Contemporary Artists

Dyani White Hawk

As a woman of Sičangu Lakota and European American ancestry, I was raised within Native and urban American communities. I strive to create honest, inclusive works that draw from the breadth of my life experiences, Native and non-Native, urban, academic, and cultural education systems. This allows me to start from center, deepening my own understanding of the intricacies of self and culture, correlations between personal and national history, and Indigenous and mainstream art histories.

My painting and sculptural works reflect these cross-cultural experiences through the combination of influences from modern abstract painting and abstract Lakota art forms. Some are executed strictly in paint on canvas while others incorporate materials such as beads, porcupine quillwork, and buckskin, weaving aesthetics and concepts from multiple yet intertwined histories.

Big Ideas: Identity, culture,

Beth Cavener

Primitive animal instincts lurk in our own depths, waiting for the chance to slide past a conscious moment. The sculptures I create focus on human psychology, stripped of context and rationalization, and articulated through animal and human forms. On the surface, these figures are simply feral and domestic individuals suspended in a moment of tension. Beneath the surface, they embody the consequences of human fear, apathy, aggression, and misunderstanding.

Alison OK Frost

Alison OK Frost was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA, where she received her BA in Art from UCLA. She went on to earn an MFA in Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY. Frost currently lives and works in Oakland, CA. Frost paints in watercolor, a medium typically associated with picturesque landscapes, to interpret disturbing images from news sources, found snap shots and movie stills. Frost’s watercolors depict absurdly dystopic yet commonplace images, such as workers in HazMat suits and disaster scenes—all incongruously painted, with a beautiful delicacy that produces odd tensions between content and artistic process.

https://www.kala.org/fellowship/alison-ok-frost/

Big Ideas: Dystopia, Social Justice, Culture

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

In her methodically layered compositions, Njideka Akunyili Crosby (b. 1983) combines painted depictions of people, places, and subjects from her life with photographic transfers derived from her personal image archive as well as Nigerian magazines and other mass media sources. The resulting works are visual tapestries that vivify the personal and social dimensions of contemporary life while evocatively expressing the intricacies of African diasporic identity. https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/njideka-akunyili-crosby

Big Ideas: Family, Culture,

Salah Elmur

SharSalah Elmur's (b. 1966, Khartoum, Sudan; lives and works in Cairo, Egypt) artistic journey is deeply entwined with Sudanese cultural heritage, resonating with the pioneering spirit of the Khartoum School and modernist movements within African and Arab diasporas. Inspired by his upbringing near the Blue Nile in Khartoum, Elmur’s work reflects the rich history of Sudanese culture. His fascination with photography, nurtured in his father’s studio, infuses his paintings with the nostalgia of 1960s Sudanese portrait photography. His compositions blend figurative abstraction, and familial themes, reflecting the multiplicities within Sudanese life. (https://marianeibrahim.com/artists/92-salah-elmur/)

Big Ideas: Culture, Family, Storytelling

Kaitlin Chan

Kaitlin Chan is a Hong Kong-based cartoonist whose touching comics and zines highlight personal, everyday moments. Actively engaged in artistic and literary communities in Hong Kong and beyond, Chan’s work has been published by outlets including The New Yorker and The Economist. https://kaitlinchan.com/

Big Ideas: Storytelling, Ritual

Tauba Auerbach

Tauba Auerbach’s work (b. 1981, San Francisco, CA) contemplates structure and connectivity on the microscopic to the universal scale. Building on crafts in many disciplines, Auerbach often invents tools and techniques for inducing material behaviors. The artist’s hand is recognizable in work across a wide variety of media including painting, weaving, glass sculpture, photography, video, calligraphy and musical instrument design.

https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s11/tauba-auerbach-in-bodies-of-knowledge/

Joiri Minayas

Artist Statement: My work is a reassertion of Self, an exercise of unlearning, decolonizing and exorcizing imposed histories, cultures and ideas.

It’s about reconciling the experience of having grown up in the Dominican Republic with living and navigating the U.S. / global North; using gaps, disconnections and misinterpretations as fertile ground for creativity. I’ve learned there is a Gaze thrust upon me which others me. I turn it upon itself, mainly by seeming to fulfill its expectations, but instead sabotaging them, thus regaining power and agency. Inter-disciplinarily, I explore the performativity of tropical identity as product: the performance of labor, decoration, beauty, leisure, service.

