Kehinde Wiley is a contemporary African-American painter known for his distinctive portraits. His subjects are often young black men and women, rendered in a Photorealist style against densely patterned backgrounds. Wiley melds references from many sources, including Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte, Islamic architecture, and hip hop culture. “I believe it’s possible to hold twin desires in your head, such as the desire to create painting and destroy painting at once,” the artist has explained. “The desire to look at a black American culture as underserved, in need of representation, a desire to mine that said culture and to lay its parts bare, and look at it almost clinically.” Born on February 28, 1977 in Los Angeles, CA, he received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 and his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2001. The artist has gone on to have several successful exhibitions including “Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic,” which opened at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2015. On February 12, 2018, both Wiley and the artist Amy Sherald unveiled their official presidential portraits of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. The artist currently lives and works between New York, NY and Beijing, China.

Faith Ringgold, born 1930 in Harlem, New York, is a painter, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, writer, teacher and lecturer. She received her B.S. and M.A. degrees in visual art from the City College of New York in 1955 and 1959. Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of California in San Diego, Ringgold has received 23 Honorary Doctorates.

During the early 1960’s Ringgold traveled in Europe. She created her first political paintings, The American People Series from 1963 to 1967 and had her first and second one-person exhibitions at the Spectrum Gallery in New York. In the early 1970’s Ringgold began making tankas (inspired by a Tibetan art form of paintings framed in richly brocaded fabrics), soft sculptures and masks. She later utilized this medium in her masked performances of the 1970’s and 80’s. Although Faith Ringgold’s art was initially inspired by African art in the 1960’s, it was not until the late 1970’s that she traveled to Nigeria and Ghana to see the rich tradition of masks that have continued to be her greatest influence.

She made her first quilt, Echoes of Harlem, in 1980, in collaboration with her mother, Madame Willi Posey. The quilts were an extension of her tankas from the 1970’s. However, these paintings were not only bordered with fabric but quilted, creating for her a unique way of painting using the quilt medium.

Kerry James Marshall challenges the marginalization of African-Americans through his formally rigorous paintings, drawings, videos, and installations, whose central protagonists are always, in his words, “unequivocally, emphatically black.” As he describes, his work is rooted in his life experience: “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central [Los Angeles] near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it.” Marshall’s erudite knowledge of art history and black folk art structures his compositions; he mines black culture and stereotypes for his unflinching subject matter. In Black Star (2011), a nude black woman bursts through a Frank Stella-like canvas, commanding attention and daring viewers to consider how she has been (and how she should be) seen and portrayed.

Amy Sherald (born August 30, 1973) is an American painter based in Baltimore, Maryland. She is best known for her portrait paintings. Her choices of subjects look to enlarge the genre of American art historical realism by telling African-American stories within their own tradition. She is well known for using grisaille to portray skin tones in her work as a way of "challenging the concept of color-as-race." Her style is simplified realism, involving staged photographs of her subjects. Sherald is the first African-American to paint an official First Lady portrait. Her portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC on February 12, 2018.

teeped in African-American history, Carrie Mae Weems’s works explore issues of race, class, and gender identity. Primarily working in photography and video, but also exploring everything from verse to performance, Weems has said that regardless of medium, activism is a central concern of her practice—specifically, looking at history as a way of better understanding the present. “Photography can be used as a powerful weapon toward instituting political and cultural change,” she has said. “I for one will continue to work toward this end.” She rose to prominence with her “Kitchen Table Series” in the early 1990s, whose photographs depict the artist seated at her kitchen table and examine various tropes and stereotypes of of African-American life. Most recently, her achievements were recognized with a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation.

Dawoud Bey (born 1953) is an American photographer and educator known for his large-scale art photography and street photography portraits, including American adolescents in relation to their community, and other often marginalized subjects. In 2017, Bey was named a fellow and the recipient of a "Genius Grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He is a professor and Distinguished Artist at Columbia College Chicago.

Charles White, Jr. was born on April 2, 1918 to Ethel Gary and Charles White Sr. on the South Side of Chicago. He discovered at an early age that he could draw. Often described as a Social Realist artist, White’s works is largely devoted to monumental prints and mural eloquently documenting the universality of humanity through the portrayal of Black America.

Coming home from school one day, White discovered students from The Art Institute of Chicago painting in a nearby park. One student explained how to mix paint and turpentine and stretch canvas. She also advised him that the class would be working there for a week. The next day after school, White raced there with an oil set his mother had previously bought him. Using a window blind as his canvas, he painted a landscape. Although initially angered by his destruction of the blind, his mother treasured this painting until her death in 1977.

Elizabeth Catlett (April 15, 1915 – April 2, 2012) was an American and Mexican graphic artist and sculptor best known for her depictions of the African-American experience in the 20th century, which often focused on the female experience. She was born and raised in Washington, D.C. to parents working in education, and was the grandchild of formerly enslaved people. It was difficult for a black woman in this time to pursue a career as a working artist. Catlett devoted much of her career to teaching.

Her work is a mixture of abstract and figurative in the Modernist tradition, with influence from African and Mexican art traditions. According to the artist, the main purpose of her work is to convey social messages rather than pure aesthetics. Her work is heavily studied by art students looking to depict race, gender and class issues.

Mark Bradford is a contemporary African-American artist. Working in a wide-ranging conceptual practice, he is best known for his multimedia abstract paintings whose laborious surfaces hint at the artist’s excavation of emotional and political terrain. “For me, it's always a detail—a detail that points to a larger thing,” he observed of his process. “I start to imagine what it points to, and that's when my imagination really goes.” Born in 1961 in Los Angeles, CA, Bradford studied at the California Institute of the Arts, graduating with an MFA in 1997. His work often displays the atrocities and struggles of race and poverty, as seen in his site-specific installation Help Us (2008). In the work, the artist displayed pieces of wood salvaged from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on top of Los Angeles building, spelling out “HELP US,” recalling the desperation of hurricane survivors on New Orleans rooftops. In 2017, Bradford represented the United States pavilion at the Venice Biennale with his work Tomorrow is Another Day, which was later shown at the Baltimore Museum of Art. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.

Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary American artist best known for her depictions of African-American women and celebrities through collages of acrylic, enamel, and rhinestones. Often based in photography, Thomas’ practice utilizes both the aesthetics of Western painting and the heavily sexualized blaxploitation films of the 1970s. Through appropriated imagery the artist addresses issues of femininity, race, and beauty alongside personal histories and childhood memories, citing artists such as Carrie Mae Weems and Romare Bearden as early influences. She also notably painted the first individual portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama, which was subsequently displayed at the National Portrait Gallery. Born on January 28, 1971 in Camden, NJ, she went on to attend the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and later received her MFA at the Yale School of Art in 2002. Thomas’ work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. .

Lorna Simpson is an American artist best known for her black-and-white photographs and works on paper—both of which explore the interplay between historical memory, culture, and identity. Often associated with postcolonial and feminist critique, Simpson’s work seeks to explicate the ways in which race and gender shape human interactions, specifically in the United States, through the medium of portraiture. “I do not feel as though issues of identity are exhaustible,” the artist has said. “I feel that my critique of identity, which in the past work may be the most obvious, becomes the foreground or recedes given the structures of the text or the type of narrative that I impose on the work.” In her most famous work Stereo Styles (1988), she explores the way in which identity is externally projected, displaying 10 images of an African American woman in different hairstyles alongside text that reads “Sweet,” “Ageless,” and “Magnetic.” Born in 1960 in Brooklyn, NY, Simpson studied photography at School of Visual Arts in New York and received an MFA from the University of California at San Diego, where she studied under Allan Kaprow and Eleanor Antin. In 1986, she received critical attention for her photographic series Twenty Questions (A Sampler), which evaluated the importance of image in contemporary society. In 2007, she was the subject of the retrospective titled “Lorna Simpson” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and she first exhibited paintings in 2015. Simpson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She was married to fellow artist James Casebere from 2007 to 2018. Today, her works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Miami Art Museum, among others.

Glenn Ligon is an American Conceptual artist known for his text-based paintings, prints, and sculptures. Ligon often explores ideas of sexuality, violence, and racial identity within American history through the intertextuality between literature and visual arts, sourcing material from both historical and invented texts. The artist’s signature hand-stenciled paintings and neon art sculptures, often portray a series of phrases that, when exhibited in the museum or gallery context, prompts the viewer to read them in a new way, such as in Double America (2012). He frequently appropriates text from well-known writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Gertrude Stein, and Walt Whitman to tell visual stories of ambiguous and unsettling nature. “My job is not to produce answers,” he once explained. “My job is to produce good questions.” Born in the Bronx, NY in 1960, he graduated with a BA from Wesleyan University in 1982, going on to participate in the Whitney Museum of Art's Independent Study Program in 1985. Ligon has garnered widespread critical acclaim for his work, including mounting solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the St. Louis Art Museum, among others. He lives and works in New York, NY.

Jordan Casteel (b. 1989, Denver, CO) has rooted her practice in community engagement, painting from her own photographs of people she encounters. Posing her subjects within their natural environments, her nearly life-size portraits and cropped compositions chronicle personal observations of the human experience. Casteel received her BA from Agnes Scott College, Decatur, GA for Studio Art (2011) and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (2014). In 2020, Casteel presented a solo exhibition titled “Within Reach,” curated by Massimiliano Gioni, at the New Museum, New York, presented in conjunction with a fully illustrated catalogue published by the New Museum. Other recent institutional solo exhibitions include “Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze,” presented at both the Denver Art Museum, CO (2019), and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, CA (2019–20). In recent years, she has participated in exhibitions at institutional venues such as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2020); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2020); Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands (2020); Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2019); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2018); MoCA Los Angeles, CA (2018); The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY (2017 and 2016); and MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2017). Casteel is an Assistant Professor of Painting in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at Rutgers University - Newark. The artist lives and works in New York.

The Ntozake Shange quote, “I found God in myself and I love her fiercely” is the underlying thought to my practice. In searching for myself, I found solace in her black womanhood and my ancestors. When challenged to represent God in a tradition practiced by my ancestors, I found Ifa. I became a researcher looking into ways to honor myself, my Ancestors, and nature. Resulting in a magical retelling of my spiritual history through self portraiture. Symbols radically unfolded from the stories of many Black women authors notably Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropological studies of Black folktales centering God and spirit. The art became a living entity constantly evolving as my understanding does. The artworks read chronologically despite my vessel existing outside of the confine of time. Acting as an amalgamation of ideas centering stories, theories, and aesthetics found in the tradition the visual narrative begins with the guardian of the crossroads. From that moment, I journey through a changing forest reflecting my spiritual energy and the deities that inhabit it. The spiritual truths I uncover shapes the forest around me and the depiction of my vessel. My Ori, which guides my head and spirit, and the Orisha that rule my head become my companions as I uncovers the space.

To articulate this narrative I include the colors that represent each Orisha and their shrine items. My nature aesthetics and shapes pull from the work “Into Bondage” by Aaron Douglass and the intricate geometric artworks of Jeff Donaldson and Alma Thomas. I creates a visual language that vibrates with metallics, glitter, glass, and rhinestones to echo art historical choices that have illustrated holiness and power throughout major world iconography. My art pieces hold a dual identity existing as physical and theoretical collages. They are physical collages of material with the layering of canvas, acrylic, glitter, and glass. Theoretically, the artwork layers art history, African American folktales, and personal spiritual practice. I all at once becomes an observer, student, and griot unpacking my journey in front of the viewer.

Jerrell Gibbs retraces family memories, examining the origin of his own life by representing intimate and instantly joyous moments. While affirming the multilayered experience of the African-American diaspora, Gibbs plunges the viewer into an immersive experience, the realm of his childhood.

Growing up in Baltimore influenced his perspective of socio-economics, body politics, race, economic disparities and their influence on one another. Through his figurative portraits, Gibbs accentuates banal representations of black identity by depicting empathy, inviting the possibility for a spiritual connection. The works are adapted from small polaroids, adapted into life-size paintings. The artist draws from revised characters in his own life and narratives such as Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts, mimicking their playful illustrative style.

