Voices of the Diaspora: The Artisans Behind the Canvas

Romare Bearden (1911-1988) was a multimedia artist best known for his use of collage. Taking inspiration from artists such as Giotto, Picasso, Cezanne, and African art, Bearden is known for combining a variety of artistic styles and elements into his own pieces. Much of his work considers the contemporary Black American experience and represents Black culture.

Romuald Hazoumè (1962- ) is a Beninese sculptor who only uses recycled materials in his work. Through the manipulation of material, he communicates his stance against slavery, corruption, trafficking, and current abuses. He sees his role in two ways, a protector of Yoruba cultural values and someone is improving Beninese attitudes around art. 

Ron Adams (born June 25, 1934, in Detroit, Michigan – died 2020) was an American artist, master printmaker, and educator whose practice explored abstraction, visual language, portraiture, and the relationship between signs and meaning. Working across printmaking, painting, drawing, and mixed media, Adams examined image systems, form, and Black cultural presence through technically sophisticated lithographs, paintings, and works on paper.  Adams studied at Los Angeles Trade Technical College, UCLA, the University of Mexico, and Otis College of Art and Design, where he earned a certificate of trade proficiency in 1963. His work often engages abstraction, graphic language, and portrait form, using lithography, draftsmanship, and print-based experimentation to consider how visual symbols operate. He also trained at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles and collaborated with major artists including Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, John Biggers, and Judy Chicago.  His work is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and he taught at several universities while maintaining an independent studio practice associated with Los Angeles and later Santa Fe. Ron Adams was active in both commercial and fine-art printmaking and is remembered as an important Black master printer. 

Ronald Cyrille (1984- ) is a Dominican and Guadeloupean artist. He works in painting, drawing, and sculpture. Cyrille questions social and power dynamics through surreal landscapes. 

Ronald Moody (1900-1984) was a Jamaican-British sculptor. He is known for his wood carvings. Self-taught, he began sculpting with clay before moving to wood. His work is known for its stylisation, a form of figuration with symbolic or allegorical overtones. Moody received his dentistry degree King's College London in 1930.

Ronald Young is an American assemblage artist. He collects objects from his surroundings such as doors, broken tools, rusty metals, and bricks for his assemblages. He references Nkisi n Kondi, sculptures, power objects, and masks from African diasporic contexts. Young is not only creating a link from an African past to an American present, but his use of the materials is an attempt to document histories of vacancy and displacement in Saint Louis. In his work, doors function as a metaphor for access and opportunity. Young received his MFA from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis in 2019. He also received his MA in Media Communications from Webster University in 1989 and his BA in Art Education K-12 from Clark/Atlanta University in 1980. 

Rosana Paulino (1967- ) is a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist and curator. A major theme in her work is the position of Black women in Brazilian society. She works with drawing, embroidery, engraving, printmaking, collage, and sculpture. Pulling from archetypes, memory, familial legacies, and histories she delves into the memories of those who still suffer from legacies of racism.  Paulino received a bachelor's degree and a doctorate in Fine Arts from Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo in 1995 and 2011 respectively. 

Roscoè B. Thické III (born 1981, in Miami, Florida) is an American lens-based artist whose photographic practice explores memory, family, community, intimacy, and the lived histories embedded in Black Miami. Working across photography, experimental printing techniques, artist books, and framing-based presentation, Thické examines inheritance, neighborhood life, and emotional interiority through narrative image-making rooted in Liberty City, Miami Gardens, and the social textures of South Florida.  Thické is largely self-taught as a photographer. After graduating high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, and while stationed in South Korea he took a volunteer-based photography class that helped shape the beginning of his artistic practice. His work often engages family archive, place, Black domestic and community life, and documentary traditions, using environmental portraiture, experimental printing, unique framing concepts, and sequencing to consider how memory and belonging are carried through ordinary spaces and gestures.  His work has been exhibited through Oolite Arts, Untitled Art Fair with Homework Gallery, Superposition, Kates-Ferri Projects, and other contemporary art platforms. He received the 2021 Ellies Creator Award and the 2024 South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual and Media Artists Grant. Roscoè B. Thické III lives and works in Miami, Florida.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955-1989) was a Nigerian-British photographer. His work heavily featured themes of race, gender, religion, and sexuality. Fani-Kayode saw himself as a "triple outsider" via his nationality, race, and sexuality. Much of his work incorporates Yoruba imagery alongside European elements, complicating the idea of the Black body in the Western imagination. His work communicates a queer African perspective. The complex photographs explore desire, eroticism, and asserting one's place in the world.  Fani-Kayode received his MFA in Fine Arts & Photography at the Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, NY in 1983. He received his BA in Fine Arts and Economics from Georgetown University, Washington DC. 

