Voices of the Diaspora: The Artisans Behind the Canvas

Otobong Nkanga (born September 13, 1974 in Kano, Nigeria) is a Nigerian-Belgian visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores ecology, resource extraction, colonial history, labor, and the interconnected relationships between bodies and land. Working across installation, tapestry, sculpture, drawing, photography, performance, video, poetry, and sound, Nkanga examines how natural materials are extracted, transformed, valued, circulated, and consumed across different geographical and economic systems.  Nkanga studied at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris before earning a master’s degree in performing arts through DasArts, Advanced Research in Theatre and Dance Studies, in Amsterdam. Her work often engages geology, botany, mining, environmental violence, global trade, memory, healing, and repair, using layered textiles, organic materials, sculptural constellations, poetry, and participatory projects to consider how human histories remain embedded within landscapes and material objects.  Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Nasher Sculpture Center, Tate St Ives, Zeitz MOCAA, Castello di Rivoli, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Gropius Bau, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She has received the Nasher Prize, the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award, the Belgian Art Prize, the Yanghyun Art Prize, and a Special Mention at the 58th Venice Biennale. Otobong Nkanga lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. 

Oumar Ka (born 1930, Kel, Senegal; died 2020, Touba, Senegal) was a Senegalese photographer whose work documented rural life, portraiture, and self-fashioning in postcolonial Senegal. Based in Touba and active across the Senegalese interior, Ka worked primarily in photography, creating carefully composed portraits that situated his subjects within domestic, agricultural, and village settings. His work is characterized by formal clarity, attention to environment, and an emphasis on how people represented themselves through pose, dress, and place.  Ka apprenticed under the Senegalese photographer Cheikh Kane before beginning his own career in 1959 as an itinerant photographer, traveling to villages in the Baol region and beyond. Unlike many better-known West African studio photographers of the period, Ka often photographed his clients in their lived surroundings, allowing landscape, architecture, and personal belongings to become part of the portrait. His many self-portraits further reflect this approach, presenting the self through environment, gesture, and objects.  In recent years, Ka’s work has gained major international recognition through exhibitions including Oumar Ka: Voltaic and Rural Portraits at Axis Gallery and presentations at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, where his photographs are held in the collection. His work has also entered major institutional collections and is now recognized as an important contribution to the history of African photography and portraiture. 

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, (b.1980-) an artist whose work encompasses drawing, painting, installation, and animation. Her work alludes to mythology, geology and theories on the nature of the universe. Sunstrum’s works include narrative landscapes that appear simultaneously futuristic and ancient.

Pamina Sebastião (1988- ) is an Angolan multidisciplinary artist working with video, drawing, collage, and photography. One of their activist avenues is their art, interrogating coloniality and centering queer experiences.  Sebastião received a Master's in International Law and Relations with a focus on African Human Rights System from Lisbon University, Portugal in 2015 and a Law degree from Catholic University, Angola in 2011. 

Papa Ibra Tall (1935-2015) was a weaver, painter, and illustrator. Known for his role in the Ecole de Dakar, an art school/movement based in Senegal, his works feature bright colors and abstracted shapes. Taking the form of large scale installations, much of his art was created with the intention of transforming space.

Patricia Encarnación (1991- ) is a Dominican multimedia artist based in New York. She works with video, photography, and sculpture. Her work investigates the tourist and consumerist gaze that is often directed at the Caribbean. Ultimately she explores the lasting effects colonialism on the Caribbean and Latin America through everyday objects and the myth of the “tropical”. Encarnación received an AAS degree in Illustration and Fine Arts from Altos de Chavon, the School of Design. She then was awarded a full-tuition scholarship to complete her BFA at Parsons, The New School of Design, New York, in 2014. She then received a full-tuition scholarship for the graduate program in the Caribbean Studies concentration in Museum Studies at NYU, where she graduated in 2022.

Patrick Bongoy (1980- ) is a Congolese sculptural artist. He works mostly with waste materials such as tires, inner tubes, industrial packaging, jute sacking, textiles, and ropes. His figurative and abstract works reference traditional Congolese basket-weaving while referencing the immense labor that goes into the objects. Bongoy urgently highlights the high cost of human life at the expense of natural resources for technology. Important to him is the forced migration, homelessness, and displacement due to larger social and political elements at machinations.  He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa. 