Big Ideas: Identity, Culture

Naudline Pierre

Naudline Pierre was born in 1989 in Leominster, MA, and currently lives and works in New York City, NY. The artist received her BFA from Andrews University and later her MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Through painting and sculpture, Pierre crafts an alternate reality filled with burning landscapes and otherworldly creatures. Drawing inspiration from personal history, religious iconography, and medieval and Renaissance works of art, the artist reframes tradition through a more secular and personal lens, centering themes of community, transcendence, and transformation

https://art21.org/watch/new-york-close-up/naudline-pierre-a-place-other-than-here/

Big Ideas: Fantasy, Storytelling, Relationships, Spirituality

Margaret Killgallen

Margaret Kilgallen was a central figure of the San Francisco Mission School whose work celebrated the "evidence of the human hand" through a unique blend of printmaking, typography, and folk art. Drawing inspiration from hand-painted signs and marginalized histories, she utilized a muted, "retro" palette to elevate the stories of everyday people and strong, independent women. By intentionally embracing the "waver" in her hand-drawn lines, Kilgallen challenged the slickness of commercial advertising and championed the beauty found in life’s imperfections.

Big Ideas: History, Culture, Heroes, Identity

Shantell Martin

Shantell Martin's work goes beyond art, it's an immersive journey into storytelling, identity, and space transformation. With a rich background in collaborations, commissions, institutional projects, and museum shows, Shantell has been on a journey of mastering her line and the art of creating pieces that not only capture attention but also provoke thought and emotion. Her distinctive style, rooted in self-exploration and social consciousness, offers more than a visual tapestry.

Big Ideas:

Favianna Rodriguez

Favianna Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist and activist whose vibrant printmaking serves as a powerful tool for social justice and cultural transformation. Her work frequently utilizes bold colors and symbolic imagery, such as the iconic monarch butterfly, to advocate for immigrant rights, gender equity, and climate justice. By blending high-impact aesthetics with community-based organizing, Rodriguez reclaims narratives for marginalized groups and inspires collective action toward a more inclusive future.

Big Ideas: Culture,

Danielle SeeWalker

Danielle SeeWalker is Húŋkpapȟa Lakȟóta and citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota. She is an artist, writer, activist, and boymom of two, based in Denver, Colorado. Her visual artwork often incorporates the use of mixed media and experimentation while incorporating traditional Native American materials, scenes, and messaging. Her artwork pays homage to her identity as a Lakȟóta wíŋyaŋ (woman) and her passion to redirect the narrative to an accurate and insightful representation of contemporary Native America while still acknowledging historical events.

https://www.seewalker.com/about

Big Ideas: Identity, Past/Present

Stephanie H. Shih

STEPHANIE H. SHIH’s painted ceramic sculptures explores the way cultural identities transform as they migrate with a diaspora. She replicates everyday objects that reflect traces of colonization, emigration, assimilation, and cultural interchange within the lives of Asian immigrants and their children.

https://stephaniehshih.com/work

Big Ideas: Culture, Identity

Robyn O'Neil

Robyn O'Neil's (born 1977, Omaha, NE) prodigious career places her in the company of some of the great landscape artists in the history of art. Known for her detailed narrative drawings that often contain art historical references, her drawings in dry media range from intimate landscapes to large-scale, multi-panel works. Often surreal or symbolic, her drawings reference personal narratives and art historical allusions, and deal with themes of memory, identity and climate crises.

https://www.inmangallery.com/video/35-robyn-o-neil-hell/

Big Ideas: Memory and Identity, Climate Crises

Lance Lammers

Lance Lammers is a graphite portrait artist and baseball coach at Englewood High School whose work focuses on capturing the emotion and intensity of athletes through highly detailed realism. Inspired by his daily connection to sports and competition, Lance creates portraits that highlight defining moments, leadership, and identity in athletics. His goal is to tell meaningful stories through graphite while continuing to grow both as an artist and educator within the Englewood community.

Big Ideas: Leadership, Identity, Sportsmanship

Jahna Rae

Jahna Rae Church is a Painter, Illustrator and Muralist in Denver, Colorado. She received her degree in Illustration at The Academy of Art University in San Francisco, CA in 2017.