Roxane Mbanga (born 1996, Paris, France) is a Guadeloupean, Cameroonian, and French multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the body, migration, displacement, and colonial rupture. Working across installation, film, photography, textile, writing, and performance, Mbanga examines plural identity and embodied memory through storytelling, spatial construction, and research into the lived and perceived body.  Mbanga studied in the Fashion Design Department at Gerrit Rietveld Academie, graduating in 2021. Her work often engages Black womanhood, public space, intimacy, geographies of belonging, and intersecting gazes, using fashion, moving image, graphic design, batik, performance, and participatory gathering formats to consider how identity is shaped across different cultural and social contexts.  Her work has been exhibited at 193 Gallery, Maison des Mondes Africains, Fondation H, San Mei Gallery, the National Museum of Cameroon, and the Van Gogh Museum. She has received the Lichting Award and the Rietveld Review(ed) Award. Roxane Mbanga is based in Paris, with earlier recent exhibition histories also tied closely to Amsterdam. 

Roy DeCarava (1919-2009) was an American photographer active during the Harlem Renaissance. He started his path as a photographer in the late 1940s, after working in painting and making prints for the posters division of the Works Progress Administration. Originally, DeCarava sought to use photography as a study for his paintings but soon fell in love with the medium itself. He sought to develop photography as a fine art form, outside of its potential social documentarian function. His oeuvre shows everyday life in Harlem strikingly and dramatically with moody lighting and contrasting tones.  DeCarava received his degree from The Cooper Union School of Art in 1940. He studied painting, architecture, and sculpture while there.   

ruby onyinyechi amanze (1982- ) is a Nigerian British-American artist noted for drawings and works on paper which focus on cultural hybridity or "post-colonial non-nationalism." In addition to being an artist, she has also worked as a teacher and curator. ruby onyinyechi amanze uses her work on paper to play with the spatial dimensions and tangibility of the human form, with animate and inanimate objects.  amanze received her BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. From 2012-2013, amanze was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Ruby Pearl Washington (1952-2018) was an American photojournalist. She was the first Black woman to become a staff photographer at The New York Times. 

Rudy H. Cole is a mixed media artist who employs the use of multiple mediums including charcoal, pastels and paper collages. Believing the work should speak for itself, Cole creates these portraits to allow viewers to interpret it based on their own imaginations and point of views. 

Ruth G. Waddy was an influential African American printmaker, organizer, and cultural advocate whose work helped define Black arts activism in the mid-20th century. Best known for her bold linocuts depicting everyday Black life, social struggle, and community strength, Waddy used graphic clarity and powerful symbolism to center dignity, labor, and identity. After moving to Los Angeles in the 1940s, she became a major force in building Black artistic networks, founding Art West Associated—one of the first organizations supporting Black artists on the West Coast. Waddy was co-editor and artist for the groundbreaking anthology Black Artists on Art (1969–1971), which documented and uplifted Black creative voices during a key moment of political and cultural transformation. Her work is held in major museum collections and remains a vital reference point in African American printmaking and arts organizing.

Sable Elyse Smith (1986- ) is an American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator. Her work highlights the ways that our culture overlooks violence, particularly carceral violence. For example, the prison visiting room is a place of interest for Smith. The violence of the police state has private and public implications, harming on a micro and macro scale.  She also explores the limits of the written word and the difficulties in communicating trauma.  Smith holds a BA in studio art and film from Oglethorpe  [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oglethorpe_University]University and an MFA in Design & Technology from the Parsons New School for Design

Sadie Barnette (1984- ) is an American artist who works primarily with drawing, photography, and installation. Much of her work traces familial history and its mirror to largely American histories. This is evident in her project around her father's experience surviving the FBI due to his involvement in the Black Panther Party. For Barnette, history is something to be activated through research and the archives, illuminating oppressive legacies practiced in the United States.  Barnette received her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2006 and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 2012.