Paula Wilson (1975- ) is an American interdisciplinary artist who works across printmaking, film, and installation. She has a deep interest in femininity and the environment. Her entry point into her work is through a naturalist, educator, and ecosexual lens. Her practice seeks to find space between art and life, creating an accessible space.  Wilson received her BFA from Washington University, Saint Louis, MO in 1998 and her MFA from Columbia University, New York, NY in 2005. 1998    

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982) is a Californian photographer who integrates his professional and personal life into his work to create raw images of the human form. Sepuya's photos include friends, lovers, and models and showcase intimate depictions of humans in "creative, desirous exchanges. His photos have been exhibited in solo shows and museums nationwide.

Paulo Nazareth (1977- ) is a Brazilian performance, video, and photography artist. Nazareth's practice brings awareness to the experiences of marginalized identities, colonialism, and racism. Through simple gestures, he foregrounds his relationships with the people around him. 

Pepón Osorio (born 1955 in Santurce, San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a Puerto Rican multidisciplinary artist known for large-scale, immersive installations that bring together sculpture, video, found objects, performance, and community-based practices. After moving from Puerto Rico to the South Bronx in 1975, Osorio studied sociology at Herbert H. Lehman College and later earned an MA in sociology from Columbia University in 1985. Before working as an artist full-time, he was a social worker in New York, including in a child-abuse prevention unit serving primarily Latino communities—an experience that profoundly shaped his collaborative approach to artmaking. He currently lives and works between Philadelphia and San Juan and is Associate Professor Emeritus at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture.  Osorio is recognized for densely layered environments that transform familiar spaces—including homes, barbershops, bedrooms, classrooms, and institutional settings—into sites for examining social and political realities. Often incorporating everyday objects, decorative materials, photographs, video, furniture, religious imagery, and what he has described through the language of chucherías, his installations draw upon Puerto Rican and Nuyorican visual culture while challenging conventional distinctions between fine art, popular aesthetics, and domestic decoration. Works such as El Chandelier (1988), Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?) (1993), No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop (1994), and Badge of Honor (1995) address migration, racial and class hierarchies, masculinity, family, incarceration, and the ways private life intersects with larger social systems.  Community engagement is fundamental to Osorio’s methodology. Many of his projects emerge through extended conversations and collaborations with the people whose experiences inform the work, and he has frequently presented installations within neighborhoods, storefronts, schools, and other community spaces before moving them into museums. This process positions exhibition-making as a form of social exchange and allows the meaning of a work to shift as it moves between community and institutional contexts. Over more than three decades, his projects have addressed structural inequalities involving education, health care, incarceration, race, gender, class, and cultural representation, particularly as they affect Latinx and working-class communities in the United States.  Osorio has received some of the most significant honors in contemporary American art, including a MacArthur Fellowship, an Alpert Award in the Arts, the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the College Art Association’s Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement. His 2023 New Museum exhibition, My Beating Heart/Mi corazón latiente, was described by the museum as his most comprehensive exhibition to date, bringing together landmark installations from the 1990s through his contemporary practice. In 2024, his installation Convalescence, developed from conversations about illness and health-care inequity, was presented by Philadelphia Contemporary and Thomas Jefferson University. His work is also included in MASP’s current 2026–27 exhibition Latin American Histories in São Paulo. 

Peter Bradley (born September 15, 1940, Connellsville, Pennsylvania, United States) is an American artist whose abstract painting and sculpture practice explores color, rhythm, improvisation, and formal intensity. Working across painting and sculpture, Bradley examines abstraction through saturated color, sprayed acrylic, gestural layering, and a visual language often associated with Color Field painting and the improvisatory structure of jazz.  Bradley studied at the Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit and at Yale University. His work often engages abstraction, material experimentation, and the relationship between movement and color, using acrylic thickened with gel medium, spray application, and sculptural form to consider how color can operate as subject, atmosphere, and force.  Their work has been exhibited at Karma, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other major institutions, including recent solo presentations such as Ruling Light: Paintings from the 1970s and Ten Sculptures. No major standalone awards or honors were clearly verified in the sources I reviewed. Peter Bradley lives and works in Saugerties, New York. 

Philemona Williamson (born 1951, New York, NY) is an American painter known for her psychologically rich figurative works that explore memory, girlhood, identity, and the complexities of coming-of-age. Her paintings feature ambiguous narratives that center young people—often girls and adolescents—caught in moments of emotional transition. With vibrant color, symbolic objects, and fluid dreamlike compositions, Williamson examines interpersonal relationships, cultural heritage, and the inner worlds of youth. Her work has been exhibited nationally at the Montclair Art Museum, Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Newark Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the June Kelly Gallery. Williamson received her BA from Bennington College and her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). She lives and works in New York.