Kara Walker is a contemporary African-American artist known for her exploration of race, stereotypes, gender, and identity throughout American history. She is best known for her large-scale tableaux of collaged silhouettes amidst black-and-white pastoral landscapes. Often filled with brutal and harrowing imagery, Walker provocatively illustrates the country’s origins of slavery in the antebellum South. “I didn’t want a completely passive viewer. Art means too much to me. To be able to articulate something visually is really an important thing,” the artist explained. “I wanted to make work where the viewer wouldn’t walk away; he would giggle nervously, get pulled into history, into fiction, into something totally demeaning and possibly very beautiful.” Born on November 26, 1969 in Stockton, CA, the artist received her BFA from Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and her MFA in painting and printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design three years later. Success came just out of school, with Walker becoming one of the youngest recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship at age 28. Her Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994) was an early example of the artist’s hallmark style. Influenced by Lorna Simpson and Adrian Piper, Walker continues to engage with feminism and ideals of beauty, as seen in her monumental sugar sculpture A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014), which portrayed a black woman as a sphinx at the former Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. She currently lives and works in New York, NY. Walker’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.

Titus Kaphar is an artist whose paintings, sculptures, and installations examine the history of representation by transforming its styles and mediums with formal innovations to emphasize the physicality and dimensionality of the canvas and materials themselves. His practice seeks to dislodge history from its status as the “past” in order to unearth its contemporary relevance. He cuts, crumples, shrouds, shreds, stitches, tars, twists, binds, erases, breaks, tears, and turns the paintings and sculptures he creates, reconfiguring them into works that reveal unspoken truths about the nature of history. Open areas become active absences; walls enter into the portraits; stretcher bars are exposed; and structures that are typically invisible underneath, behind, or inside the canvas are laid bare to reveal the interiors of the work. In so doing, Kaphar’s aim is to reveal something of what has been lost and to investigate the power of a rewritten history.

Titus Kaphar was born in 1976 in Kalamazoo, Michigan and lives and works in New Haven, CT. Kaphar received an MFA from the Yale School of Art and is a distinguished recipient of numerous prizes and awards including a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2018 Art for Justice Fund grant, a 2016 Robert R. Rauschenberg Artist as Activist grant, and a 2015 Creative Capital grant. Kaphar’s work, Analogous colors, was featured on the cover of the June 15, 2020 issue of TIME. He gave a TED talk at the annual conference in Vancouver 2017, where he completed a whitewash painting, Shifting the Gaze, onstage. Kaphar’s work has been included in solo exhibitions at the Seattle Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA PS1 and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, among others. His work is included in the collections of Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AK; the 21C Museum Collection; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami, FL, amongst others.

Kaphar’s commitment to social engagement has led him to move beyond traditional modes of artistic expression to establish NXTHVN. NXTHVN is a new national arts model that empowers emerging artists and curators of color through education and access. Through intergenerational mentorship, professional development and cross-sector collaboration, NXTHVN accelerates professional careers in the arts. Now in its second year of operation, NXTHVN encourages artists, art professionals, and local entrepreneurs to expand New Haven’s growing creative community. Supporters include: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Stonesthrow Fund, and the RISC Foundation.

Jacob Lawrence was an important African-American painter known for his portrayals of black culture in the early 20th century. Consisting of 60 panels of sensitively colored figurative paintings, the artist’s hallmark work Migration Series (1940–1941), depicts the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to Northern cities between World War I and World War II. “My belief is that it is most important for an artist to develop an approach and philosophy about life,” he once said. “If he has developed this philosophy, he does not put paint on canvas, he puts himself on canvas.” Born on September 7, 1917 in Atlantic City, NJ and, showing early talent at a young age, was encouraged to attend the Harlem Community Art Center where he studied under the sculptor Augusta Savage. Completing his Migration Series at only 23 years old, in 1941, Lawrence was the subject of his first solo show at Downtown Gallery in New York, and became the first black artist ever to be represented by a New York gallery. During this time, he was credited with developing a unique aesthetic known as Dynamic Cubism, which Lawrence would attribute not to European influences but to “hard, bright, brittle” Harlem. In 1970, Lawrence and his wife, the painter Gwendolyn Knight, moved to Seattle where he taught art at the University of Washington. He died on June 9, 2000 in Seattle, WA at the age of 82. Today, Lawrence’s works are held in the collections of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.

Alma Woodsey Thomas was an American painter best known for her colorful, abstract compositions. She frequently translated art historical references, natural phenomena, and personal aesthetic through simple compositions of circular and linear form. A major player in the Washington Color School, Thomas was born on September 22, 1891 in Columbus, GA and her family moved to Washington, D.C. by 1906 to escape growing racial prejudice. Thomas was the first person to graduate from Washington, D.C.'s Howard University's fine arts department in 1924, after which she gained an MA in art education from Columbia University in 1934. Thomas' legacy is defined by critical acclaim and achievements, including a 1972 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work was notably exhibited at the White House during the Obama administration's tenure. “Creative art is for all time and is therefore independent of time,” the artist once said, “It is of all ages, of every land, and if by this we mean the creative spirit in man which produces a picture or a statue is common to the whole civilized world, independent of age, race and nationality; the statement may stand unchallenged.” Thomas died on February 24, 1978 in Washington, D.C.