Sadie Barnette (born 1984, Oakland, CA) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work transforms personal and political archives into sparkling, rebellious landscapes of Black possibility. She is best known for her reimagining of her father’s 500-page FBI surveillance file—an archive of state violence turned into a site of resistance, tenderness, and radical imagination.  Barnette works across drawing, photography, installation, sculpture, and text, often incorporating elements such as glitter, hot pink, spray paint, family photographs, and everyday domestic materials. Her visual language merges West Coast aesthetics with Afrofuturist sensibilities, blending personal narrative with broader histories of Black radical movements, the Black Panther Party, and queer joy.  Her installations frequently construct intimate, hybrid spaces—bedrooms, living rooms, party scenes—where Black life, memory, and pleasure can thrive outside the gaze of the state. Barnette has exhibited at ICA Los Angeles, Oakland Museum of California, The Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA PS1, and countless national and international institutions. She lives and works between Oakland, CA and Los Angeles, CA.

Sahara Longe (1994-) is a British artist who creates art pieces that showcase everyday life. With the intention of showing ordinary interaction, Longe does so in a large scale way. More specifically, Longe's work stands out due to her portrayal of Black people in some of her pieces. She showcases them in traditional aspects that they were often excluded from. Her work has had her featured in Vogue, and exhibited all over the UK.  @saharalonge

Samantha Yun Wall (born 1977 in Seoul, South Korea) is a Korean-American visual artist based in Portland, Oregon. Wall immigrated to the United States as a child, and her drawings and mixed-media works explore the psychological and emotional dimensions of transcultural identity. Centering feminine perspectives within diasporic experience, she examines what it means to navigate Black Korean, multiracial, immigrant, and American identities across different cultural and social contexts.  Wall is best known for highly detailed figurative drawings created with delicately layered ink, Conté crayon, graphite, charcoal, and related materials. Often working in monochrome on Dura-Lar, paper, or Claybord, she constructs bodies that appear suspended, doubled, fragmented, entangled, or transformed. Her figures communicate interior psychological states while addressing the simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility frequently imposed upon women of color and other people positioned as social outsiders.  Her imagery draws from Korean folklore, global mythology, science fiction, creation narratives, and female archetypes including ghosts, monsters, healers, grandmothers, and storytellers. Recent work has considered Black Amerasian histories, the children born to Asian women and United States service members during periods of military occupation, and the stigma, secrecy, displacement, and inherited trauma surrounding these histories. In What We Leave Behind, Wall uses overlapping female silhouettes and the Korean Pasque flower to explore mourning, family memory, loss, care, and what remains unspoken across generations.  Wall received a BFA in Studio Art and Drawing from the University of South Carolina in 2001 and an MFA in Visual Studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2011. Her work has been exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Portland Art Museum, Frye Art Museum, New Orleans Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, CUE Art Foundation, Whatcom Museum, and Hangaram Art Museum at the Seoul Arts Center. Her honors include the 2024 Betty Bowen Award, the Bonnie Bronson Fellowship, the Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts, the Arlene Schnitzer Prize, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant. 

Sam Gilliam (1933-2022) was an American Postwar artist celebrated for his techniques in Color Field painting. One of his most recognizable innovations was his Drape sculpture paintings. These were works that existed beyond the boundaries of a canvas. This gave each work its own unique life and body. His dynamic and experimental approach to color and form has solidified his place as a pivotal figure in the evolution of contemporary art.  Gilliam received both his bachelor's and master's in painting from the University of Louisville in 1955 and in 1961 respectively. 