Philippe Walter Marie Dodard (1954- ) is a Haitian illustrationist painter, and sculptor. Expressionist and vibrant, Dodard's work oscillates between figurative and abstraction scenes applied with thick brushstrokess. Reoccuring themes in his work include animals, landscapes, and women and children. 

Philomé Obin (1892-1986) was a Haitian painter. He depicted daily life as well as Haiti's complex history. His flat style is insight into public space in Haiti. He is one of the founders of the  Cap-Haitien school of painting (named for the community in the north of the country). 

Phoebe Beasley (1943- ) is an American painter, collagist, printmaker, and mixed media artist. Her colorful work focuses on scenes from everyday life. She is the only artist whose work has been awarded the Presidential Seal under two different U.S. Presidents, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Beasley received her BFA in art education from Ohio University in 1965. She received her MFA from Kent State University. Additionally, she received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Ohio University in 2005. 

Phyllis Stephens (born 1955, in Atlanta, Georgia) is an American artist whose textile-based practice explores African American history, Black family life, movement, legacy, and the emotional force of everyday experience. Working across story quilts, tapestry, and hand-sewn textile compositions, Stephens examines memory, ancestry, celebration, and cultural continuity through richly patterned surfaces, painterly color, and narrative figuration.  Stephens is a fifth-generation quilt maker and has quilted professionally for more than thirty years. Her work often engages African American cultural history, family, beauty, spirituality, and community, using fabric, appliqué, stitching, and layered textile construction to consider how Black life is carried through gesture, dress, movement, and intergenerational remembrance. Recent writing on her work also notes the role of prayer and research in shaping each new body of work.  Her work has been exhibited at Almine Rech, Richard Beavers Gallery, Oglethorpe University Museum of Art, and in the traveling exhibition Water Is Life, which opened in Geneva and traveled internationally. Stephens lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. 

PJ Anderson is a Canadian ceramic artist of Afro-Jamaican and Red River Métis heritage whose practice examines cultural inheritance, colonial disruption, identity, technology, environmental justice, and the recovery of traditional making knowledge. Working primarily with handbuilt ceramics, weaving, and mixed media, Anderson uses techniques including coiling, burnishing, terra sigillata, smoke firing, and basket weaving—processes connected to ceramic and fiber traditions practiced by Indigenous communities in Africa and the Americas. Her work considers what happens when intergenerational systems of knowledge transmission are disrupted by colonialism and how contemporary artists might reclaim, adapt, and transmit those practices.  Anderson’s material research has taken her beyond Western academic approaches to ceramics. During her undergraduate studies at the University of Manitoba, she traveled to South Africa in 2009 as a research assistant and worked directly with Zulu ceramic practitioners. She returned to the University of KwaZulu-Natal as an artist-in-residence in 2012. In 2018, she traveled to New Mexico to study ceramic and weaving traditions associated with Pueblo pottery families. These experiences became foundational to a practice that treats direct learning from traditional practitioners and elders as a means of repairing breaks in cultural knowledge caused by colonization and displacement.  A recurring body of work explores what Anderson calls the weaponization of identity. Her “weaponized” vessels combine traditional ceramic forms with blades, firearm imagery, inaccessible interiors, or defensive structures. These works began partly in response to unsafe drinking water in Indigenous communities in Canada and developed into a broader investigation of power, cultural protection, digital harassment, race, gender, and the political consequences of visibility. The vessel becomes simultaneously protective and threatening: an object designed to safeguard something precious so completely that what it protects can become unreachable.  Anderson earned a BFA with honors from the University of Manitoba in 2009, specializing in painting and ceramics, and completed her MFA there in 2022 with the thesis exhibition the weapons we become. Alongside her studio practice, she has become an important advocate for greater racial and cultural representation within ceramics. She is a co-organizer of The Color Network and currently serves as Programs Director for the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA), 2024–2027.  In fall 2026, her work will appear simultaneously in two major exhibitions devoted to Caribbean diasporic ceramics: After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco and After the Island: Caribbean Canadian Ceramics at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto.