Romare Bearden was an African-American artist, activist, and writer. He is perhaps best remembered for his inventive paintings of black culture, as seen in his mural-sized work The Block (1971). “You should always respect what you are and your culture because if your art is going to mean anything, that is where it comes from,” the artist once said. Born on September 2, 1911 in Charlotte, NC, Bearden moved with his family to Harlem in 1914. His parents’ household became a social and intellectual hub for luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, visited by the likes of Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes. From 1935 until 1937, Bearden was employed as a cartoonist for the Baltimore publication Afro-American, but for most of his life he worked as a social worker in New York, making art in his free time. A founding member of the Harlem Cultural Council and Black Academy of Arts, Bearden was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1972. The artist received the Mayor's Award of Honor for Art and Culture in New York in 1984 and the National Medal of Arts in 1987. He died on March 12, 1988 in New York, NY. In 2013, his hometown of Charlotte dedicated a city park in honor of Bearden’s legacy. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an influential African-American artist who rose to success during the 1980s. Basquiat’s paintings are largely responsible for elevating graffiti artists into the realm of the New York gallery scene. His spray-painted crowns and scribbled words referenced everything from his Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage, to political issues, pop-culture icons, and Biblical verse. The gestural marks and expressive nature of his work not only aligned him with the street art of Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, but also the Neo-Expressionists Julian Schnabel and David Salle. “If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you've got to realize that influence is not influence,” he said of his process. “It's simply someone's idea going through my new mind.” Born on December 22, 1960 in Brooklyn, NY, Basquiat never finished high school but developed an appreciation for art as a youth, from his many visits to the Brooklyn Museum of Art with his mother. His early work consisted of spray painting buildings and trains in downtown New York alongside his friend Al Diaz. The artist’s tag was the now infamous pseudonym SAMO. After quickly rising to fame in the early 1980s, Basquiat was befriended by many celebrities and artists, including Andy Warhol, with whom he made several collaborative works. At only 27, his troubles with fame and drug addiction led to his tragic death from a heroin overdose on August 12, 1988 in New York, NY. The Whitney Museum of American Art held the artist’s first retrospective from October 1992 to February 1993. In 2017, after having set Basquiat’s auction record the previous year with a $57.3 million purchase, the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa surpassed it, buying the artist’s Untitled (1982) at Sotheby's for $110.5 million. This set a new record for the highest price ever paid at auction for an American artist's work. Today, Basquiat's works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others.

Barkley L. Hendricks was an African-American painter known for his photo-based portraits of black men and women. Conveying a sensitivity towards the unique persona of each sitter, his works are both matter-of-fact and culturally pointed. “Let me correct the assumption that my early work was explicitly political,” the artist said. “I was only political because, in the 1960s, America was fucked up and didn’t see what some artists or what black artists were doing.” Born on April 16, 1945 in Philadelphia, PA, he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before receiving his BFA and MFA from the Yale School of Art. While at Yale, he spent much of his time honing his photography skills, working under the famed Walker Evans. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the artist captured the hairstyles, fashions, and emotions of his neighbors and friends. In 2008, he was the subject of the acclaimed solo exhibition “Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of Cool” at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. His works, such as The Family Jules: NNN (No Naked Niggahs) (1974), went on to influence younger African-American artists, including Kehinde Wiley and Mickalene Thomas. Hendricks died on April 18, 2017 in New London, CT. The artist’s works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Modern in London, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Jack Whitten was an African-American artist best known for his rigorous experimentation with the materiality of painting. Using eggshells, acrylic paint, copper, and Styrofoam, he creates unique textures and photographic light effects. Titling his works with scientific, personal, or popular culture references—such as Quantum Wall or Church Street Spring—the artist calls forth evocative metaphors for culture and visual experience. “I’m convinced today that a lot of my attitudes toward painting and making, and experimentation came from George Washington Carver,” Whitten reflected. “He made his own pigments, his own paints, from his inventions with peanuts. The obsession with invention and discovery impressed me.” Born on December 5, 1939 in Bessemer, AL, the artist grew up amidst the segregation of the South and became a participant in the Civil Rights Movement while studying at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Leaving the South for good, the artist moved to New York where he studied at the Cooper Union School of Art during the early 1960s. In New York, Whitten became deeply influenced by the Jazz music of John Coltrane as well as the paintings of Jacob Lawrence. Largely working without much public attention over the following decades, in 2014 the travelling retrospective “Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting” opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego to critical acclaim. The artist died on January 20, 2018 in Queens, NY. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among others.

William H. Johnson was an African-American artist best known for his paintings and prints of landscapes and portraits. Johnson evolved through several styles during his career, influenced by Impressionism, Chaïm Soutine, and naïve folk art. “My aim is to express in a natural way what I feel, what is in me, both rhythmically and spiritually, all that which in time has been saved up in my family of primitiveness and tradition, and which is now concentrated in me,” he once explained. Born William Henry Johnson on March 18, 1901 in Florence, SC, he moved to New York with ambitions of becoming a cartoonist at the age of 17. However, his teacher at the National Academy of Design, Charles Webster Hawthorne, encouraged him to pursue painting instead of illustration. In 1926, Hawthorne raised money for Johnson to study abroad in France. Over the following decade, the artist met his wife the Danish textile artist Holcha Krake, and traveled around Europe and North Africa. Settling with his wife in Kerteminde, Denmark and then Svolvær, Norway, Johnson produced a number of works reflecting the natural beauty he lived amidst. Returning to the United States in 1938, the artist worked for the WPA in New York and began painting in a consciously naïve style. With the death of his wife in 1944, he underwent a mental breakdown. Though he returned to Denmark again, complications related to syphilis began affecting his mental health. Tragically, Johnson was institutionalized the last 23 years of his life, and died on April 13, 1970 in Central Islip State Hospital, NY. Today, his works are held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.

Betye Saar is an American artist known for assemblage and collage works. With a found-object process like that of Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg, Saar explores both the realities of African-American oppression and the mysticism of symbols through the combination of everyday objects. “I'm the kind of person who recycles materials but I also recycle emotions and feelings,” the artist has explained. “And I had a great deal of anger about the segregation and the racism in this country.” Saar was a part of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, and her work tackles racism through the appropriation and recontextualization of African-American folklore and icons, as seen in the seminal The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972), a wooden box containing a doll of a stereotypical “mammy” figure. Born on July 30, 1926 in Los Angeles, CA, she studied at the University of California Los Angeles and the University of Southern California. Today, her works are held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others. Saar lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Alison Saar is a contemporary American artist who addresses ideas of race, gender, culture, spirituality, and humanity through her figurative sculptures and paintings. “The pieces always feel like children to me, in that they have their own personalities and their own needs and desires, and their own abilities,” Saar has said about her life-sized artworks. Often commissioned for public installations, one of his best-known works is the fantastical Spring (2011), a bronze sculpture of a young women with tree roots growing out of her hair and butterflies adorning their branches. Born on February 5, 1956 in Los Angeles, CA, Saar earned a BA from Scripps College in 1978 and an MFA three years later from the Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design). Though primarily a sculptor employing a variety of materials—wood, glass, metal, and found objects—the artist also creates prints and illustrations that explore themes similar to those expressed by her three-dimensional bodies. A recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowships, Saar currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Her work can be found in the collections of the Walker Institute in Minneapolis, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the High Museum in Atlanta, among others.