Sammy Baloji (born 1978, in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo) is a Congolese artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores colonialism, extraction, memory, labor, and the entangled histories of industry, architecture, and power in Central Africa. Working across photography, video, installation, sculpture, and archival research, Baloji examines the social and material afterlives of Belgian colonial rule through juxtaposition, montage, and historically layered image-making rooted in the Katanga region.  Baloji studied computer and information sciences and communication at the University of Lubumbashi and later continued his training in photography and video in Strasbourg. His work often engages archives, industrial heritage, mineral extraction, museum collections, and architectural history, using photography, moving image, found documents, and sculptural installation to consider how colonial violence continues to shape contemporary landscapes, labor systems, and cultural memory. He is also a cofounder of the Rencontres Picha biennial in Lubumbashi, and since 2019 has pursued doctoral artistic research at Sint Lucas Antwerpen.  His work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Kunsthalle Basel, Goldsmiths CCA, the Biennale of Sydney, and major international museums and research institutions. He has received recognition including the BelgianArtPrize and the African Photography Prize. Sammy Baloji lives and works between Lubumbashi and Brussels. 

Samuel Fosso (1962- ) is a Cameroonian-born Nigerian photographer who works primarily in the Central African Republic. Fosso picked up photography as a young man, starting his studio at 13. Eventually, he turned the camera on himself and began the self-portraiture practice for which he is best known.  These early works highlight Fosso's interest in presentation and play. As his practice developed, he explored a growing interest in power and Black visual sovereignty and its manifestations via photography. 

Samuel Levi Jones (1978- ) is an artist based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Jone's work investigates systems of power and oppression through painting and assemblage. A material he uses as part of his part is law books. These allow him to engage directly with primary source material and documentary practices, as vestibules of political and social power.  Jones investigates themes of manipulation and the rejection of authority through his work.  Jones received a BA in communications studies from Taylor University and a BFA in photography from Herron School of Art and Design in 2009. He also received an MFA in Studio Art from Mills College in 2012.

Samuel Nnorom (b. 1990, Nigeria) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice traverses tapestry-like sculpture, textile reworking, and mixed media. Inspired by his early life sketching portraits in his father’s shoe shop and working with fabric scraps in his mother’s tailoring workshop, Nnorom identifies as a “custodian of material culture.” His signature forms—bubbled clusters of fabric-covered foam spheres—constitute what he terms the “fabric of society,” evoking social structure, memory, and community. 

Sandra Brewster (1973- ) is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist. Her early works focused on portraiture. Brewster's practice expanded to include drawings and metallic sculpture. Her practice explores identity and representation, particularly emphasizing Black identity within the Caribbean diaspora.  Brewster received her BFA in Painting and Drawing from York University in 1997. She received her Masters of Visual Studies - Studio from the University of Toronto in 2017. 

Sanford Biggers (1970- ) is an American visual artist based in Harlem, New York. Biggers' work incorporates found objects, vintage fabrics, and historical artifacts, adding layers of meaning and symbolism to his creations. Additionally, he works in print, film, and sculpture. He frequently repurposes these materials to challenge conventional narratives and provide new perspectives on complex issues. Always topical, he focuses on contemporary social, political, and racial discourse. His references can be as varied as Underground Railroad to police brutality.  Biggers received a BA from Morehouse College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1998. 

Sanlé Sory (born 1943, Nianiagara, Burkina Faso) is a Burkinabè photographer based in Bobo-Dioulasso. Working primarily in photography, Sory’s practice documents youth culture, nightlife, portraiture, and everyday life in post-independence Burkina Faso. His work is characterized by vibrant studio portraiture and dynamic images of social life that capture style, freedom, and self-fashioning in the 1960s and 1970s. After learning photography through apprenticeship, including how to use a twin-lens Rolleiflex camera and process prints, Sory opened his studio, Volta Photo, in 1960, the same year Upper Volta began its transition to independence.  Through Volta Photo and his photographs of clubs, concerts, and bals poussières (“dust balls”), Sory created a vivid visual record of a generation shaping new forms of identity and modernity. His portraits foreground music, fashion, and performance while also preserving an important social history of the period. In recent years, his work has received major international recognition through solo exhibitions including Volta Photo at Yossi Milo Gallery, New York (2018), Volta Photo: Starring Sanlé Sory and the People of Bobo-Dioulasso in the Small but Musically Mighty Country of Burkina Faso at the Art Institute of Chicago (2018), Sanlé Sory: Volta Photo at Weinstein Hammons Gallery, Minneapolis (2019), and Sanlé Sory: Volta Photo at M+B Gallery, Los Angeles (2020).  His photographs are held in significant collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the RISD Museum, and the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery. Sory continues to live and work in Bobo-Dioulasso.

