Cultural imperialism, also called cultural colonialism, comprises the cultural aspects of imperialism. "Imperialism" here refers to the creation and maintenance of unequal relationships between civilisations, favouring a more powerful civilisation. Thus cultural imperialism is the practice of promoting and imposing a culture over a less powerful society. This may take the form of cultural hegemony of industrialised or politically and economically influential countries influencing general cultural values and standardising (globalising) civilisations elsewhere.
Pan-Africanism is a worldwide movement that aims to encourage and strengthen bonds of solidarity between all indigenous and diaspora ethnic groups of African descent. Based on a common goal dating back to the Atlantic slave trade, the movement extends beyond continental Africans with a substantial support base among the African diaspora in the Americas and Europe.
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.
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."
Toyin Ojih Odutola is a Nigerian-American contemporary visual artist known for her vivid multimedia drawings and works on paper. Her unique style of complex mark-making and lavish compositions rethink the category and traditions of portraiture and storytelling. Ojih Odutola's artwork often investigates a variety of themes from socio-economic inequality, the legacy of colonialism, queer and gender theory, notions of blackness as a visual and social symbol, as well as experiences of migration and dislocation.
Valerie Maynard is an African-American sculptor, teacher, printmaker, and designer. Maynard's work frequently deals with themes of social inequality and the civil rights movement.
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.
Jaishri Abichandani is a Brooklyn-based artist and curator. Her interdisciplinary practice focuses on the intersection of art, feminism, and social practice. Abichandani was the founder of the South Asian Women's Creative Collective, with chapters in New York City and London, and director from 1997 until 2013. She was also the Founding Director of Public Events and Projects from at the Queens Museum from 2003-2006.
iQhiya is a network of young black women artists based in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa. They specialise in a broad range of artistic disciplines including performance art, video, photography, sculpture and other mediums.
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.
Janet Henry is a visual artist based in New York City.
Chloë Bass is an American conceptual artist who works in performance and social practice. Bass's work focuses on intimacy. She was a founding co-lead organizer of Arts in Bushwick from 2007-2011, the group that organizes Bushwick Open Studios. She is an Assistant Professor of Art and Social Practice at Queens College, CUNY, and holds a BA from Yale University and an MFA from Brooklyn College. Bass is also a regular contributor to publications like Hyperallergic.
Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, is an American interdisciplinary artist of Puerto Rican descent born in The Bronx, NY and based in Orlando, FL.
Aisha Tandiwe Bell is an American visual artist known for her work that creates myth and ritual through mixed media including sculpture performance, video, sound, drawing, and installation that addresses themes of fragmentation, shape-shifting, code-switching, hyphenated identities and multiple consciousness, marginalization, and lack of agency people in the African Diaspora struggle with. Through her mixed media, Aisha Tandiwe Bell's art focuses on and looks at the societal constraints of sex, race, and class. She uses each piece of her art to look at the norms that society has created around sex, race, and class and the limitations that people have placed upon themselves when it comes to these ideas. As a Jamaican-American woman in the United States, Bell uses her art to represent the displacement that she feels and the alter egos that black women have to uphold publicly and privately. The sculptures that Bell creates are intentionally cracked, fragmented, and imperfect to reflect her fractured identity.
Rajkamal Kahlon is an American artist based in Germany whose work draws on legacies of colonialism, often using the material culture, documentary material, and aesthetics of Western colonial archives.
Lina Puerta is a Colombian-American mixed media artist based in New York City. She was born in New Jersey and grew up in Columbia.
Gina Adams is an American interdisciplinary artist and activist of Ojibwe and Lakota descent.
Christine Shaw-Checinska is a British womenswear designer and art historian. She is the Curator of African and African Diaspora Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her work considers the relationship between cloth, culture and race.
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.
Oriana Baddeley is a professor of transnational art history at UAL where from 2011 to 2020 she was Dean of Research.