Pogus Caesar (born 1953, in St. Kitts, West Indies) is a British artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores Black British life, migration, protest, social history, and self-representation. Working across photography, conceptual art, film, archiving, curating, and publishing, Caesar examines community, visibility, and historical memory through documentary photographs, portraiture, moving image, and long-term archival work rooted in Birmingham and the wider Black British experience.  Caesar grew up in Birmingham and began as a pointillist painter before turning to photography in the 1980s. His work often engages Black British history, everyday life, musicians, political unrest, and urban communities, using photography and archival practice to consider both the ordinary and the historic. His images of the 1985 Handsworth uprisings are especially well known, and in 2004 he established the OOM Gallery Archive in Birmingham to represent and preserve his photographic archive.  His work has been shown widely, including at the National Portrait Gallery and in major exhibition contexts such as Life Between Islands. His photographs are held by institutions including the National Gallery of Art, National Portrait Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. In 2018, Birmingham City University awarded him an Honorary Doctorate, and he is also listed as a Visiting Professor there.

Pope.L (June 28, 1955 – December 23, 2023) was an American interdisciplinary artist, writer, performer, theater-maker, and educator whose conceptually driven practice examined race, class, language, gender, power, labor, and social inequality. Working across performance, drawing, painting, installation, sculpture, video, photography, text, and theater, he used absurdity, endurance, humor, discomfort, and contradiction to expose the unstable systems through which people and communities are categorized, marginalized, and made visible. He frequently described himself as a “fisherman of social absurdity,” positioning art as a way of asking difficult questions rather than delivering fixed political conclusions.  Pope.L is especially known for the physically demanding Crawl performances he began in 1978. In works including Times Square Crawl, Tompkins Square Crawl, and The Great White Way: 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street, he moved through public space on his hands, knees, elbows, or stomach, sometimes wearing a business suit or Superman costume. By surrendering what he called “verticality,” Pope.L drew attention to homelessness, poverty, racial inequality, physical vulnerability, and the unequal ways bodies are permitted to occupy urban space.  Pope.L studied at Pratt Institute, earned a BA from Montclair State College in 1978, attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and received an MFA from Rutgers University in 1981. He taught at Bates College for approximately two decades before joining the University of Chicago, where he became a tenured professor in the Department of Visual Arts. His work was presented internationally at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Art Institute of Chicago, Walker Art Center, South London Gallery, Documenta, the São Paulo Biennial, and numerous other institutions. He died in Chicago in 2023. 

Portia Zvavahera (born March 22, 1985, in Harare, Zimbabwe) is a Zimbabwean artist whose painting practice explores dreams, spirituality, womanhood, vulnerability, and emotional transformation. Working across painting and print-based processes, Zvavahera examines interior life, faith, fear, and protection through layered surfaces, repeated motifs, and dense compositions that merge figuration with pattern and abstraction. Her paintings often draw from dreams, everyday rituals, Pentecostal belief, and Shona visual culture to create psychologically charged scenes that move between intimacy and the uncanny.  Zvavahera studied at the BAT Visual Arts Studio under the National Gallery of Zimbabwe from 2003 to 2004 and received a diploma in visual arts from Harare Polytechnic in 2006. Her work often engages memory, dream states, spirituality, and cultural inheritance, using painting, printmaking processes, and textile-like patterning to consider care, anxiety, embodiment, and the porous boundary between the seen and unseen. She has described dreams as a key source for her imagery, and institutions frequently note the way her work bridges Indigenous Shona references with Christian and personal symbolism.  Her work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, David Zwirner, Fruitmarket, and Zeitz MOCAA, among other international venues. She has received the FNB Art Prize and the Tollman Award for the Visual Arts. Portia Zvavahera lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Precious Okoyomon (born 1993, London, United Kingdom) is a Nigerian-American artist and poet whose multidisciplinary practice explores ecology, colonial histories, migration, and the entanglements between human and nonhuman life. Working across installation, sculpture, poetry, and performance, Okoyomon creates immersive environments that incorporate living materials such as plants, soil, insects, and organic matter, foregrounding processes of growth, decay, and transformation. Their work often centers invasive plant species—such as kudzu—as metaphors for colonial expansion, displacement, and resilience, examining how landscapes are shaped by histories of violence and survival. By cultivating these materials within gallery spaces, Okoyomon constructs ecosystems that challenge distinctions between nature and culture, control and wildness. Their installations frequently evolve over time, allowing unpredictability and ecological processes to shape the work’s form and meaning. Alongside their visual practice, Okoyomon is an acclaimed poet, and language plays a central role in their work. Their texts and installations engage themes of love, grief, spirituality, and belonging, often drawing from diasporic experience and queer identity. By combining literary, ecological, and sculptural approaches, Okoyomon expands contemporary art discourse to include care, relationality, and interdependence across species. Okoyomon has exhibited widely at major international institutions and biennials and was included in the 59th Venice Biennale. Their work is held in significant public and private collections. They live and work in New York.