Santu Mofokeng (born October 19, 1956, in Johannesburg, South Africa – died January 26, 2020) was a South African photographer whose documentary and conceptual practice explored Black social life, spirituality, memory, land, and the psychic afterlives of apartheid. Working primarily across black-and-white photography, photo essay, archival intervention, and installation, Mofokeng examined everyday experience, faith, displacement, and historical violence through intimate observation, poetic sequencing, and a sustained engagement with the photographic image as both document and metaphor. Mofokeng was largely self-taught, though he later studied at the International Center of Photography in New York through the Ernest Cole Scholarship, and he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2016. He began as a street photographer in Soweto, worked in newspaper darkrooms, joined the Afrapix collective in 1985, and later became a photographer and researcher at the Institute for Advanced Social Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. His work often engages archive, ritual, landscape, and social history, using photographic essays, seriality, altered printing processes, and careful textual framing to consider Black interiority, sacred space, land dispossession, and the instability of historical memory.  His work has been exhibited at Jeu de Paume, Documenta 11, the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, the International Center of Photography, Museo Reina Sofía, and the Walther Collection. He received the Prince Claus Award, the inaugural International Photography Prize from Fondazione Fotografia Modena, the Ernest Cole Scholarship, and the Mother Jones Award for Africa. Santu Mofokeng lived and worked in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Sasha Huber (1975- ) is a visual artist of Swiss-Haitian heritage based in Helsinki, Finland. One of the significant influences on her artistic practice has been her collaboration with the Swiss-Haitian historian and activist Jean Casimir, who has researched the history of Josephine Bonaparte and her connection to Haiti. This collaboration led to the "Demounting Louis Agassiz" project, which explores the legacy of the Swiss naturalist, glaciologist and Louis Agassiz, a Harvard University Professor, known as a racist and proponent of scientific racism that advanced the false theory of hierarchy of intelligence existed among different racial groups, which emboldened the resolve of many pro-slavery white Americans to maintain slavery. Though photography, film, performance work Huber explores the lasting effects of colonialism on society. Colonialism's effect on the environment is of particular interest to her.  She has her MA in visual culture from Aalto University in Helsinki and is currently pursuing a practice-based PhD in artistic research at Zurich University of the Arts

Dominican-American artist Scherezade García creates immersive worlds where personal narrative intersects with collective memory. Working across installation, painting, printmaking, and sculpture, García weaves together devotional iconography, electric color palettes, and carefully chosen found materials—vintage suitcases that carry stories of departure, inner tubes that float between survival and play—to construct visual poems about displacement and belonging.

Sedrick Ervin Huckaby (1975) is an American artist known for his use of thick, impasto paint to create murals that evoke traditional quilts and his production of large portraits that represent his personal history through images of family members and neighbors.

Sekai Machache (1989- ) is a Zimbabwean-Scottish photographer and performer. She also creates works on paper. Machache is interested in imagination and dreams. Her work teases out the role of the artist in developing liminal experiences for healing.  She received a degree from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee, Scotland, in 2012. 

Selma Burke (1900-1995) is an American sculptor. She discovered her love of the medium as a young child, feeling clay from riverbeds flow through her fingers. In the 1920s she moved to New York city from North Carolina where she became part of the Harlem Renaissance. She traveled to Europe twice, once in 1933 on a Rosenwald Fellowship and again in 1936. While in Paris, she met Henri Matisse who expressed enthusiasm for her work. Burke is best known for a bust portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, completed in 1944.  She took art classes at Sarah Lawerence College in New York Burke completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at Columbia University in 1941. 