Hank Willis Thomas is a contemporary American artist best known for his photography and appropriation art that considers racial identity through the lens of advertising and popular culture. Critic Arwa Mahadawi of The Guardian described Thomas’ work as un-branding “advertising: stripping away the commercial context, and leaving the exposed image to speak for itself.” He is most famed for his oeuvre Branded Series, among which is the dynamic piece Black Power (2006), depicting a smiling African-American man with the phrase “Black Power” overlaid in a gold and diamond grill on his teeth. Born on March 17, 1976 in Plainfield, NJ, Thomas went on study at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he received a BFA in photography and Africana studies, later receiving his MFA in photography from the California College of the Arts in Oakland. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, among others, and he has been a professor at MFA programs at Yale University and the Maryland Institute College of Art. Thomas lives and works in New York, NY.

My art practice takes on social commentary, critiquing perceptions of ideal beauty. Stereotypes and myths are challenged in my work; I create a dialogue between the ideas of inclusion, dignity, consumption, and subjectivity by addressing beauty in the form of the ideal woman, the Venus. By challenging Venus, my work challenges the notion of universal beauty—making room for women of color who are not included in this definition.

Wading through my work, you must look through multiple layers, double meanings and symbols. My process combines found and manipulated images with hand drawn and painted details to create hybrid figures. These figures often take the form of young girls and increasingly Black boys, whose well being and futures are equally threatened because of the double standard of boyhood and criminality that is projected on them at such a young age. The boys and girls who populate my work, while subject to societal pressures and projected images, are still unfixed in their identity. Each child has character and agency to find their own way amidst the complicated narratives of American, African American and art history.

Bisa Butler was born in Orange, NJ and raised in South Orange, the youngest of four siblings. Butler's artistic talent was first recognized at the age of four, when she won a blue ribbon in the Plainfield Sidewalk art competition. By age five, Butler was named the "artist of the month" at her nursery school. She currently resides in West Orange, New Jersey and is a Newark Public School art teacher.

A formally trained artist, Butler graduated Cum Laude from Howard University, with a Bachelor's in Fine Art degree. It was her education at Howard that Butler was able to refine her natural talents under the tutelage of such lecturers as Lois Mailou Jones, Elizabeth Catlett, and Ernie Barnes. While at Howard, Butler also studied the works of Romare Bearden, Faith Ringgold, and Henry O. Tanner.

While in the process of obtaining her Master’s degree on the road to a career as an art teacher, Butler took a Fiber Arts class that the light bulb went on and she finally realized how to express her art. "As a child, I was always watching my mother and grandmother sew, and they taught me. After that class, I made a quilt for my grandmother on her deathbed, and I have been quilting ever since." R

ecently Butler had the honor of having her artwork displayed at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, and at Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center.

Butler's quilts are enchanting works of art. These quilts communicate art, emotion, heritage, tradition, and beauty. The quilts of Bisa Butler represent a merging of artistic excellence and quilting magic.

Kadir Nelson is a Los Angeles–based painter, illustrator, and author who is best known for his paintings often featured on the covers of The New Yorker magazine, and album covers for Michael Jackson and Drake. His work is focused on African-American culture and history.

"I am not a portrait painter...

Painting faces (or people) is a practice that allows me to explore the complexities of humanity. Every person has a story. Every face archives experiences that are psychologically and emotionally embedded... but I am not a portrait painter. I seek to facilitate an engagement between my work and the viewer - with the viewer gazing upon an image... studying the face of another... speculating of their story... and identifying with their humanity. Life is complex and it presents an intricate maze of challenges and opportunities for each one of us to navigate. This is our journey, and I am exploring this journey through paintings... but I am not a portrait painter."

Ebony G. Patterson (born 1981, Kingston, Jamaica) is a Jamaican-born visual artist and educator. She is known for her large and colorful tapestries created our of various materials such as, glitter, sequins, fabric, toys, beads, faux flowers, jewelry, and other embellishments, her "Gangstas for Life series" of dancehall portraits, and her garden-inspired installations.

She has taught at the University of Virginia, Edna Manley College School of Visual and Performing Arts and is a tenured Associate Professor in Painting and Mixed Media at the University of Kentucky. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Jamaica, the United States, and abroad.

abstract paintings. Blending elements of Abstract Expressionism with Pop Art, her work bears the influence of important 20th-century painters, including Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian. Working as both painter and printmaker, Mehretu layers a mixture of pigment, graphite, and ink into heavily intersected lines of color, topographical elements, and geometric renderings. “The earlier, more analytic impulse was to use very rational but kind of absurd techniques or tendencies—mapping, charting, and architecture—to try and make sense of who I was in my time and space and political environment,” she explained of her work. Born on November 28, 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, her family moved to the United States in 1977. She graduated from Kalamazoo College in 1992, and began pursuing an art career independently before attending the MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she received her degree in 1997. She was the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2005, and in 2009, Goldman Sachs unveiled Mehretu’s sprawling Mural in the lobby of their Manhattan headquarters. The artist currently lives and works in New York, NY. Her works are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.

Peter Uka’s (b.1975, Nigeria; based in Cologne, Germany) classical training in realistic figuration, images from his memory, are nostalgic, and simultaneously convey innate and timeless human emotion, breathing depth into dynamic portrayals. Scenes of growing up in Nigeria, including elements like afro hairstyles and bell-bottom jeans - the bright mannerisms and local customs are all captured in vibrant, visual narrative.

Compositions also capture international trends from the late 20th century and the ways globalization connects countries around the world. These narratives uncover historical precedents of globalization and dynamic cultural signifiers connecting two countries that Uka calls home, while reminding the rest of the world of collective reciprocity, closeness, and connection.