Préfète Duffaut (1 January 1923 – 6 October 2012) was a Haitian painter. Born in Cyvadier, Sud-Est, near the seaport of Jacmel, where he lived and worked. Duffaut was one of the painters, alongside important Haitian artists such as Gesner Abelard and Rigaud Benoit, at the Centre d'Art in the Haitian capital. In the early 1950s Duffaut was one of several artists invited to paint murals in the interior of the Cathedral of Sainte Trinité (largely destroyed in the January 2010 earthquake) in Port-au-Prince; his works there were titled "The Temptation of Christ" and "The Processional Road" (also referred to as the "Procession of the Crossing Guard"). Duffaut paints in the vernacular style and his oeuvre typically consists of fantastical "imaginary cities" (villes imaginaires), that often contain coastal elements with boats. The cityscapes are strongly influenced by the coastal city of Jacmel. Another recurrent theme, especially in earlier works, is imagery associated with Vodou.

Prince Gyasi Nyantakyi (1995- ) is a Ghanaian photographer. He is co-founder of Boxedkids, a non-profit organization helping kids from Accra get an education. Prince Gyasi's hallmark style includes colorful and emotional photographs depicting life in Accra, Ghana—all taken with his iPhone. His choice of bold, bright backgrounds highlights the beauty of Black skin. 

Purvis Young (1943-2010) was a Bahamian-American artist. A self-taught artist, Young had an interest in art as a child and revisited it as a young adult. A voracious reader, he was inspired by artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, El Greco, Honoré Daumier, and Pablo Picasso. Young painted on wooden panels frequently. His work is characterized by its expressionist syle, works guided by his "inner eyes". He often explored race and the human condition in his work. 

Qualesha Wood (b. 1996) is a contemporary multidisciplinary artist whose work explores Black womanhood, memory, and the emotional landscapes carried within the body. Working across photography, video, performance, and mixed media, Wood uses gesture, storytelling, and intimate portraiture to examine themes of vulnerability, healing, and visibility. Her practice often engages familial histories and the quiet rituals of daily life, creating images that are tender, atmospheric, and rooted in lived experience. Through her visual language, Wood reframes Black interiority as a site of power, softness, and complexity, inviting viewers to witness narratives that are often overlooked or unspoken.

Queen Nwaneri is a painter born in Italy, raised in Nigeria, and currently based in Australia. These global experiences inform her work and convey the human condition's universality beyond borders. 

Rachel Jones (1991- ) is a British artist who uses sound, performance, painting, and installation to explore psychological truths through abstraction. Jones grapples with the challenges of finding visual means to convey existential concepts. She replicates symbols to create associative relationships as part of her ongoing investigation of identity and abstract representation of the internal structures of Black life. Jones' work relates the various ways the Black body has been depicted through history and pushes past modes of figurative representation.

Radcliffe Bailey (1968-2023) was an American multidisciplinary artist who worked across painting, sculpting, and mixed media. A deep interest in African American and Southern histories informs his work.  Using religion, music, baseball, slavery, and Atlanta’s rich history pertaining to both the American Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s Bailey created installations that probed African diasporic histories. He often used old family photos and piano keys in works that were personal yet accessible.  Bailey received his BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991. 

Rahim Fortune (born 1994, in Austin, Texas) is an American artist whose photographic practice explores American identity, migration, family history, landscape, and the intertwined experiences of Black and Indigenous communities in the American South. Working across photography, portraiture, landscape, and photobook-making, Fortune examines memory, resettlement, grief, and cultural continuity through intimate documentary observation, poetic sequencing, and images that move between personal history and broader social narrative.  Fortune is a self-taught photographer. His work often engages family archive, social history, regional landscape, and community memory, using black-and-white and color photography, serial image-making, and the photobook form to consider loss, care, belonging, and the ways history is carried through people and place. His projects frequently focus on Texas, Oklahoma, and the wider American South, foregrounding the emotional and historical textures of everyday life rather than spectacle.  His work has been exhibited at the California African American Museum, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and the University of Texas, and it is held in collections including the High Museum of Art, LUMA Arles, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He received the Rencontres d’Arles Louis Roederer Discovery Award in 2022, and his book I Can’t Stand to See You Cry was nominated for the Paris Photo–Aperture Photobook of the Year award. Rahim Fortune lives and works between Austin, Texas, and Brooklyn, New York.

