Joan Mitchell was an American artist who worked primarily in painting and printmaking, and also used pastel and made other works on paper. She was an active participant in the New York School of artists in the 1950s. A native of Chicago, she is associated with the American abstract expressionist movement, even though she lived in France for much of her career.
Alison Saar is a Los Angeles, California based sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist. Her artwork focuses on the African diaspora and black female identity and is influenced by African, Caribbean, and Latin American folk art and spirituality. Saar is well known for "transforming found objects to reflect themes of cultural and social identity, history, and religion." Saar credits her parents for her exposure to these metaphysical and spiritual practices. Her mother, Betye Saar, is a collagist and assemblage artist and her father, Richard Saar, is a painter and art conservator. Saar followed in her parents footsteps along with her sisters, Lesley Saar, who is also an artist, despite wanting to get out of her parents shadow. She finds more gratification in making art than writing about it, as she found out after finishing a dual major in fine arts and art history.
Raven Chacon is a Diné composer, musician and artist. Born in Fort Defiance, Arizona within the Navajo Nation, Chacon became the first Native American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Music, for his Voiceless Mass in 2022.
Lorna Simpson is an American photographer and multimedia artist whose works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally. In 1990, she became one of the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. She came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with photo-text installations such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal that questioned the nature of identity, gender, race, history and representation. Simpson continues to explore these themes in relation to memory and history using photography, film, video, painting, drawing, audio, and sculpture.
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.
Heather T. Hart is an American visual artist who works in a variety of media including interactive and participatory Installation art, drawing, collage, and painting. She is a co-founder of the Black Lunch Table Project, which includes a Wikipedia initiative focused on addressing diversity representation in the arts on Wikipedia.
Saya Woolfalk is an American artist known for her multimedia exploration of hybridity, science, race and sex. Woolfalk uses science fiction and fantasy to reimagine the world in multiple dimensions.
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.
Candida Alvarez is an American artist and professor, known for her paintings and drawings.
Jennie C. Jones is an African-American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been described, by Ken Johnson, as evoking minimalism, and paying tribute to the cross-pollination of different genres of music, especially jazz. As an artist, she connects most of her work between art and sound. Such connections are made with multiple mediums, from paintings to sculptures and paper to audio collages. In 2012, Jones was the recipient of the Joyce Alexander Wien Prize, one of the biggest awards given to an individual artist in the United States. The prize honors one African-American artist who has proven their commitment to innovation and creativity, with an award of 50,000 dollars. In December 2015 a 10-year survey of Jones's work, titled Compilation, opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas.
Jina Valentine is a contemporary American visual artist whose work is informed by the techniques and strategies of American folk artists. She uses a variety of media to weave histories—including drawing, papermaking, found-object collage, and radical archiving.
Gia Maisha Hamilton is an applied anthropologist who employs methodology to investigate land, labor and cultural production while examining social connectivity within institutions and communities. As a model builder, Hamilton co-founded an independent African centered school, Little Maroons in 2006; later, she opened a creative incubator space- Gris Gris Lab in 2009 and designed and led the Joan Mitchell Center artist residency program in New Orleans as a consultant from 2011- 2013 and director from 2013-2018.
Krista Franklin is an American poet and visual artist, whose main artistic focus is collage. Her work, which addresses race, gender, and class issues, combines personal, pop-cultural, and historical imagery.
Kambui Olujimi is a New York-based visual artist working across disciplines using installation, photography, performance, tapestry, works on paper, video, large sculptures and painting. His artwork reflects on public discourse, mythology, historical narrative, social practices, exchange, mediated cultures, resilience and autonomy.
Nicole Awai is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York and Austin, Texas. Her work captures both Caribbean and American landscapes and experiences and engages in cultural critique. She works in many media including painting, photography, drawing, installations, ceramics, and sculpture as well as found objects.
Carlos Rolón, also known professionally under the pseudonym Dzine, is an American contemporary visual artist of Puerto Rican descent. Rolón's work has been shown at museums and galleries internationally, including the Bass Museum of Art, Miami, Marta Herford Museum, Germany, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico, New Orleans Museum of Art, and the 2007 Venice Biennale.
Paul Claude Gardère was a Haitian-born, Brooklyn-based visual artist whose work explored "post-colonial history, cultural hybridization, race, and identity, in and beyond the Haitian diaspora." Gardère's work has been widely exhibited throughout the United States, including at institutions such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Figge Art Museum, Lehigh University, Pomona College Museum of Art, and the Jersey City Museum, and is included in a number of prominent institutional collections, including that of Thea Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Milwaukee Art Museum, the Figge Art Museum, the Columbus Museum, the Beinecke Library at Yale University and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University.
Nontsikelelo Mutiti is a graphic designer, artist and educator. Her work focuses on web design, video, print, and book art. She often includes hair braiding in her design work, and is "interested in the nuanced differences between black cultures". Her work includes printed materials for Black Lives Matter. Since 2022, Mutiti has served as the Director of Graduate Studies in Graphic Design at the Yale School of Art.
Cullen Washington, Jr. is an African-American contemporary abstract painter. Washington lives and works in New York.
Shervone Neckles is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and community worker. Her work draws inspiration from the duality and transitional nature of her Afro-Grenadian-American identity. Neckles’ practice combines mixed media techniques of printmaking, textiles, book arts, sculpture, installation, and social investigations to further explore concepts of past and present-day colonialism, notions of provenance as it relates to origin, authorship and ownership.
