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 and the Harlem Renaissance. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender.
Lorna Simpson is an American photographer and multimedia artist. She came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with artworks such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal. Simpson is most well-known for her work in conceptual photography. Her works have been included in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally. She is best known for her photo-text installations, photo-collages, and films. Her early work raised questions about the nature of representation, identity, gender, race and history. Simpson continues to explore these themes in relation to memory and history in various media including photography, film, video, painting, drawing, audio, and sculpture.
Berni Searle is an artist who works with photography, video, and film to produce lens-based installations that stage narratives connected to history, identity, memory, and place. Often politically and socially engaged, her work also draws on universal emotions associated with vulnerability, loss and beauty.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons is a Cuban-born artist based in Nashville, Tennessee. Campos-Pons works primarily in photography, performance, audiovisual media, and sculpture. She is considered a "key figure" among Cuban artists who found their voice in a post-revolutionary Cuba. Her art deals with themes of Cuban culture, gender and sexuality, multicultural identity as well as interracial family (Cuban-American), and religion/spirituality.
Fatimah Tuggar is a interdisciplinary artist born in Nigeria and based in the United States. Tuggar uses collage and digital technology to create works that investigates dominant and linear narratives of gender, race, and technology. She is currently an Associate Professor of AI in the Arts: Art & Global Equity at the University of Florida in the United States.
Athi-Patra Ruga is a South African artist who uses performance, photography, video, textiles, and printmaking to explore notions of utopia and dystopia, material and memory. His work explores the body in relation to sensuality, culture, and ideology, often creating cultural hybrids. Themes such as sexuality, HIV/AIDS, African culture, and the place of queerness within post-apartheid South Africa also permeate his work.
Joi T. Arcand is a nehiyaw photo-based artist from Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, Saskatchewan, who currently resides in Ottawa, Ontario. In addition to art, Arcand focuses on publishing, art books, zines, collage and accessibility to art.
Deanna Bowen is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes films, video installations, performances, drawing, sculpture and photography. Her work addresses issues of trauma and memory through an investigation of personal and official histories related to American slavery, migration, the Civil Rights Movement and the Ku Klux Klan. Bowen is a dual citizen of the US and Canada. She lives and works in Montreal.
April Hickox is a Canadian lens-based artist, photographer, teacher and curator whose practice includes various medias, from photography, film, video and installation.
Lovie Olivia is an American multidisciplinary visual artist. She uses the media of printmaking, painting, and installations to explore themes of gender, sexuality, race, class and power.
Erika DeFreitas is a Toronto-based artist who works in textiles, performance and photography.
Sandra Brewster is a Canadian visual artist based in Toronto. Her work is multidisciplinary in nature, and deals with notions of identity, representation and memory; centering Black presence in Canada.
Genevieve Gaignard, born in Orange, Massachusetts in 1981, is best known for work exploring issues of race, class, and gender. As a self-identified mixed-race woman, Gaignard utilizes photography, videography, and installation to explore the overlap of black and white America through staged environments and character performances. She received an AAS in Baking & Pastry Arts from Johnson & Wales University, her BA in photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2007, and an MFA from Yale University in 2014. Gaignard's work is represented by Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, and has been shown at Shulamit Nazarian, The Cabin, The FLAG Art Foundation, The California African American Museum, The Foley Gallery, and at two residentially-owned art spaces in Los Angeles, CA. She was also included in the fourth iteration of the triennial Prospect New Orleans, in 2018, with an installation at the Ace Hotel New Orleans. Her work has been featured in The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. Gaignard's photographic series draw inspiration from Carrie Mae Weems, Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, and Nikki S. Lee, remixed with the references to the selfie and Instagram culture.
Jacqueline Bishop is a writer, visual artist and photographer from Jamaica, who now lives in New York City, where she is a professor at the School of Liberal Studies at New York University (NYU). She is the founder of Calabash, an online journal of Caribbean art and letters, housed at NYU, and also writes for the Huffington Post and the Jamaica Observer Arts Magazine. In 2016 her book The Gymnast and Other Positions won the nonfiction category of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
Sam Vernon is an installation and performance artist. She works in various media to create her artwork, including sculpture, paintings and photographs. She is interested in "honor[ing] the past while revising historical memory" through works that explore her own personal identity. Several of her art pieces also convey a certain narrative, and this is done through Vernon's various Xerox drawings.
Bushra Junaid is a Canadian artist, curator and arts administrator based in Toronto. She is best known for exploring history, memory and cultural identity through mixed media collage, drawing and painting. Born in Montreal to Jamaican and Nigerian parents and raised in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Junaid's work frequently engages themes of Blackness, the African Diaspora and the history of Atlantic Canada.
Katherine Boyer is a Métis artist, whose multidisciplinary practice focuses primarily on the mediums of sculpture, printmaking and beadwork. She was born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan, but currently resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba—a location that has had a direct influence on her current artistic practice.
Stella Fakiyesi is a Nigerian creative photographer, cinematographer and painter. Fakiyesi's works in photography and visual art have been featured in many international exhibitions.
FAFSWAG is an arts collective of Māori and Pacific LGBTQI+ artists and activists founded in Auckland, New Zealand in 2013. They explore and celebrate the unique identity of gender fluid Pacific people and LGBTQI+ communities in multi-disciplinary art forms. In 2020 FAFSWAG was awarded an Arts Laureate from the New Zealand Arts Foundation, and they also represented New Zealand at the Biennale of Sydney.
Pati Solomona Tyrell is an interdisciplinary artist from New Zealand who focuses on performance, videography and photography. In 2018 Tyrell became the youngest nominee for the Walters Prize, New Zealand's most prestigious contemporary art award, for the video work Fāgogo, subsequently purchased by Auckland Art Gallery. In 2020 Tyrell won the Arts Pasifika Awards' Emerging Pacific Artist Award.