ransome (James Earl Ransome, born September 25, 1961, in Rich Square, North Carolina) is an African American painter, collage artist, sculptor, installation artist, filmmaker, illustrator, and educator whose work explores Black family history, the Great Migration, Southern life, memory, labor, resilience, cultural inheritance, and the everyday experiences through which African American communities have created and sustained themselves.  Working primarily from New York’s Hudson Valley, he combines figurative painting and abstraction with collage, found and handmade papers, installation, sculpture, and moving image. His contemporary fine-art practice is presented under the mononym ransome, while his extensive career in children’s-book illustration is generally credited to James E. Ransome.  Ransome’s fine-art practice grows directly from his family history. His grandparents were North Carolina sharecroppers, and members of his family were among the millions of Black Southerners who relocated northward during the Great Migration. He frequently treats his family’s experiences as a point of entry into a much larger African American history, combining intimate portraits, archival memory, domestic imagery, cotton, luggage, quilts, patterns, text, and everyday materials with references to migration, segregation, Jim Crow, labor, aspiration, and Black community life. As he has repeatedly explained, his family history is inseparable from the larger history of Black America. His recent exhibitions have increasingly emphasized not only the violence and hardship surrounding Black history but also the love, pleasure, beauty, style, intimacy, humor, dignity, and joy that make survival meaningful. His forthcoming 2026 solo exhibition A Little Sugar in My Bowl at Curtiss Jacobs Gallery in Harlem makes this especially explicit: portraits of families, children, lovers, workers, ancestors, and elders shift the historical narrative from what Black communities endured toward what they created, protected, and passed forward. That exhibition follows major projects examining the Great Migration at Opalka Gallery and CAM Raleigh and Black representation at the Gibbes Museum of Art and Pelham Art Center.  Ransome earned a BFA in Communications Design (Illustration) from Pratt Institute in 1987 and an MFA in Visual Arts from Lesley University in 2021. He spent many years as a tenured professor at Syracuse University before leaving academia to concentrate on his studio practice.  His fine art is held by the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, University of New Hampshire, and Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art. His honors include the 2025 Alexander Rutsch Award for Painting, a 2022 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and major awards from his parallel illustration career, including the 2023 Children’s Literature Legacy Award, Coretta Scott King honors, and NAACP Image Awards. He lives and works in Rhinebeck, New York. 

Rashid Johnson (1977- ) is an American artist from Chicago. His work often depicts a range of mediums, such as sculpture, painting, drawing, filmmaking, and installation. They showcase historical occurrences, philosophy, cultural viewpoints, and his narrative. Much of his work explores themes of race and class pulled from autobiographical and broader Black American life.  Johnson received a BFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2000 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. 

Ravelle Pillay (b.1993, Durban, South Africa) is a Johannesburg-based painter whose practice mines the haunting reverberations of history, extracted from archival photography and inherited memories. As a starting point, the artist collects family photographs stretching back generations alongside a broader archive of portrait and landscape photography as imperfect portals into the past. The process of meeting the canvas with unstable imagery is underpinned by an inevitable grappling with the legacies of colonialism and migration. 

Raymond Saunders (born 1934, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is an American painter whose work blends abstraction, figuration, and assemblage to explore race, representation, and the expansive possibilities of painting. Based in California, Saunders works across painting, drawing, and mixed media, creating layered compositions that incorporate found materials, text, and imagery drawn from both everyday life and art history. His practice resists categorization, embracing complexity and contradiction as central to its form and meaning. Saunders first gained prominence in the 1960s and is widely known for his influential 1967 pamphlet Black Is a Color, in which he challenged the expectation that Black artists should be confined to explicitly political or representational modes. Instead, he argued for artistic freedom and the right to engage abstraction, conceptualism, and personal expression without limitation. This philosophy continues to inform his work, which moves fluidly between visual languages and references. His paintings often feature chalkboard-like surfaces, gestural marks, photographic images, and handwritten text, creating dense visual fields that invite close looking and interpretation. By layering cultural references, symbols, and fragments of language, Saunders constructs works that function as both visual and intellectual spaces, where meaning is continuously negotiated rather than fixed. Saunders has exhibited widely throughout his career and is recognized as a key figure in postwar American art. His work is held in major institutional collections, and he continues to live and work in California.

Reginald O’Neal (L.E.O.) (1992- ) is an American painter. O'Neal typically utilizes a dark, muted palette in his portraits. Much of his work features his family, community, and experiences. They are his personal experiences but lend themselves to a broader Black experience. O'Neal sometimes mediates on themes of death and decay as an unfortunate point of life. Currently, his work focuses on his community and beliefs. 

