Mary Edmonia Lewis, also known as "Wildfire", was an American sculptor, of mixed African-American and Native American heritage. Born free in Upstate New York, she worked for most of her career in Rome, Italy. She was the first African-American and Native American sculptor to achieve national and then international prominence. She began to gain prominence in the United States during the Civil War; at the end of the 19th century, she remained the only Black woman artist who had participated in and been recognized to any extent by the American artistic mainstream. In 2002, the scholar Molefi Kete Asante named Edmonia Lewis on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was an American author, educator, sociologist, speaker, Black liberation activist, and one of the most prominent African-American scholars in United States history.
Johnnetta Betsch Cole is an American anthropologist, educator, museum director, and college president. Cole was the first female African-American president of Spelman College, a historically black college, serving from 1987 to 1997. She was president of Bennett College from 2002 to 2007. During 2009–2017 she was Director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art.
Lowery Stokes Sims is an American art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art known for her expertise in the work of African, African American, Latinx, Native and Asian American artists such as Wifredo Lam, Fritz Scholder, Romare Bearden, Joyce J. Scott and others. She served on the curatorial staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of Arts and Design. She has frequently served as a guest curator, lectured internationally and published extensively, and has received many public appointments. Sims was featured in the 2010 documentary film !Women Art Revolution.
Richard Howard Hunt is a sculptor. In the second half of the 20th century, he became "the foremost African-American abstract sculptor and artist of public sculpture." Hunt, the descendant of enslaved people brought through the port of Savannah from West Africa, studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s, and while there received multiple prizes for his work. He was the first African American sculptor to have a retrospective at Museum of Modern Art in 1971. Hunt has created over 160 public sculpture commissions in prominent locations in 24 states across the United States, more than any other sculptor.
Audrey L. Flack is an American artist. Her work pioneered the art genre of photorealism and encompasses painting, sculpture, and photography.
Alma Woodsey Thomas was an African-American artist and teacher who lived and worked in Washington, D.C., and is now recognized as a major American painter of the 20th century. Thomas is best known for the "exuberant", colorful, abstract paintings that she created after her retirement from a 35-year career teaching art at Washington's Shaw Junior High School.
Keith Anthony Morrison, Commander of Distinction (C.D.), born May 20, 1942), is a Jamaican-born painter, printmaker, educator, critic, curator and administrator.
Dorothea Rockburne DFA is an abstract painter, drawing inspiration primarily from her deep interest in mathematics and astronomy. Her work is geometric and abstract, seemingly simple but very precise to reflect the mathematical concepts she strives to concretize. "I wanted very much to see the equations I was studying, so I started making them in my studio," she has said. "I was visually solving equations." Rockburne's attraction to Mannerism has also influenced her work.
Dorothy Wright Liebes was an American textile designer and weaver renowned for her innovative, custom-designed modern fabrics for architects and interior designers. She was known as "the mother of modern weaving".
Emma Amos was a postmodern African-American painter and printmaker.
Rosemarie Beck was an American abstract expressionist, figurative expressionist painter in the post-World War II era. She was married to the writer and editor Robert Phelps.
Sylvia H. Williams, was an American museum director, curator, art historian, and scholar of African art. She helped develop the study and appreciation of African art as a significant aesthetic and intellectual pursuit in the United States.
Jefferson Pinder is an African-American performance artist whose work provokes commentary about race and struggle.
Mary Hortense Webster (1881–1965) was an American sculptor.
Margo Humphrey is an American printmaker, illustrator and art teacher. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Stanford after earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the California College of Arts and Crafts in printmaking. She has traveled in Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and Europe and has taught in Fiji, Nigeria, Uganda, and the University of Maryland. As a printmaker, she is known for her "bold, expressive use of color and freedom of form", creating works that are "engaging, exuberant and alive." Her techniques for layering colors are uncommon in lithography. Her work is considered to be "in the forefront of contemporary printmaking."
Suzanne Jackson is an American visual artist, gallery owner, poet, dancer, educator, and set designer; with a career spanning five decades. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. Since the late 1960s, Jackson has dedicated her life to studio art with additional participation in theatre, teaching, arts administration, community life, and social activism. Jackson's oeuvre includes poetry, dance, theater, costume design, paintings, prints, and drawings.
Stephanie Elaine Pogue (1944–2002) was an American professor, printmaker, artist, and curator. Her artistic interests included the portrayal of women and the human figure.
Gyöngy Laky is an American sculptor living and working in San Francisco, California. Her work has been exhibited in the U.S., Europe, Asia and South America. She gained recognition early in her career for her linear sculptures constructed in the architectural methods of textile arts. “Laky’s art manifests architectonic sensibility. She is as much an engineer as she is an artist in the conventional sense.” She is also known for her site-specific, outdoor, temporary installations.
Lauren Haynes is an American curator who is senior curator of contemporary art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Previously, she was director of artist initiatives and curator of contemporary art at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Momentary in Arkansas.
