Betye Irene Saar is an African 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 art work that critiques American racism toward Blacks.
Samella Sanders Lewis was an American visual artist and art historian. She worked primarily as a printmaker and painter. She has been called the "Godmother of African American Art". She received Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association (CAA) in 2021.
“Art is not a luxury as many people think – it is a necessity. It documents history – it helps educate people and stores knowledge for generations to come.” – Dr. Samella Lewis
Mildred Jean Thompson was an American artist who worked in painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and photography. Critics have related her art to West African textiles and Islamic architecture; they have also cited German Expressionism, music and Thompson's readings in astronomy, spiritualism and metaphysics as important artistic influences. She also wrote and was an associate editor for the magazine Art Papers.
Lorser Feitelson (1898–1978) was an artist known as one of the founding fathers of Southern California–based hard-edge painting. Born in Savannah, Georgia, Feitelson was raised in New York City, where his family relocated shortly after his birth. His rise to prominence occurred after he moved to California in 1927.
Joan Wheeler Ankrum was an American film actress and founder of the Ankrum Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles.
Howardena Pindell is an American artist, curator and educator. She is known as a painter and mixed media artist, 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 is known for the wide variety of techniques and materials used in her artwork; she has created abstract paintings, collages, "video drawings," and "process art."
Malaika Favorite is an American visual artist and writer whose art work can be found in major collections in the U.S. She works mainly in oil, acrylic, and watercolor and has carried out experiments with folded canvas and the written word as another dimension of a painting's text. Her provocative paintings and sculpture pieces emanate as much from her personal history as it does from the wider world.
Camille Josephine Billops was an African-American sculptor, filmmaker, archivist, printmaker, and educator.
"Where We At" Black Women Artists, Inc. (WWA) was a collective of Black women artists affiliated with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It included artists such as Dindga McCannon, Kay Brown, Faith Ringgold, Carol Blank, Jerri Crooks, Charlotte Kâ (Richardson), and Gylbert Coker. Where We At was formed in the spring of 1971, in the wake of an exhibition of the same name organized by 14 Black women artists at the Acts of Art Gallery in Greenwich Village. Themes such as the unity of the Black family, Black female independence and embodiment, Black male-female relationships, contemporary social conditions, and African traditions were central to the work of the WWA artists. The group was intended to serve as a source of empowerment for African-American women, providing a means for them to control their self-representation and to explore issues of Black women's sensibility and aesthetics. Like AfriCobra, a Chicago-based Black Arts group, the WWA was active in fostering art within the African-American community and using it as a tool of awareness and liberation. The group organized workshops in schools, jails and prisons, hospitals, and cultural centers, as well as art classes for youth in their communities.
Doyle Lane (1923–2002) was an African-American ceramist known for his innovative, tactile glazes. His work ranged from delicate vases and ceramic sculptures to large scale clay paintings and mosaics. Lane maintained a studio in the El Sereno district of East Los Angeles. He exhibited his work at Brockman Gallery in Leimert Park (1968) and Ankrum Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard, both notable centers for African American Art in Los Angeles in the mid-twentieth century.
Dale Brockman Davis is a Los Angeles–based African-American artist, gallerist and educator best known for his assemblage sculpture and ceramic work that addresses themes of African American history and music, especially jazz. Along with his brother, artist Alonzo Davis, he co-founded Brockman Gallery in Leimert Park. Through the gallery and his broader community work, Davis became an important promoter of African-American artists in Los Angeles.
William Etienne "Bill" Pajaud was an African-American artist, primarily working in watercolor, known for his paintings exploring themes of jazz. He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and died in Los Angeles, California, on June 16, 2015, at the age of 89. He was the curator of the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Fine Art Collection.
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.
Eileen Abdulrashid is an American artist and craftsperson who is known for her work in enamel on copper.
Martha Joanne Alf was an American artist. Her work consists of paintings, drawings and photographs of everyday objects, including pears and rolls of toilet paper.
Emily Mae Smith is a visual artist from Austin, Texas. Her sly, humorous, and riveting compositions nod to art historical movements such as Greek Mythology and Surrealism through with a distinctly 21st century spin. Her genre-defying paintings speak through a vocabulary of signs and symbols addressing timely subjects including gender, class, and violence. Smith’s paintings tackle art history’s phallocentric myths and create imagery for subjectivities absent in visual culture, specifically the feminist perspective.
Tomashi Jackson is an American multimedia artist working across painting, video, textiles and sculpture. Jackson was born in Houston, Texas, raised in Los Angeles, and currently lives and works in New York, NY and Cambridge, MA. Jackson was named a 2019 Whitney Biennial participating artist. Jackson also serves on the faculty for sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design. Her work is included in the collection of MOCA Los Angeles. In 2004, a 20-foot-high by 80-foot-long mural by Jackson entitled Evolution of a Community was unveiled in the Los Angeles neighborhood of West Adams.
Gloria Racine Bohanon was an American visual artist and educator based in Los Angeles, California. She was born in Atlanta, Georgia. She received a BA in Art Education and an MA in Art Education from Wayne State. She also studied at Otis College of Art and Design in 1973. She was an active member of the Los Angeles contemporary art scene in the 1970s. As a professor at Los Angeles Community College, she organized "Black Culture Week" in 1974. She taught design, painting, printmaking, and served as chair of the Arts Department while there. She was the director of ADAPT, an organization for disabled students while at LACC.
Deborah Roberts is an American contemporary artist living and working in Austin, Texas. Roberts is a mixed media collage artist whose figurative works depict the complexity of Black subjecthood and explores themes of race, identity, and gender politics taking on the subject of otherness as understood against the backdrop of existing societal norms of race and beauty. Her work has been exhibited internationally across the US and Europe. Roberts’s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California. Roberts was named 2023 Texas Medal of Arts Award Honoree for the Visual Arts. Roberts was selected to participate in the Robert Rauschenberg Residency (2019) and is a recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman Grant (2018), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2016), and the Ginsburg-Klaus Award Fellowship (2014). She received her MFA from Syracuse University, New York. She lives and works in Austin, Texas. Roberts is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, and Vielmetter Los Angeles.
Yvonne Olivia Cole Meo (1923–2016) was an American artist known primarily for sculpture and printmaking. Born in Seattle, Washington, Meo lived in Los Angeles for most of her life, primarily in Altadena CA.