Renée Cox (born October 16, 1960, in Colgate, Jamaica) is a Jamaican-American artist, photographer, filmmaker, activist, curator, and educator whose work challenges historical representations of Black people, particularly Black women, across Western art, religion, popular culture, and mass media. Working primarily through staged photography, self-portraiture, video, and digital image-making, Cox places the Black female body at the center of narratives from which it has historically been marginalized or excluded. Her images confront racism, sexism, colonialism, beauty standards, motherhood, sexuality, religion, and cultural power while proposing affirmative forms of Black self-representation.  Born in Jamaica and raised in Scarsdale, New York, Cox initially studied film at Syracuse University before establishing herself as a commercial and fashion photographer. She worked in New York and Paris, photographing for publications including Glamour, Essence, Votre Beauté, and Vogue Homme, as well as designers including Issey Miyake and Claude Montana. In the early 1990s, she increasingly turned toward fine-art photography, earning an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1992 and participating in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1992–1993.  Cox frequently uses her own body as both subject and instrument of critique. Her Yo Mama series reimagines motherhood through monumental self-portraiture, while Rajé transforms Cox into a Black female superhero who confronts racist stereotypes. In works such as Yo Mama’s Last Supper, she reconfigures canonical religious imagery by occupying the position traditionally reserved for Christ, and in Queen Nanny of the Maroons she embodies Jamaica’s legendary Maroon leader to engage histories of anti-colonial resistance, Black sovereignty, and diasporic memory. Her 2017 photograph The Signing reimagines Howard Chandler Christy’s painting of the signing of the U.S. Constitution by replacing the white male Founding Fathers with contemporary women and men of color.

Renée Green (b. 1959, Cleveland, Ohio, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and filmmaker whose work spans sculpture, architecture, photography, video, sound, and installation. Her practice draws on cultural anthropology, historical archives, literary and philosophical sources, and is often research-intensive—creating layered installations that examine memory, exchange, language, and the circulation of ideas. 

Renee Stout (born 1958) is an American sculptor and contemporary artist known for assemblage artworks dealing with her personal history and African-American heritage. Born in Kansas, raised in Pittsburgh, living in Washington, D.C., and connected through her art to New Orleans, her art reflects this interest in African diasporic culture throughout the United States. Stout was the first American artist to exhibit in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art.

Renell Medrano (1992- ) is a Dominican-American commercial and artistic photographer and director. Medrano seeks to get to the "truth" of her subjects. Past subjects include Kendell Jenner, Kylie Jenner, Kendrick Lamar, and the Venus sisters. She has been creating images since she was a teenager. In addition to her work with musical artists, she creates work exploring her Dominican heritage. Medrano received her BFA in Photography at Parsons The New York School for Design. 

René Peña (1957- ) is a Cuban photographer. Peña has been taking photographs since he was a child. He shoots primarily in black and white is focused on duality duality between human inability to escape institutionalization and human desire for individualism. Individuals all exist within systems -- family, religion, class, etc. despite a belief that individuals possess boundless freedom.  René Peña graduated from the University of Havana with a specialization in English.

René Tavares (1983-  ) is a São Tomean multidisplinary artist working across photography, video, painting, drawing, and installation. Grounded in a rigorous research practice, Tavares focuses on social and political issues experience in African countries. He questions forgotten and neglected heritages hallenging the rigidity of categories and prejudices through abstract, gestural, and figuration works.  Tavares holds a Bachelor's in Fine Arts and Visual Arts from the Dakar School of Fine Arts, Senegal, a postgraduate degree in Visual Arts, Painting and Photography from the Rennes School of Fine Arts, France, and a Master's in Art and Heritage Sciences from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon Portugal.

Rhea Leonard (born 1991, South Florida) is a Miami-based African American multidisciplinary artist whose work spans drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and textile-based mark-making. Her practice centers the Black body, memory, trauma, and healing, using figurative imagery and material experimentation to explore how systemic violence, personal experience, and cultural history shape identity. Leonard often expands the language of drawing through sewn, beaded, and tactile surfaces that embody care, vulnerability, and resilience. She holds a BFA from New World School of the Arts and an MFA from Florida International University, and is currently a resident artist at Bakehouse Art Complex.

