Voices of the Diaspora: The Artisans Behind the Canvas

Carlos Martiel (1989- ) is a Cuban installation and performance artist. He explores racism, immigration, gender, and the legacies of colonialism. With his body as the starting place, he visualizes the ongoing violence that Black people face.  Martiel graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts in 2009. 

Carolyn Mims Lawrence (1940- ) is an American visual artist, teacher, and original member of AfriCOBRA, an artist collective founded in 1968 in Chicago. The group sought to develop a unique aesthetic to empower and uplift Black communities. Her work uses bright greens, yellows, and blues showing positive values such as family unity and social cohesion. Lawrence was one of the artists commissioned for the Wall of Respect in Chicago. She was an art teacher at Kenwood Academy for most of her career. Lawrence felt it was important to inspire the incoming generation of artists.  She received a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s degree in 1968 from the Illinois Institute of Technology. 

Carrie Mae Weems (born April 20, 1953, in Portland, Oregon) is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores history, identity, power, race, gender, and the structures that shape social life. Working across photography, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video, Weems examines personal experience and institutional history through staged narrative, archival intervention, conceptual portraiture, and poetic visual language.  Weems earned a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and also continued her studies in folklore at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work often engages Black history, representation, family, gender, politics, and historical memory, using serial image-making, self-performance, text panels, and appropriated archival imagery to consider how power operates through images and institutions. Major series such as The Kitchen Table Series and From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried are central to her practice and legacy.  Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Getty Center, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Grand Rapids Art Museum, among many others. She has received major honors including the MacArthur Fellowship, the U.S. State Department’s Medal of Arts Award, the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal, the Artes Mundi Prize, the Bernd and Hilla Becher Prize, and the Hasselblad Award. Carrie Mae Weems lives and works in Syracuse, New York. 

Castera Bazile (b. October 7, 1923 – d. February 27, 1966) was a Haitian painter and muralist acknowledged as one of the foundational figures of the modern Haitian art movement. Born in Marbial (near Jacmel), Haiti, Bazile overcame early hardship to develop a distinctive style marked by bold color, simplified forms, and deep cultural resonance. Working initially as a handyman at the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince from 1945, he soon began painting in 1947, and by 1951 was selected among a group of eight artists to produce three major fresco-style murals in the Holy Trinity Cathedral of Port-au-Prince—an iconic achievement in Haitian art.  Bazile’s work features daily life, maternity, poverty, and spiritual themes—combining Catholic devotional imagery with Vodou undercurrents—and demonstrates his mastery of colour contrasts (blues, greens, vermilion) and a lyrical sense of composition.

Cauleen Smith (born September 25, 1967, in Riverside, California) is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores Black life, memory, spirituality, Afrofuturism, experimental cinema, and Afro-diasporic histories. Working across film, installation, sculpture, drawing, and performance, Smith examines the imaginative and political possibilities of Black cultural production through poetic image-making, speculative narrative, and references to science fiction, music, ritual, and everyday life.  Smith studied at San Francisco State University, where she earned a B.A. in Creative Arts/Cinema, and later received an M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Theater, Film and Television. Her work often engages experimental film, non-Western cosmologies, poetry, Black feminist thought, and social history, using immersive installation, moving image, text, sound, and symbolic objects to consider liberation, mourning, collective memory, and the radical potential of the imagination.  Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She has received numerous honors, including the United States Artists Fellowship, the Heinz Award for the Arts, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, and the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize. Cauleen Smith lives and works in Los Angeles. 

Chakaia Booker (1953- ) is an American sculptor who creates abstract works for both the gallery and outdoor public spaces. She is known for her abstract tire sculptures. Her practice of using found materials speaks to her environmental interests as a discard, toxic material becomes an object of interest. Her prints suggest an organic form despite their nonrepresentational nature.  Booker received a BA in sociology from Rutgers University in 1976 and an MFA from the City College of New York in 1993. 

Charles Harris (1908-1998) was an American photographer. From 1936-1975, Harris documented life in the Black Pittsburgh neighborhoods for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of America's oldest Black newspapers. He often often celebrities when they visited Pittsburgh, including Harry Belafonte, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Little Richard, and Ray Charles.  In 2001, the Carnegie Museum of Art purchased the negatives and all rights from the artist’s family and continues to shepherd Harris's legacy. 

Chelsey Luster is a curator and visual artist based in Baltimore, MD. Working to empower queer Black voices, much of Luster’s work aims to empower marginalized groups and adds to scholarship surrounding intersectionality and contemporary identity. 