Lauren Pearce is a black artist based in Cleveland Ohio who pulls inspiration from her community, creating powerful mixed media art and completing texture in her portraits, and iconic shape and color to her murals that captivate all who walk by them. Her passion for expressing her identity led her to become a young student at an art School. At an early age of 24, she began her professional career as an artist. Using an array of materials in her work, she transfers her world onto her paintings and allows her imagination to bring forth the colorful language of Identity, race, and womanhood, beyond a canvas.

Cassi Namoda (b. 1988, Maputo, Mozambique) is a visual and performance artist who creates figurative portraits of everyday life in post-colonial Mozambique. She works between Los Angeles and New York. Namoda is interested in conveying the dualities between sacrifice, pain and happiness in her social and familial networks, an acceptance of the balance between suffering and joy which she perceives as fundamental to her community’s way of life. Her paintings portray the importance of family, the remnants of colonial control and the physical fatigue of working life as narrative vignettes, inspired by her studies in film and literature.

Alfred Amadu Conteh was born in 1975 in Fort Valley, Georgia. He attended Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia, where he received a BFA. He received his MFA from Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Georgia. His mother is African American and his father is from Sierra Leone, West Africa. Many of his works examine his personal identity through his parents' experiences and cultural differences. Along with paintings, Conteh creates organic contemporary sculpture that uses symbology to express his narratives of the African American southern experience.

Theaster Gates lives and works in Chicago. Gates creates work that focuses on space theory and land development, sculpture and performance. Drawing on his interest and training in urban planning and preservation, Gates redeems spaces that have been left behind. Known for his recirculation of art-world capital, Gates creates work that focuses on the possibility of the “life within things.” Gates smartly upturns art values, land values, and human values. In all aspects of his work, he contends with the notion of Black space as a formal exercise – one defined by collective desire, artistic agency, and the tactics of a pragmatist.

Nick Cave is a contemporary African-American artist and dancer known for his unique fabric sculptures and performances. His Soundsuits act as costumes meant to empower the person wearing them through concealing their race and gender. The work was initially made in reaction to the police beating of Rodney King in 1992. “I am an artist with a civic responsibility. I [am invigorated] by dealing with these really hard issues around race and gun violence,” Cave has explained. Born on February 4, 1959 in Fulton, MO, he studied fiber arts at the Kansas City Art Institute before going on to receive his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1989. After finishing school, the artist became the director of the fashion program at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. Through the decades that followed, Cave has continued to address issues of racial inequality in the United States and his heritage. He continues to live and work in Chicago, IL. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, among others.

James Van Der Zee was an African-American photographer known for his distinctive portraits from the Harlem Renaissance. The artist used photography as a means not only to celebrate black culture but also provided his sitter’s with a feeling of pride. “It's a hard job to get the camera to see it like you see it. Sometimes you have it just the way you want it, and then you look in the camera and you don't have the balance,” he once said. “The main thing is to get the camera to see it the way you see it.” Born on June 29, 1886 in Lenox, MA, he began making photographs with a pinhole camera as a teenager. Moving to New York around 1909, he worked as a darkroom clerk at a small department store for a number of years before opening his own studio in Harlem. Over the next four decades, Van Der Zee captured the inhabitants of Harlem, including weddings, schoolchildren, and parades organized by Marcus Garvey. The artist died at the age of 96, on May 15, 1983 in Washington, D.C. Today, his photographs are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, among others.

Sanford Biggers is contemporary African-American artist who works in sculpture, video, installation, and performance. Drawing from a diverse range of influences, including Buddhism and Afrofuturism, Biggers employs antique quilts, African sculptures, and other significant objects to investigative identity and culture in his practice. “I often say time is malleable, but the reception of an artwork is malleable too,” he has said. “When the culture changes, the view and the way you see that work, your perspective, changes. It's something that you can't control.” Born in 1970 in Los Angeles, CA, he attended Morehouse College in Atlanta and received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999. Biggers currently lives and work in New York, NY. Today, his works are held in the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among others.

A first generation artist of the New Negro Movement, Hale Aspacio Woodruff created paintings, prints, and murals that depict the historic struggle and perseverance of African Americans. Though some of his work, such as his Afro Emblems series, is entirely abstract, Woodruff is perhaps best known for his American scenes that combine a representational style with a modern idiom and African aesthetic. He believed it was important to “keep your artistic level at the highest possible range of development and . . . [simultaneously] make your work convey . . . what we are as a people.” It was a philosophy that Woodruff lived by and one that he passed on to his students at Atlanta University.

A native of Cairo, Illinois, Woodruff began his career as a political cartoonist, first for a high school newspaper in Nashville, Tennessee, and later for an African American newspaper in Indianapolis. It was not until he enrolled in the John Herron Art School in Indianapolis that Woodruff learned about African and African American art. An encounter with William Edouard Scott, who had just returned from Europe, inspired Woodruff to study art, including African art, abroad. Financed in part by an award from the Harmon Foundation, in 1927 Woodruff began a four-year sojourn in Paris, where he became part of what he designated the “Negro Colony.” This group of expatriated African American artists and intellectuals included Henry Ossawa Tanner, Augusta Savage, Alain Locke, and the recently arrived Josephine Baker. Though they did not directly engage with the Parisian artist circle comprised of Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Matisse, and others, Woodruff and his friends were nonetheless aware of their artistic innovations and dealt with similar aesthetic issues in their own work. At the same time, Woodruff explored the ethnographic market with Alain Locke and studied African sculpture in books.

Richard Mayhew is an American painter, best known for his rainbow-colored landscape paintings. His fluorescent depictions of the American countryside tackle ideas surrounding African-American identity, jazz music, and Abstract Expressionism. “Landscape has no space, no identity,” he once said. Born on April 3, 1924 in Amityville, NY, Mayhew made his first contact with contemporary art through the famed New York hangout Cedar Bar, where Abstract Expressionist painters like Willem de Kooning would gather. These artists encouraged Mayhew to pursue and experiment in his art, influencing his technique and worldview. His body of work is based on his extensive travels throughout the United States, and he was notably a member of the Black painters' collective "Spiral," including other members such as Romare Bearden and Hale Woodruff. Mayhew continues to live and work in Santa Cruz, CA.