Senga Nengudi (born September 18, 1943, Chicago, Illinois) is a pioneering American interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the body, movement, ritual, and the elasticity of form. Emerging in the 1970s within the Black avant-garde communities of Los Angeles and New York, Nengudi became known for her groundbreaking use of unconventional materials—particularly pantyhose, sand, and found objects—to create sculptures that respond to gravity, tension, and the physicality of lived experience. Her iconic R.S.V.P. series (1970s–ongoing) consists of nylon pantyhose stretched and weighted with sand, forming biomorphic, sagging structures that evoke the human body—especially the maternal body—and its vulnerability, resilience, and transformation. These works blur distinctions between sculpture and performance, as Nengudi frequently activated them through movement and collaboration with dancers. Throughout her career, she has emphasized process, improvisation, and ritual, drawing influence from African diasporic traditions, Japanese Gutai performance, and her own experiences of pregnancy and motherhood. Associated with the Studio Z collective in Los Angeles, Nengudi collaborated closely with artists such as David Hammons and Maren Hassinger, helping shape a generation of experimental Black conceptual practices. Her work challenges rigid definitions of minimalism and post-minimalism by introducing softness, Black embodiment, and spiritual resonance into sculptural discourse. In recent decades, Nengudi has received renewed international recognition, with major museum retrospectives and exhibitions highlighting her lasting influence on contemporary art. Her work is held in leading institutional collections worldwide, and she continues to be regarded as a critical figure in feminist, performance-based, and Black avant-garde art histories.

Serge Alain Nitegeka (born 1983, Bujumbura, Burundi) is a contemporary artist whose sculptural and installation-based practice explores migration, memory, architecture, and the spatial politics of displacement. Now based in Johannesburg, South Africa, Nitegeka is known for his use of industrial materials—particularly black-painted steel—that reference scaffolding, fences, gates, and architectural fragments. His works evoke both protection and restriction, reflecting lived experiences of exile and the psychological residue of movement across borders. Through abstraction and modular construction, Nitegeka examines how space is shaped by power, history, and survival, transforming minimal forms into charged metaphors for belonging, instability, and resilience.

Seydou Keïta (1921–2001), born in Bamako, Mali) was a Malian photographer whose portrait practice explored modernity, self-fashioning, identity, and social life in mid-20th-century Bamako. Working primarily in black-and-white studio portraiture, Keïta examined personal style, dignity, and representation through carefully staged compositions, patterned backdrops, and close attention to pose, dress, and gesture. Keïta was self-taught and began making photographs after receiving a Kodak Brownie camera in the 1930s. He opened his studio in Bamako in 1948 and later served as an official government photographer after Mali’s independence. His work often engages portraiture, social history, memory, and the photographic archive, using formal precision, natural light, and collaborative studio methods to consider aspiration, status, and the visual culture of a rapidly changing postcolonial society. His work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, and in major international exhibitions devoted to African photography. Keïta is widely recognized as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century, and his portraits remain foundational to the global history of photography. He lived and worked in Bamako, Mali.

Seyni Awa Camara (b. c. 1945, Bignona region, Casamance, Senegal) is a Senegalese sculptor internationally recognized for her powerful, multi-figured terracotta works rooted in ancestral knowledge, spirituality, and personal mythology. Working primarily with clay she gathers herself, Camara hand-builds densely populated sculptures featuring women, children, hybrid beings, and spiritual guardians. Her practice is deeply connected to Casamance cosmology, ritual, and oral storytelling traditions, and she is regarded as one of the most significant contemporary artists of West Africa. Her work has appeared in major global exhibitions, including the Dakar Biennale, the Venice Biennale, and international museum shows highlighting African contemporary art.

Shanequa Gay (1978- ) is an American multidisciplinary artist working across painting, installation, and photography. Gay is interested in counter-narratives, mythology, and an expansion of Black imagery. At the center of her work sits multiple universes that expand narratives around Black women.  Gay received her BA in Painting from Savannah College of Art and Design, AA in Graphic Design and Fashion Marketing from the Art Institute of Atlanta, and an MFA from Georgia State University.

Shani Crowe is an American photographer. Her work focuses on Black hair, its adornment and beauty rituals, and how they can foster connection. She is most known for creating intricate corn-rowed hairstyles, and then capturing them as large photographic portraits. Crowe received her BFA in film production from Howard University’s John H. Johnson School of Communications in 2011.

Shannon Bono (1995- ) is a British multidisciplinary artist, curator, and writer. She often uses oils, acrylics, and spray paints in her work. Bono is interested in centering Black womanhood and asserting it as a source of knowledge. Common reference points include African spirituality, Christian iconography, and Renaissance art. Her various mediums mix meld  Bono received her MA in Art & Science from Central Saint Martins University, her Associate Fellowship in higher education from the University of the Arts London and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art.