Chemu Ng’ok (born 1989 in Nairobi, Kenya) is a Kenyan painter and draughtsperson whose practice explores the sociopolitical, physical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of human relationships. Working primarily in oil, acrylic, watercolor, ink, and drawing, Ng’ok creates paintings in which individual and collective bodies emerge through loose, energetic lines, translucent layers, shifting color, and unstable figurative forms. Her subjects frequently appear caught between recognizable bodies and abstraction, producing what she has described as “psychological landscapes” in which internal states, social structures, memory, and political tension overlap.  The body is central to Ng’ok’s visual language. She considers it both intimate and public: a physical form shaped by geography, race, gender, institutional power, and the expectations placed upon Black bodies. Her earlier work developed the concept of the “Psychological Riot,” a framework through which she examined how patriarchal and racist systems are internalized and how resistance might occur within the psyche as well as publicly. Paintings responding to political tension surrounding Kenya’s 2017 elections considered how state power, military presence, fear, and collective unrest register psychologically within individuals.  Over time, Ng’ok’s paintings have moved toward increasingly ambiguous territories in which the political coexists with memory, spirituality, kinship, transition, and collective experience. Works shown in To Witness in Miami Beach depicted processions and gatherings recalling weddings, births, funerals, parades, and other transitional rituals without specifying exactly what event is taking place. Her paintings deliberately resist fixed narratives: figures float, merge, disappear, reappear, and inhabit dreamlike environments, while unconventional skin tones complicate expectations surrounding Black figuration. Her 2026 exhibition Those We Remember or Are Yet to Meet extends these concerns through paintings about community, family, ancestry, remembrance, and the afterlives of people who came before us.  Ng’ok earned both her BFA and MFA in Painting from Rhodes University in South Africa, completing the MFA in 2017. Her graduate research, A Counter-narrative Analysis of Psychological Riot in Contemporary Painting, helped formulate ideas that continue throughout her practice. She has since exhibited at the New Museum, ICA Milano, Kunstmuseum Basel, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Goodman Gallery, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, CENTRAL FINE, and other venues internationally. Her honors include the Mellon Foundation’s Visual and Performing Arts of Africa Masters Bursary, Raymond Pullen Bursary, Helen Timm Award, and selection for the Henrike Grohs Art Award shortlist. She lives and works in Nairobi. 

Chief Ekpenyong Bassey Nsa (born 1973, in Creek Town, Nigeria) is an Efik Nigerian artist whose multidisciplinary masquerade practice explores cultural continuity, ceremonial power, family lineage, and the living visual traditions of the Ekpe society. Working across masquerade ensembles, beadwork, chieftaincy attire, cultural knowledge, and funeral shrines, Bassey Nsa examines identity, prestige, and spiritual inheritance through elaborately constructed wearable forms rooted in Efik performance traditions.  Bassey Nsa is a third-generation artist who learned his craft from his father, a maker credited with modernizing masquerade ensembles for the Ekpe secret society across southeast Nigeria and west Cameroon. Initiated into Ekpe at a young age, he was later conferred the chieftaincy title Obong Murua Okpoho in 2009. His work often engages masquerade, ritual, beadwork, social hierarchy, and memorial practice, using fabric, raffia, sequins, and constructed costume forms to consider how artistic innovation can operate within inherited ceremonial systems.  His work has been featured in New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations, which opened at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2025 and traveled to the Frist Art Museum and San Antonio Museum of Art. His work is also represented in museum collections including the North Carolina Museum of Art, Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. Chief Ekpenyong Bassey Nsa lives and works in Calabar, Nigeria. 

Chloë Bass (1984- ) is an American conceptual artist working across performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Taking inspiration from the occurrences within daily life, Bass is known for her research into the scales of intimacy in the illusive normality of existence. Bass starts with the mundane, the things we always do as a starting place, questioning its stability. What exists in the space between the familiar and unfamiliar and how we relate is an ongoing question for Bass.  Bass received her BA from Yale University in 2006 and her MFA from Brooklyn College in 2011.  ⁠

Chris Johnson (born 1948) is an American fine art photographer, educator, author, curator, video and installation artist working primarily with themes related to personal history, chance operations and social justice. He is a professor of photography at the California College of the Arts. His photographic work has been shown in a solo exhibition at Monterey Museum of Art. Johnson's video work in collaboration with the Question Bridge team has been exhibited at Oakland Museum of California, Brooklyn Museum and Portland Art Museum.

Chris Ofili (b. October 10, 1968, Manchester, England) is a British painter and sculptor of Nigerian descent whose richly layered works blend vibrant color, figurative imagery, and unconventional materials—such as glitter, resin and elephant dung—to explore themes of identity, spirituality, race and representation. He emerged as part of the Young British Artists movement in the 1990s and gained international acclaim when he became the first Black (and first painter in over a decade) to win the Turner Prize in 1998. His work challenges the boundaries of painting, collage and sculpture, and situates the Black body and cultural history at the heart of contemporary art discourse.

