African-American art is a broad term describing visual art created by African Americans. The range of art they have created, and are continuing to create, over more than two centuries is as varied as the artists themselves. Some have drawn on cultural traditions in Africa, and other parts of the world, for inspiration. Others have found inspiration in traditional African-American plastic art forms, including basket weaving, pottery, quilting, woodcarving and painting, all of which are sometimes classified as "handicrafts" or "folk art".
The Studio Museum in Harlem is an American art museum devoted to the work of artists of African descent. The museum's galleries are currently closed in preparation for a building project that will replace the current building, located at 144 West 125th Street between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, with a new one on the same site. Founded in 1968, the museum collects, preserves and interprets art created by African Americans, members of the African diaspora, and artists from the African continent. Its scope includes exhibitions, artists-in-residence programs, educational and public programming, and a permanent collection.
Faith Ringgold is an American painter, painting on different materials including fabric, a published author, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, and intersectional activist, perhaps best known for her narrative quilts.
Sir David Frank Adjaye is a Ghanaian-British architect. He is known for having designed many notable buildings around the world, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Adjaye was knighted in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to architecture. He is the recipient of the 2021 Royal Gold Medal, making him the first African recipient and one of the youngest recipients. He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 2022.
Derek Fordjour is an American interdisciplinary artist and educator of Ghanaian heritage who works in collage, video/film, sculpture, and painting. Fordjour lives and works in New York City.
The Children's Museum of the Arts (“CMA”) is located at 103 Charlton Street, Manhattan, New York, United States in the South Village district. Founded by Kathleen Schneider in 1988, CMA opened its new, 10,000-square-foot space in October 2011.
Betty Blayton was an American activist, advocate, artist, arts administrator and educator, and lecturer. As an artist, Blayton was an illustrator, painter, printmaker, and sculptor. She is best known for her works often described as "spiritual abstractions". Blayton was a founding member of the Studio Museum in Harlem and board secretary, co-founder and executive director of Harlem Children's Art Carnival (CAC), and a co-founder of Harlem Textile Works. She was also an advisor, consultant and board member to a variety of other arts and community-based service organizations and programs. Her abstract methods created a space for the viewer to insert themselves into the piece, allowing for self reflection, a central aspect of Blayton's work.
Theaster Gates is an American social practice installation artist and a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, where he still lives and works.
Marcia Marcus is an American figurative painter of portraits, self-portraits, still life, and landscape.
Christine Y. Kim is an American curator of contemporary art. She is currently the Britton Family Curator-at-Large at Tate. Prior to this post, Kim held the position of Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Before her appointment at LACMA in 2009, she was Associate Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem in New York. She is best known for her exhibitions of and publications on artists of color, diasporic and marginalized discourses, and 21st-century technology and artistic practices.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is an American writer, educator, and artist from East Palo Alto, California. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts known for her work in installations, book arts, immersive text-based installations, large-scale public text pieces, publications, collage, and audio recordings. Rasheed's art explores memory, ritual, discursive regimes, historiography, and archival practices through the use of fragments and historical residue. Based in Brooklyn, NY, she is currently the Arts Editor for SPOOK magazine. In 2021 her work was featured in an Art 21 documentary, "The Edge of Legibility."
Janet Henry is a visual artist based in New York City.
San Juan Hill was a community in what is now the Lincoln Square neighborhood of the Upper West Side in Manhattan, New York City. Its residents were mostly African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Puerto Rican, and comprised one of the largest African-American communities in New York before World War I. San Juan Hill was bound by 59th Street to the south, West End Avenue to the west, 65th Street to the north, and Amsterdam Avenue to the east. The site is now occupied by Lincoln Center, a 16.3-acre (6.6 ha) complex dedicated to the performing arts.
The International Puppet Fringe Festival NYC is a biannual puppet theater fringe festival hosted by Teatro SEA in the Lower East Side of New York City. The festival had its 1st edition in 2018, at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center, and featured puppet shows, short films and artist talks with international puppet theater companies. The Puppet Fringe Festival is the first ever international fringe festival dedicated to puppetry.
Adam Lindemann is a New York Based gallerist, art collector and writer who founded Venus Over Manhattan gallery in New York City in 2012. As an art collector and gallerist, Lindemann is known for setting multiple world records both at auction and privately, including career records for Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jean Royère.
The People's Flag Show was a November 1970 exhibition at Judson Memorial Church in New York City by Faith Ringgold, Jean Toche and Jon Hendricks, known as the Judson Three. The exhibition was raided by the police and the artists arrested on a charge of flag desecration. They were convicted and fined $100 each, but this was later overturned with support from the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Sana Musasama is an African-American ceramic and mixed-media artist based in New York City. Her artistic practice parallels her work as an educator and commitment to human rights causes especially the human trafficking of women. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards including an Anonymous Was a Woman Award in 2002, Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2013, and was a Studio Museum in Harlem Artist-in-Residence in 1983–84. Musasama is an associate adjunct professor at Hunter College.
Moses Ros–Suárez is a Dominican–American architect, sculptor, painter, printmaker and muralist who lives and works in New York City.
David Hartt is a Canadian artist and educator living and working in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Hartt works across various media to examine the transformation of ideas and histories over time.
The Edo Museum of West African Art is a planned museum for west African art to be built in Benin City, Nigeria. It will show over 300 items on loan from European museums. Its architect, David Adjaye, revealed renderings for the museum in November 2020. The Metropolitan Museum of Art will repatriate two Benin Bronzes to be shown in the museum.