Sharon Norwood (born in Kingston, Jamaica) is a Jamaican-born Canadian interdisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, fiber, found objects, video, and site-specific installation. Raised in Toronto and currently based in Savannah, Georgia, Norwood examines race, gender, labor, beauty, class, colonialism, cultural memory, and the systems through which Black bodies and histories have been represented. A defining element of her visual language is the curly line, which operates simultaneously as an abstract drawing gesture and as a signifier for Afro-textured hair and the Black body.  Norwood frequently places this line onto materials associated with domestic refinement and European cultural authority—porcelain teacups, saucers, serving pieces, Wedgwood, historical prints, textiles, furniture, and architectural fragments. By inserting Black hair into these surfaces, she disrupts the presumed neutrality of decorative objects and asks viewers to reconsider histories of domestic labor, enslavement, colonial commerce, exclusion, and racialized standards of beauty. In works such as Hair Matters, The Root of the Matter, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner or Rather Tea, the curl can appear ornamental from a distance before becoming legible as hair, creating a tension between beauty, decoration, historical violence, and visibility.  Her recent practice has expanded these concerns from individual objects into broader histories of architecture and material production. Living in Savannah has prompted Norwood to investigate the city’s built environment and the labor concealed within objects associated with Southern wealth and refinement. For the forthcoming After the Island exhibitions, she works with vintage china as well as Savannah Grey bricks salvaged from her property and surrounding neighborhood, drawing connections between decorative culture, architecture, Black labor, colonial commerce, and the enslaved people whose work built and sustained these environments. At Telfair Museums’ Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters in 2023, she similarly used ceramics and mixed media to counter romanticized narratives of antebellum domestic life and center histories of unpaid labor, violence, and resistance.  Norwood earned a BFA in Painting from the University of South Florida in 2013 and an MFA in Studio Art from Florida State University in 2018. Her work has appeared at the National Gallery of Jamaica, Telfair Museums, Gardiner Museum, Mint Museum, Atlanta Contemporary, Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts, Canada Gallery in London, Washington and Lee University, and other institutions internationally. She has undertaken residencies at Banff Centre, McColl Center, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hambidge Center, Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, PILOTENKUECHE, Struts Gallery, and ROKTOWA in Kingston. Her works are represented in collections including the Gardiner Museum, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Museums at Washington and Lee University, Telfair Museums, Microsoft Art Collection, and TD Bank Collection. She also operates Norwood Gallery, an artist-run exhibition space in Savannah.

Shawna Moulton (born in Freeport, Bahamas) is a multidisciplinary artist and art educator whose practice explores identity, migration, Caribbean heritage, and community through drawings, paintings, sculpture, and papermaking. Working across multiple media, Moulton examines personal history and diasporic experience through introspective, process-based forms that connect storytelling, material experimentation, and arts education.  Moulton was raised in Kingston, Jamaica, and later migrated to the United States. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2015. Her work often engages identity formation, migration, and Caribbean-rooted memory, using painting, sculpture, drawing, and paper-based practices to consider belonging, cultural continuity, and self-definition.  Her work and teaching have been presented through the Norton Museum of Art, Miami Book Fair, MOCA North Miami, Bakehouse Art Complex, and other South Florida arts spaces. She lives and works in South Florida.

Sheku “Goldfinger” Fofanah (born 1976, in Freetown, Sierra Leone) is a Sierra Leonean artist whose masquerade practice explores performance, identity, social belonging, and the dynamic visual language of Sierra Leonean masquerade traditions. Working across masquerade design and construction, Fofanah examines continuity and invention through intricate costumes and objects that blend “fancy” and “fierce” aesthetics associated with Ordehlay, Hunting, and Jollay performance cultures.  Based in the Fourah Bay community, Fofanah is the resident kotu (builder/artist) for the Gladiators Power Ordehlay Society, cofounded by his father, and he also contributes to societies such as Tourist Ojeh and Omo Jessah Hunting. His work often engages masquerade genres including Jollay, Ordehlay, and Hunting, using fabric, sequins, wood, paint, glue, and highly detailed surface design to consider how masquerade acts as both performative art and a durable social marker in a rapidly changing world.  His work has been featured in New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations, first shown at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2025 and then traveling to the Frist Art Museum and San Antonio Museum of Art. Museum sources note that his designs are sought after in Sierra Leone, The Gambia, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and that they are part of the Sierra Leone National Museum; they also note a British Museum commission connected to Sierra Leone’s fiftieth independence anniversary. 