Radcliffe Bailey is a contemporary African American artist known for his mixed-media practice that delves into his black heritage and childhood in the South. Employing materials that include paint, traditional African sculpture, tintype photographs of his family, clay, and piano keys, the artist conveys the powerful sentiment of a living memory. “I believe that by making things that are very personal they become universal,” he explained. “I am first and foremost an artist, a person of this world, and an artist of African descent who grew up in the South and has chosen to continue to live and work in the South. My art is about history and the mystery of history.” Born in 1968 in Bridgeton, NJ, he grew up in Atlanta where he frequent the High Museum of Art with his mother who introduced her son to the works of James Van Der Zee and Jacob Lawrence. Bailey received his BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and has gone on to have several solo exhibitions including “Memory as Medicine,” which opened in 2011 at the High Museum of Art. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., among others. He continues to live and work in Atlanta, GA.

Purvis Young was a self-taught African-American artist known for his expressive collages and paintings. Made on found objects, including scrap metal, book pages, and discarded envelops, his richly colored depictions of trucks, figures, and coil-shaped abstractions, described a fraught yet inspired experience of living in the poverty stricken Overtown neighborhood of Miami. “What I say is the world is getting worser, guys pushing buggies, street people not having no jobs here in Miami, drugs kill the young, and church people riding around in luxury cars,” he once remarked. Born on February 4, 1943 in Liberty City, FL, he learned to draw from his uncle at a young age but never had any formal art training. It was during his incarceration at the Raiford State Penitentiary from 1961–1961 as a teenager, that he began drawing prolifically. Years after his release, Young’s creative output attracted the attention of Bernard Davis, the owner of the Miami Art Museum. Davis subsequently brought the artist’s work into the public eye, and by the 1970s, tourists and collectors regularly visited Young in Goodbread Alley where he lived and worked. Inspired by books on Rembrandt, Vincent van Gogh, El Greco, and Paul Gauguin, as well as documentaries on American history, Young’s work grew in scope and formal invention throughout the latter part of his career. The artist died on April 20, 2010 in Miami, FL. Today, his works are held in the collections of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the American Folk Art Museum in New York, and the de Young Museum of Art in San Francisco, among others.

Duro Olowu is a Nigerian-born British fashion designer. He is best known for his innovative combinations of patterns and textiles that draw inspiration from his international background.

Born in Lagos, Nigeria, to a Nigerian father and Jamaican mother, Olowu’s first eponymous collection in 2004 was a critical hit with the fashion world and sold out internationally. It featured the now signature "Duro” dress, hailed by both British and American ​Vogue​ as the dress of the year in 2005. That same year, he won the prestigious New Designer of the Year Award at the British Fashion Awards.

Alluring silhouettes, sharp tailoring, original prints juxtaposed with luxurious fabrics in off-beat, yet harmonious, combinations became Olowu’s signature. His collections are a reflection of his interpretation of an international style that is timeless and relevant. His curatorial projects ​Material​ in 2012 and ​More Material​ in 2014 at Salon 94 Gallery in New York met with critical praise by the art world.

Olowu’s first museum exhibition, ​Making & Unmaking​ at the Camden Arts Centre in London in 2016, also garnered high critical curatorial praise and is regarded as a landmark exhibition both for the scale and range of artists included as well as the deftly original installation he designed for the show. He lives between London and New York.

Edmonia Lewis was an American sculptor in the 19th century who worked in a Neoclassical style. Her marble figurative sculptures portrayed both mythological and historical people, including Poor Cupid (1973), Hagar in the Wilderness (1868), and Forever Free (1867). As an African American and Native American woman, she is remembered as a trailblazer and pioneering figure in the history of art, with her work notably portraying black and indigenous people at a time when it was extremely controversial to do. Born circa July 4, 1844 in Greenbush, NY, Lewis went on to study art at Oberlin College at the age of 15 but was the target of racism and criminal accusations, and was ultimately forced to leave without graduating. She instead eventually opened her own studio in Boston, and gained acclaim for her sculptural bust portraits. Her work continued to grow in scale and ambition, and one of Lewis’ most famous works remains the iconic Death of Cleopatra (1876), completed for the “Centennial Exposition” in Philadelphia, which was believed to be lost in a fire until it was discovered nearly 100 years later. Today, it can be found in the Smithsonian American Art Museum of Washington, D.C. Lewis's date and place of death is unconfirmed, however, it is estimated that she died on September 17, 1907 while abroad in London, England at the age of 63.

Norman Lewis was an African-American artist known for his incisive depictions of contemporary society and poetic abstractions. “I wanted to be above criticism, so that my work didn't have to be discussed in terms of the fact that I'm black,” he once said. Born on July 23, 1909 in New York, NY, Lewis began his career as a Social Realist painter, focusing on the inequities caused by poverty and racism, as seen in his work Girl with Yellow Hat (1936). In the mid-1940s, his focus shifted towards abstraction and gestural mark-making, drawing inspiration from the work of Wassily Kandinsky and Mark Tobey. He emerged as the sole black artist in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists alongside Ad Reinhardt, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock. Though his paintings changed Lewis remained committed to social concerns throughout his career, forming the Spiral Group with Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, and Hale Woodruff, the group’s primary mission was assisting the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s. The artist died on August 27, 1979 in New York, NY. Today, Lewis’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others.

