Samera Paz is an artist and organizer from Washington, D.C., born on May 19, 1994, and current student at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She is known for leading Girl Power Meetups in D.C. Paz mostly uses photography but has also done some performance art and works with themes such as gender, race, and mental health.
Paz started using menstrual blood to make her art when she was 16 and creates pieces that are mostly abstract, based in line, shapes, and patterns. [1] Paz finds her blood and her art "natural and beautiful," and believes she's relieving the stigma around periods, but she received a lot of backlash after posting her work on social media. [2]
She has been featured in several group exhibitions in galleries like Transformer in D.C. and aspires to be a war photographer. [3] [4]
While in D.C. in 2015, Paz founded a movement called Girl Power Meetups based in D.C., "run by women of color that aims to bring young women together to support, educate, connect and collaborate creatively." [1] She started it because she wanted celebrations of women artists to cater more to young people and happen more often. [5] "The events range from pure fun, like clothing swaps and yoga classes, to career development—and even a visit to the White House to meet with women working in prominent positions." [6]
Along with Girl Power Meetups, Paz also runs Locals Only DC, which is a Tumblr page devoted to highlighting local talent with interviews and features with D.C. artists that goes unrecognized in the mainstream art scene. [3]
Paz also founded Chocolate MLK, "a movement to celebrate and educate people on black history" which an emphasis on D.C. history and gentrification. [7]
Alice Neel was an American visual artist. Recognized for her paintings of friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and strangers, Neel is considered one of the greatest American portraitists of the 20th century. Her career spanned from the 1920s to 1980s.
Lois Mailou Jones (1905–1998) was an artist and educator. Her work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Muscarelle Museum of Art, and The Phillips Collection. She is often associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
Faith Ringgold was an American painter, author, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, and intersectional activist, perhaps best known for her narrative quilts.
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Betye Irene Saar is an American artist known for her work in the medium of assemblage. Saar is a visual storyteller and an accomplished printmaker. Saar was a part of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, which engaged myths and stereotypes about race and femininity. Her work is considered highly political, as she challenged negative ideas about African Americans throughout her career; Saar is best known for her artwork that critiques anti-Black racism in the United States.
Violet Oakley was an American artist. She was the first American woman to receive a public mural commission. During the first quarter of the 20th century, she was renowned as a pathbreaker in mural decoration, a field that had been exclusively practiced by men. Oakley excelled at murals and stained glass designs that addressed themes from history and literature in Renaissance-revival styles.
Chakaia Booker is an American sculptor known for creating monumental, abstract works for both the gallery and outdoor public spaces. Booker’s works are contained in more than 40 public collections and have been exhibited across the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Booker was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Art in 2001. Booker has lived and worked in New York City’s East Village since the early 1980s and maintains a production studio in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Rosalyn Drexler is an American visual artist, novelist, Obie Award-winning playwright, and Emmy Award-winning screenwriter, and former professional wrestler. Although she has had a polymathic career, Drexler is perhaps best known for her pop art paintings and as the author of the novelization of the film Rocky, under the pseudonym Julia Sorel. Drexler currently lives and works in New York City, New York.
Emma Amos was a postmodern African-American painter and printmaker.
Andrea Modica is an American photographer and professor of photography at Drexel University. She is known for portrait photography and for her use of platinum printing, created using an 8"x10" large format camera. Modica is the author of many monographs, including Treadwell (1996) and Barbara (2002).
Howardena Pindell is an American artist, curator, critic, and educator. She is known as a painter and mixed media artist who uses a wide variety of techniques and materials. She began her long arts career working with the New York Museum of Modern Art, while making work at night. She co-founded the A.I.R. gallery and worked with other groups to advocate for herself and other female artists, Black women in particular. Her work explores texture, color, structures, and the process of making art; it is often political, addressing the intersecting issues of racism, feminism, violence, slavery, and exploitation. She has created abstract paintings, collages, "video drawings," and "process art" and has exhibited around the world.
Esther Mahlangu is a South African artist. She is known for her bold large-scale contemporary paintings that reference her Ndebele heritage. She is one of South Africa's best known artists.
Katharine Nash Rhoades was an American painter, poet and illustrator born in New York City. She was also a feminist.
Mary Beth Edelson was an American artist and pioneer of the feminist art movement, deemed one of the notable "first-generation feminist artists". Edelson was a printmaker, book artist, collage artist, painter, photographer, performance artist, and author. Her works have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
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.
Clarissa T. Sligh is an African-American book artist and photographer based in Asheville, North Carolina. At age 15, she was the lead plaintiff in a school desegregation case in Virginia. In 1988, she became a co-founder of Coast-to-Coast: A Women of Color National Artists' Project, which focused on promoting works completed by women of color.
Lisa Marie Thalhammer is an artist living in Washington D.C.
Ethel V. Ashton was an American artist who primarily worked in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was both a subject of noted artist Alice Neel and a portraitist of Neel. Her early works reflect the influence of Ashcan realism focused primarily on portrait painting. She was commissioned to work on the Works Progress Administration's post office mural project and has works hanging in the permanent collections of several prominent museums. By the mid-1950s she worked with abstract concepts and through the end of the civil rights era, her works synthesize both abstract and realism. She also served as the librarian of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1957 into the early 1970s.
Mary Lee Bendolph is an American quilt maker of the Gee's Bend Collective from Gee's Bend (Boykin), Alabama. Her work has been influential on subsequent quilters and artists and her quilts have been exhibited in museums and galleries around the country. Bendolph uses fabric from used clothing for quilting in appreciation of the "love and spirit" with old cloth. Bendolph has spent her life in Gee's Bend and has had work featured in the Philadelphia Museum of Art as well as the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minnesota.
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