Shinique Smith (1971- ) is an American artist known for expansive practice including fabric sculptures and abstract paintings incorporating calligraphy and collage. Pulling from personal histories, her work is a documentation of "things".  Smith received a BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art, She earned a MA in education from Tufts University in 2000 and a MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2003.

Sidney Blu is a Nigerian-born contemporary artist whose work spans painting (often large-scale canvases) and sculptural forms. His art is deeply personal and autobiographical, frequently addressing themes of identity, mental health, and personal struggle. Blu’s creative practice is rooted in storytelling and self-reflection, often using his own experiences as mnemonic material for his visual narratives. 

Silvia Rosi (born 1992, Scandiano, Italy) is a Togolese-Italian artist whose photographic and moving-image practice explores migration, memory, and diasporic identity through staged self-portraiture. Drawing from personal history and broader narratives of movement between West Africa and Europe, Rosi uses her own body as a central subject to investigate how identity is constructed, performed, and remembered across generations. Her work often references West African studio photography traditions, particularly those of mid-20th-century photographers such as Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, while reinterpreting these visual languages within a contemporary, diasporic framework. Through carefully composed images, the use of costume, props, and gesture, Rosi inhabits multiple personas, reflecting the layered and fragmented nature of identity shaped by migration and cultural inheritance. Rosi’s practice is deeply engaged with oral histories and storytelling, particularly narratives surrounding her family’s migration from Togo to Italy. Her works frequently examine the gaps, silences, and reinterpretations that occur across generations, using performance and repetition to reconstruct memory as both personal and collective. By combining photography with video and installation, she creates immersive narratives that blur distinctions between fact and fiction.

Simone Leigh (born 1967, Chicago, IL) is an internationally acclaimed sculptor and multimedia artist whose work centers Black women’s histories, labor, beauty, and interior worlds. Rooted in Black feminist thought, her practice engages ceramic traditions, African and diasporic aesthetics, architectural forms, and ethnographic histories to interrogate how Black women have been represented — and misrepresented — in art, anthropology, and public memory. Leigh creates monumental bronzes, ceramic forms, installations, and videos that honor Black womanhood as a site of knowledge, resilience, and power. Her sculptures often merge the human figure with domestic, ritual, or architectural forms such as dwellings, water vessels, and ornamental structures.  In 2022, Leigh became the first Black woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, earning the Golden Lion for Best Participant for her presentation in The Milk of Dreams. Her solo exhibitions have been presented at the ICA Boston, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and numerous international institutions. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Simphiwe Mbunyuza (1989- ) is a South African ceramicist and sculptor. His sculptures draw heavily from his Xhosa heritage. He uses the coiling technique used for generations by the Xhosa people. Mbunyuza uses all of the sculptures’ surface to recreate cultural scenes, mimic landscapes, and add appendages that represent animal, human, or decorative flourishes.  Mbunyuza received his Masters of Fine Art from The University of Oklahoma and a Fine Art degree from Walter Sisulu University in South Africa.

Sir John Akomfrah (born May 4, 1957, in Accra, Ghana) is a Ghanaian-born British artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores memory, migration, postcolonialism, race, temporality, and the environmental and political conditions shaping global modernity. Working across film, video installation, photography, writing, and curatorial practice, Akomfrah examines diasporic experience, historical violence, and collective remembrance through archival montage, multichannel moving-image environments, poetic narration, and layered sound.  Akomfrah studied sociology at the University of Portsmouth and was a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective in London in 1982. His work often engages archives, social history, Black British identity, colonial aftermaths, and ecological crisis, using essay film, documentary strategies, montage, and immersive installation to consider how histories of displacement, resistance, and belonging are carried across image, landscape, and voice. His practice is especially noted for bringing together archival fragments and newly shot footage to create expansive meditations on migration, memory, and loss.  His work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Lisson Gallery, Tate, and other major international institutions and exhibitions. He won the Artes Mundi Prize in 2017, was elected a Royal Academician in 2019, and was knighted in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to the arts. Sir John Akomfrah lives and works in London.