Henry Ossawa Tanner was an American artist known for his depictions of biblical themes, and was also the first African-American painter to gain international acclaim. Tanner was born on June 21, 1859 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania but soon after moved to Philadelphia, where he taught himself how to paint. He later enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1880 as the only black student, and studied under the tutelage of painter Thomas Eakins. In 1890, Joseph C. Hartzell, a bishop from Cincinnati, Ohio, helped arrange an exhibition of Tanner’s works. However, when no paintings were sold, Hatzell purchased the entire collection himself, giving Tanner the money to move to Paris, France in 1891 to study at the Académie Julian. Although his early work often depicted the lives of African-Americans, he later moved on to biblical imagery, for which he started receiving acclaim in Europe and later in the United States. Daniel in the Lions' Den received an honorable mention at the 1894 Paris Salon, and The Raising of Lazarus won a medal at the 1897 Paris Salon and was later purchased by the French government. In 1900, he won the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts' Lippincott Prize for one of his most well known works, Nicodemus Visiting Jesus. He remained in France for the rest of his life, regularly exhibiting his works internationally. In 1927, he became the first African-American to be granted full membership at the National Academy of Design in New York. After his death on May 25, 1937, Tanner’s art became less renowned until the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. exhibited several of his works in 1969, the first major solo exhibition of a black artist in the United States.

Horace Pippin was a self-taught African-American artist known for his poetic paintings of flowers, genre scenes, and historical events such as the hanging of the abolitionist John Brown. With their rich colors and idiosyncratic approach to organizing space, paintings such as Domino Players (1943), are both timeless and charged with life. “My opinion of art is that a man should have love for it, because my idea is that he paints from his heart and mind,” he once reflected. Born on February 22, 1888 in West Chester, PA, he grew up in Middletown, NY, beginning to draw at an early age. Moving to New Jersey in 1902, Pippin worked as a mover and iron molder prior to enlisting in the United States Army in 1917. Shot by a sniper while serving in World War I, the artist’s right arm was permanently disabled before he returned to the United States in 1919. Upon his return, he moved to West Chester with his new wife and worked odd jobs that didn’t require manual labor, mainly living of his military pension. In 1928, Pippin began producing paintings on cigar boxes, and over the following decades, he gained the attention of artists such as N.C. Wyeth and collectors like Albert C. Barnes. As he painted more, the artist began incorporating imagery from early American artists, such as Edward Hicks and Winslow Homer. Before he died on July 6, 1946 in West Chester, PA, Pippin had been widely exhibited at institutions throughout the country. Today, his works are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.

Roy DeCarava was a photographer best known for chronicling the daily life of the Black community and famous Jazz musicians in his hometown of Harlem, New York during the Harlem Renaissance. His most famous works include Graduation and John Coltrane, which were both featured in his book “The Sweet Flypaper of Life,” a collaboration with Langston Hughes. DeCarava began his career as a painter, using a camera only to record images to paint later. Becoming aware of the limitations faced by Black painters, he was eventually drawn to the immediacy of photography and shifted gears. DeCarava’s shift to photography was also a response to the Civil Rights Movement, and came from a desire to represent the Black community in an artistic light. “One of the things that got to me was that I felt that Black people were not being portrayed in a serious and in an artistic way,” he told the New York Times in 1982. In 1938, DeCarava was awarded a scholarship to the Cooper Union School of Art. He studied there for two years, before attending the Harlem Community Art Center, where his peers included Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Langston Hughes. For his final year, DeCarava attended the George Washington Carver Art School, where he learned alongside the social realist Charles White. Throughout his career, DeCarava combined political commentary with aesthetic beauty. He passed away in Harlem in 2009. In 2019, David Zwirner Books published Light Break, a survey of DeCarava’s work. His photographs can also be seen in the MoMA, the Whitney, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Adrian Piper is a contemporary African-American artist known for addressing issues of ethics, gender, class, and race with her work. Often passing for racially white, in her series My Calling (Card) (1986-1990), Piper handed out printed notes to people who had accidentally offended her, including one with the line, “Dear Friend: I am black. I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark.” “My work is an act of communication, and it's important to me the way what I assert lands, and where it lands within someone who sees it,” she has explained. Born Adrian Margaret Smith Piper on September 20, 1948 in New York, NY, the artist went on study both philosophy and art in New York, later receiving her PhD in philosophy from Harvard University in 1981. During her studies, she was influenced by Sol Lewitt’s cerebral approach to producing artwork. She has gone receive a number of prestigious fellowships while also teaching philosophy at colleges throughout the United States. In 2018, the artist’s most comprehensive exhibition to date “Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016,” opened at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in collaboration with the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The artist currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Today, her works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.

Wangechi Mutu is a contemporary Kenyan artist noted for her work conflating gender, race, art history, and personal identity. Creating complex collages, videos, sculptures, and performances, Mutu’s work features recurring mysterious leitmotifs such as masked women and snake-like tendrils. Her pastiche-like practice combines a variety of source material and textures to explore consumerism and excess: for a 2005 work titled Cancer of the Uterus, Mutu employed a medical pathology diagram, facial features cut from a magazine, fur, and a heavy application of black glitter to create an eerily distorted face. The almost science fiction-like nature of her imagery has placed her work within the realm of Afrofuturism, and her practice is often discussed as providing an alternate course of history for people of African descent. Deeply concerned with Western commercialism, Mutu has explained that “a lot of my work reflects the incredible influence that America has had on contemporary African culture. Some of it's insidious, some of it's innocuous, some of it's invisible. It's there.” Born on June 22, 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya, she received her BFA from Cooper Union in 1996, and subsequently her MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2000. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, including a major retrospective that opened in the Nasher Museum of Art in North Carolina in 2013, and traveled globally. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Simone Leigh is a celebrated contemporary sculptor. Working in a variety of media that includes ceramic, video, installation, and bronze, her work explores issues of identity and race, beauty, and feminism. Her artworks frequently incorporate materials and forms traditionally associated with African art and the African diaspora, while her performance-related installations often blend historical precedent with personal stories. “I am compelled by this idea that the artistic form is as important as the information the form delivers,” the artist has explained. “In Western cultures there is a stated separation between style and substance; there is an idea of the object and the decoration. Black aesthetics deny this separation.” Born in 1967 in Chicago, IL, she went on to earn her BA in art with a minor in philosophy from Earlham College. Leigh’s career found particularly widespread attention in 2016, when her work was featured at the Art Show in the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Her work has since been featured in the New Museum in an exhibition titled “The Waiting Room,” the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, The Studio Museum in Harlem with the project “inHarlem,” and the 2019 Whitney Biennial, among others. She is also the recipient of numerous honors and awards, notably including the 2018 Hugo Boss Prize. The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.