
Danh Võ is a contemporary artist of Vietnamese descent. He lives and works in Berlin and Mexico City.
Sherry J. Gay-Dagnogo is a current Detroit School Board Member elected citywide, a former Democratic member of the Michigan House of Representatives, of which represented the 8th District 2015-2021. The 8th House District includes portions of Northwest Detroit, including the Bethune, Brightmoor, Castle Rouge, College Park, and Grandmont-Rosedale communities. In January 2020, Gay-Dagnogo announced that she was forming a political committee to explore the possibility of running for Mayor of Detroit in 2021.
Christian Rosa is a Brazilian-born artist known for sparse, abstract paintings which are built up from individual shapes and marks on large raw, untreated canvases, using charcoal, oil paint, resin and pencil as well as large abstract sculptures that work like improvised automatic writing.
Johann König is a German art dealer, and the founder of König Galerie. Since 2019 he has faced multiple allegations of sexual misconduct. König's attorney obtained an injunction from the Hamburg Regional Court because of false factual allegations and inadmissible reporting of suspicions. With the judgment of the court, essential parts of the reporting are prohibited.
Stewart Uoo is an American artist. Uoo's art practice explores where the social and digital overlap often incorporating fashion and video game aesthetics into his watercolors, sculptures, and video pieces. Uoo's artworks have been included in the 9th Berlin Biennale and the 10th Gwangju Biennale and were featured alongside artist Jana Euler in a two-person exhibition at The Whitney Museum of American Art in 2013. Uoo has exhibited at 47 Canal in New York, Galerie Buchholz in Berlin, Germany, and Mendes Wood in São Paulo, Brazil, amongst other galleries. Uoo is the host of It's Gets Better, an art-performance event held every summer that showcases artists, musicians, poets, and fashion icons. Uoo lives and works in New York City.
Sarah Grilo was an Argentine painter who is best known for her abstract gestural paintings. Married to the artist José Antonio Fernández-Muro, she lived in Buenos Aires, Paris, New York and Madrid.
Serge Charchoune or Sergey Sharshun was a Russian painter and the first Russian Dada poet. Born August 4, 1888, in Buguruslan, Russia, Charchoune lived most of his life in France where he died in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges on November 24, 1975.
Temitayo Ogunbiyi is a Nigerian-based contemporary artist and curator. She is known for her exhibitions in several museums, the most popular being the playground installed at Italy's Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina in 2020, known as You Can Play in the Everyday, Running.