Jahna uses patterns, and layers of paint to express the complexity and beauty of the journey to healing and self discovery. Bright, saturated colors in contrast to the more life-like portraits, evoke emotion and illustrate a story or psychological feeling. Her abstract work is a closeup or dissection of these impermanent moments in time within the human psyche. Symbolism through color and shapes create a clearer picture of self awareness, healing and connection.

Jahna Rae believes art is her greatest method for self-expression and self-awareness. As things change and time passes, her work adapts to new ways of thinking and understanding.

https://jahnarae.com

Big Ideas: Identity, Self-expression

Dustin Yellin

Dustin Yellin describes his inventive sculptures as works of “frozen cinema.” He embeds streaks of paint and a riot of tiny images snipped from old magazines, art history books, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and found notebooks into sheets of laminated glass. The collage elements coalesce into intricate, shape-shifting narrative scenes, human figures, or isolated natural forms. Yellin’s sculptures can feel once contemporary and ancient, like fossilized organisms preserved in amber.

Big Ideas: Culture

Lucia Hierro

Lucia Hierro (b. 1987) is a Dominican American conceptual artist born and raised in New York City, Washington Heights/Inwood, and currently based in the South Bronx. Lucia’s practice, which includes sculpture, digital media and installation, confronts twenty-first century capitalism through an intersectional lens.

Hierro’s practice, which includes sculpture, digital media, and installation, confronts twenty-first century capitalism through an intersectional lens. Appropriating imagery that ranges from commerce to art history, Hierro’s choices manifest her own multidimensional experience as a Dominican American New Yorker. With a studio methodology steeped in Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and European still life painting, as well as her own biographical circumstance, Hierro’s work surveys power, individuality, and opportunity specific to the communities she orbits. Lifting visual matter off the street and media outlets, she expresses subjective storylines that speak to the elasticity of identity—a symptom of our hyperkinetic present.

http://www.luciahierro.com/art

Big Ideas: Capitalism, Intersectionality, Consumerism

Alec Egan

Alec Egan is a Los Angeles based painter. His thick impastoed figurative paintings are strikingly banal interior scenes. The interior spaces his paintings depict are premised on a fictitious memory— willfully playing on tropes of nostalgia. There are moments of clarity in the messy compositions. Particular objects begin to stick out and become repeated across his various canvases. This repetition allows the items to garner their own strength and intensity, despite their mundane status. A pair of socks or plants on a windowsill are distilled into something melancholic and profound.

https://anatebgi.com/artists/alec-egan/

Big Ideas: Nostalgia, memory, still life

Amoako Boafo

Exclusively portraying individuals from the Diaspora and beyond, Boafo invites a reflection on Black subjectivity, diversity and complexity. His portraits are notable for their bold colors and patterns, which celebrate his subjects, as a means to challenge representation that objectifies and dehumanizes Blackness.Big Ideas: diversity, culture, identity
https://marianeibrahim.com/video/3-amoako-boafo-i-stand-by-me/

Amy Sherald

My work began as an exploration to exclude the idea of color as race from my paintings by removing “color” but still portraying racialised bodies as objects to be viewed through portraiture. These paintings originated as a creation of a fairytale, illustrating an alternate existence in response to a dominant narrative of black history. As my ideas became more legible the use of fantasy evolved into scenes of spectacle (e.g. circuses), to make direct reference to blackness and racialisation. I stage specific scenes of social ascent, and racial descent that chart the psychology and performance of identity with a particular attention to notions of social exclusion and assimilation. All of these things configure a practiced position or role played within a specific space or context. These kinds of performances blend and bleed the borders of how blackness is defined within the phenomenon of race as it relates to a specific experience of blackness in America, which has been performed in front of an audience that pretends not to exist. I am using historicism and race, not to be provocative, but to find some meaning within the ideas of self-actualization and the evolution of identity as a reaction to external directives