Richard Hunt (born September 12, 1935, Chicago, IL – died January 16, 2023) was a pioneering American sculptor whose work fused abstraction, organic form, and industrial materials to explore history, mythology, and the African American experience. Working primarily in welded metal, Hunt drew inspiration from nature, music, literature, and the social realities of Black life in the United States, creating dynamic sculptures that balance movement, tension, and lyricism. Over a career spanning more than six decades, he became one of the most influential sculptors of the postwar period and the most widely represented Black sculptor in public art collections in the U.S. His work is held by major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Richmond Barthé, a renowned sculptor, who made significant contributions as a trailblazer within the Black LGBTQ community. Barthé fearlessly embraced his sexuality and challenged societal taboos through his art, inspiring generations to embrace their identities. His groundbreaking work paved the way for greater acceptance of Black LGBTQ artists, leaving an enduring legacy of representation and empowerment.

Rick Lowe (1961- ) is an American artist known for his social-practice art. Lowe has worked both inside and outside institutions to create community art projects.  Lowe's practice has focused primarily on creatively transforming neighborhoods and communities, This led him to found Project Row Houses, an arts and community center in Hoston, Texas. Lowe's artistic practice includes painting and installation art and later "social" sculpture. ⁠ Lowe received a degree from Columbus State University in 1982 and studied at Texas Southern University between 1990 and 1992.  

Rigaud Benoit (1911–1986) was a Haitian painter. His work is known for its careful draughtsmanship, muted colors, and humor in his narrative works. Many of his surrealist works depict Voodoo deities or scenes. Benoit's paintings often depicted daily life. 

Rita Mawuena Benissan (1995- ) is a Ghanaian-American multidisciplinary artist working across textiles, photography, painting, sculpture, and installation. A large focus of her work is on the Royal Umbrella as a symbol of Ghanaian cultural heritage. She strives to communicate the beauty and power of her people.  Benissan received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Apparel and Textile Design from Michigan State University in 2017 and her Master of Fine Arts in photography and an African Studies Program Certificate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2021.

Robert Pruitt (born 1975 in Houston, Texas) is an American visual artist known for monumental figurative drawings that center Black subjects and construct expansive visions of Black life across the past, present, and imagined future. Working primarily with charcoal, Conté crayon, pastel, coffee wash, and hand-dyed paper, Pruitt creates intricately rendered figures whose clothing, gestures, adornments, and surroundings combine references to science fiction, comic books, hip-hop, African and African American cultural traditions, religious imagery, political history, and everyday life. His practice also encompasses sculpture, photography, video, animation, installation, and printmaking.  Pruitt describes his portraiture through the framework of a “fictive ethnography,” creating characters who appear to belong to a shared yet deliberately ambiguous cultural universe. His figures often wear elaborate costumes or carry symbolic objects that connect Black Southern experience to speculative futures, celestial environments, mythology, technology, and spiritual transcendence. Rather than presenting Black identity as fixed or singular, Pruitt layers historical, familial, regional, and popular-cultural references to portray it as complex, self-determined, and continually evolving.  Pruitt received a bachelor’s degree from Texas Southern University in 2000 and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2003. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2002 and is a founding member of the Houston-based collective Otabenga Jones & Associates. His work has been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, California African American Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, SITE Santa Fe, and numerous other institutions. He lives and works in New York City. 

Rodney Ewing (1964- ) is an American multidisciplinary artist working through installation, drawings, and mixed media. Ewing's work intersects body and place, memory and fact, and re-examines human histories, cultural conditions, and trauma. He is interested in the understudied historical objects, individuals, spaces, and events of the Black Diaspora. Ewing strives to create works that invite the viewers in for careful contemplation and observation.  Ewing received his Master of Fine Art: Printmaking, from West Virginia University in 1992 and his Bachelor of Fine Art: Printmaking from Louisiana State University in 1989. 

Rodney McMilian (born 1969 in South Carolina) is an American multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses painting, sculpture, installation, video, performance, sound, text, and theater. Using discarded domestic objects, thrifted textiles, bedsheets, blankets, carpets, furniture, architectural fragments, house paint, vinyl, and found political language, he examines how histories of race, class, violence, labor, and government policy remain embedded within the material and psychological structures of contemporary American life.  McMillian’s work frequently connects the domestic sphere to larger civic and governmental systems. Stained mattresses, worn carpets, chairs, quilts, and other cast-off household materials become witnesses to social history, carrying traces of use, aspiration, neglect, and economic inequality. His large-scale paintings and installations move between abstraction, landscape, architecture, and the body, questioning the idea that American modernism—or the American landscape itself—can ever be politically or historically neutral.  McMillian earned a BA in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia, completed post-baccalaureate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2002. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, SFMOMA, Contemporary Austin, Aspen Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Columbia Museum of Art, Sharjah Biennial, and Prospect New Orleans. He lives and works in Los Angeles and is a professor in the UCLA Department of Art.