Big Ideas: culture, identity, relationships, culture

Odili Donald Odita

Odili Donald Odita (b. Engu, Nigeria in 1966; lives and works in Philadelphia, PA) is an abstract painter whose work explores color both in the figurative historical context and in the sociopolitical sense. He is best known for his large-scale canvases with kaleidoscopic patterns and vibrant hues, which he uses to reflect the human condition.For Odita, color in itself has the possibility of mirroring the complexity of the world as much as it has the potential for being distinct. In his paintings, we see color interwoven and mixed, becoming an active agent in representing the essential power that light has in identifying the entirety of our world. He thinks of his colors as agents to express thoughts, ideas, and transformational change. Much of his color selection is based on personal memories and created intuitively by hand-mixing, so that no two shades are ever repeated.

https://www.odilidonaldodita.com/statements/index.html

Big Ideas: Memories, Race, Identity

Genesis Belanger

Genesis Belanger’s work is characterized by the treatment of objects as surrogates for the body. Everyday objects, sculpted in stoneware and tinted in fondant hues, often take on human features, made uncomfortably familiar as they begin to resemble us. Working with a wide range of material such as clay, metal, and upholstery, Belanger often creates immersive installations that depict liminal spaces, such as a reception area, hotel lobby, or funeral parlor. Her signature motifs, such as manicured female hands, misplaced limbs, half eaten foods, and cigarettes inhabit these spaces, toeing the line between comfort and disquiet, the beautiful and the strange. The artist's psychologically charged scenes ultimately point to society’s progressive, yet stagnant, movement in gender stereotypes and equality as well as critique mass consumerism.

Belanger's work considers the ways in which American advertising manipulates psychology; the dynamics of consumption; issues of privacy in our increasingly online world; and coping mechanisms for the overwhelm. Her pieces often act as surrogates for human feeling or experience. Belanger's three-dimensional work, although situated within the legacy of Claes Oldenburg and Robert Gober, is concerned with the manifestation of capitalist myths on a gendered psyche.

Big Ideas: Materialism, consumerism, society, culture

Zanelle Muholi

Muholi is a South African visual activist and photographer. For over a decade they have documented black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people’s lives in various townships in South Africa. Responding to the continuing discrimination and violence faced by the LGBTI community, in 2006 Muholi embarked on an ongoing project, Faces and Phases, in which they depict black lesbian and transgender individuals. Muholi’s self-proclaimed mission is "to re-write a black queer and trans visual history of South Africa for the world to know of our resistance and existence at the height of hate crimes in SA and beyond." These arresting portraits are part of Muholi’s contribution towards a more democratic and representative South African homosexual history. Through this positive imagery, Muholi hopes to offset the stigma and negativity attached to queer identity in African society.

Big Ideas: identity, social justice, community, culture

Eamon Ore-Giron

Eamon Ore-Giron blends a wide-range of visual styles and influences in his brightly colored abstract geometric paintings. Referencing indigenous and craft traditions, such as Native American medicine wheels and Amazonian tapestries, as well as 20th-century avant-gardes, from Russian Suprematism to Latin American Concrete Art, his paintings move between temporalities and resonate across cultural contexts. Ore-Giron also works in video and music, and his body of work across media makes manifest a history of transnational exchange.

Big Ideas: Tradition, Culture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaBZDNUGrjI

Crystal Latimer

The KEEPSAKES collection symbolizes stories of inner strength. The value of a keepsake, as a sentimental object, is relative to its owner. To expand upon that idea, the purpose of the painted tapestry is for you to, when viewing it, remember your own inner strength; how that feeling shows up is a story entirely your own. The empowerment within the work is relative to YOU.

Every ounce of my creativity is exhilarated by making work that serves to continually remind you of just how bold you are. In doing so, the result is saturated in a visual language that stimulates inner strength. Rich jewel tones lay vibrant on a surface that portrays cowgirls, cheetahs, and flora. Cowgirls are a reminder to be brazen in your purpose. Cheetahs ask you to become untamed and claim a more expansive, wilder existence. Flora symbolizes rebirth. Gilded edged designs and tassels transform the painted tapestry into a dimensional form.

Big Ideas: Symbolism, nostalgia

Rafael Silveira

Rafael Silveira’s imaginative work combines figurative classical painting, comic-inspired imagery and surreal subject matter, resulting in a universe where dreams are blended with waking life and the impossible appears commonplace. Silveira credits his native Brazil as a source of inspiration and describes his experience living in the country as having “daily contact with the bizarre, absurd and preposterous. It’s like walking through a wild forest where beauty and dangers reveal themselves in strange, random and haphazard ways."

Big Ideas: Fantasy, portraits, comics, dreams

Gina Beavers

In her visceral, vexing, often grotesque paintings, New York–based artist Gina Beavers (American, b. 1974) transforms digital images appropriated from social media and the Internet into thickly layered compositions that border on sculpture. Across a recurring repertoire of subject matter―from photos hashtagged #FoodPorn to step-by-step cosmetics tutorials―Beavers’s work offers uncanny and often unsettling visions of our digitally mediated lives. Built up through dense accumulations of acrylic medium or foam and imbued with almost cinematic color, Beavers’s works are at once repulsive and alluring, highlighting the gap between our digital and physical lives and how we consume, desire, and fashion ourselves to reflect contemporary culture. Deriving their titles from the captions or comments that originally accompanied her source imagery, Beavers actively anticipates that her works will be posted, shared, and re-shared across online platforms. Although composed from social media streams and destined to be reabsorbed by them, the stubborn materiality of Beavers’s paintings resists the logic of digital reproduction.

Big Ideas: culture, social media, consumerism, culture, materialism

Jordan Casteel

Jordan Casteel was born in 1989 in Denver, Colorado. She lives and works in New York. Casteel creates colossal portraits of the people in her community, including former classmates at Yale University, where she received her MFA in 2014; street vendors and business owners in her Harlem neighborhood; and students from her classes at Rutgers University-Newark. Rendered in vibrant hues of amber, lavender, and indigo, Casteel’s oil paintings confront traditional notions of gender and race in portraiture, with the expressed purpose of featuring those who might not otherwise be portrayed on museum walls.

Long committed to social justice, Casteel was working as a teacher in Colorado and painting in the evenings when she realized that she needed to devote herself more seriously to her art practice. After completing her MFA at Yale University, Casteel moved to New York for a residency at The Studio Museum of Harlem, where she became inspired to address ideas of Black masculinity. Casteel began painting portraits of friends, family members, and classmates, posed in intimate settings and posed to look directly at the viewer. The effect is at once tender and powerful, forcing viewers to contend with their preconceived notions of masculinity and race. Casteel’s practice expanded to a near-anthropological pursuit, in which the artist meets and photographs subjects on the streets of her neighborhood of Harlem, transforming strangers to close friends and collaborators. Through Casteel’s larger-than-life paintings, this community of diverse men and women is represented on the walls of museums globally.

https://art21.org/watch/new-york-close-up/jordan-casteel-stays-in-the-moment/

Big Ideas: culture, diversity, relationships, social justice,

Sarah Detweiler

Detweiler depicts these traditionally “hidden” mothers without their children. She renders fabrics with a mix of oil, acrylic, gouache, watercolor, and embroidered elements. By cloaking women in materials long associated with domesticity, she confronts traditional notions of femininity and motherhood.

Big Ideas: Identity, aging, family, relationships

Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley is a young, African-American painter who is quite literally changing the face(s) of portraiture with his sensitive, vibrant, and political portrayals of black folk, ranging from teenagers he meets on the streets, to fellow contemporary artists, and even former President Barack Obama.

Wiley made a name for himself for his naturalistic, brightly colored portraits of young black men, often with dramatic flowery backgrounds. With black masculinity often framed as synonymous with fear and violence in the USA, his generous and vibrant portraits challenge viewers' preconceptions of their subjects and bring young men, and people, of color into the galleries and museums they are so woefully underrepresented in.

Big Ideas: identity, culture, social justice

Hebru Brantley

https://www.hebrubrantley.com/about

Hebru Brantley creates narrative-driven work revolving around his conceptualized iconic characters which are utilized to address complex ideas around nostalgia, the mental psyche, power, and hope. The color palettes, pop-art motifs, and characters themselves create accessibility around Brantley’s layered and multifaceted beliefs. Majorly influenced by the South Side of Chicago’s Afro Cobra movement in the 1960s and 70s, Brantley uses the lineage of mural and graffiti work as a frame to explore his inquiries. Brantley applies a plethora of mediums from oil, acrylic, watercolor and spray paint to non-traditional mediums such as coffee and tea. Brantley’s work challenges the traditional view of the hero or protagonist and his work insists on a contemporary and distinct narrative that shapes and impacts the viewer’s gaze.

Big Ideas: nostalgia, power, hope