Christa David (born 1979, United States) is an American visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores home, belonging, faith, and identity. Working across painting, collage, and assemblage, David examines Black life, spiritual interiority, and social experience through layered composition, storytelling, and material juxtaposition.  David studied African American Studies at Columbia University and later earned a Master of Public Health from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Her work often engages structural racism, power, politics, and the lives of Black and Brown people, using collage, painting, assemblage, and research-driven reflection to consider how bodies and communities exist within and outside spaces made by others and spaces made for themselves.  Their work has been exhibited at 193 Gallery and other contemporary art venues, including recent presentations in Venice and Baltimore. Christa David lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.

Christopher Carter is a Miami-based sculptor whose work transforms reclaimed materials into powerful meditations on identity, memory, and cultural inheritance. Born in Albuquerque and raised in Boston, Carter draws from his African American, Native American, and European ancestry to create assemblages that explore the layered histories embedded in the objects and structures around us.  Working primarily with found wood, metal, rope, glass, and industrial remnants, Carter builds large-scale sculptures, installations, and architectural interventions that feel both ancient and futuristic. His practice embraces the material afterlives of discarded objects—salvaging fragments of the urban, the domestic, and the industrial—and recomposing them into forms that evoke ritual, resilience, and survival. Each work carries the weight of transformation: what was once overlooked becomes a vessel of lineage, movement, and lived experience.

Christopher Cozier (born 1959 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) is a Trinidadian multidisciplinary artist, writer, curator, and cultural critic whose practice encompasses drawing, printmaking, video, installation, performance, sound, sculpture, and collaborative cultural work. Based in Port of Spain, Cozier examines how the historical and contemporary experiences of the Caribbean including colonialism, globalization, migration, nationalism, economic dependency, and cultural resistance can generate alternative ways of understanding the wider world. His work frequently begins with notebook drawings and develops into installations, moving-image works, prints, and staged actions that combine personal observation with broader questions about history, geography, power, and self-determination. Drawing occupies a particularly important place in Cozier’s practice. His works on paper often function simultaneously as diaries, maps, storyboards, visual essays, and speculative records, accumulating fragments of text, symbols, bodies, architectural forms, everyday objects, and memories. His expansive series Tropical Night (2006–14), comprising 268 sheets and now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, emerged through years of travel and work across different locations. Through its fragmented visual language, the project reflects upon postcolonial Caribbean history, childhood memory, political culture, migration, development, and the artist’s experience of moving between Trinidad and other parts of the world. Cozier received a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1986 and an MFA in Visual Arts from Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts in 1988. After completing his graduate studies in the United States, he returned to Trinidad and Tobago. In addition to his individual practice, he is a co-founder and co-director of Alice Yard, the influential Port of Spain–based contemporary art space and network founded in 2006, which participated in documenta fifteen in 2022. His work has appeared in the Havana Biennials, Brooklyn Museum, Tate Liverpool, Berlin Biennale, Sharjah Biennial, Liverpool Biennial, Prospect New Orleans, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, and São Paulo Biennial. His honors include the 2026 Roy Lichtenstein Award, 2023 Pérez Prize, 2013 Prince Claus Award, and a 2004 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. 

Chris Watts (born 1984, in High Point, North Carolina) is an American artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores social and personal narrative, abstraction, embodiment, and the unstable boundary between the visible and the immaterial. Working across painting, installation, drawing, video, and mixed media, Watts examines perception, disappearance, and sacred or meditative space through layered surfaces, translucent materials, and spatial compositions that function like windows into overlapping psychic and symbolic worlds.  Watts studied at the College of Arts and Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Wrocław, Poland, before attending the MFA program at Yale School of Art. His work often engages abstraction, Black embodiment, spirituality, and social history, using painting on soft and sheer textiles, resin, acrylic, silk, and installation to consider visibility, disappearance, and the ways Blackness is imagined or misrecognized within dominant visual culture. More recent work has also drawn from video footage of police violence, removing the figure to emphasize absence and to challenge prescribed modes of representation.  His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Galerie Lelong, Welancora Gallery, Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, and other venues in the United States and abroad. He participated in the Art & Law Fellowship Program at Cornell University and was a 2022–2023 Soros Justice Fellow. Chris Watts lives and works in New York and North Carolina. 

Cicely Carew is a Boston-based multidisciplinary artist whose exuberant work explores joy, liberation, and embodied experience. Her practice spans painting, printmaking, collage, and installation, often combining vibrant color palettes, gestural abstraction, and layered textures to evoke the complexity and dynamism of being. Carew’s work celebrates Black femininity and spiritual resilience, often drawing on the language of abstraction to explore healing, ancestral memory, and transformation. She holds an MFA from Lesley University and has exhibited widely across the U.S., with her work featured in solo and group shows as well as public art commissions.

Clarence James (1991- ) is an American painter and muralist. His work features abstract and figurative forms, referencing his interest in eno-Expressionism and street art. He explores the tension between individual freedom and cultural influence, examining self. Ultimately, he hopes to drive viewers towards positive change.  Clarence received his BBA from Howard University in 2014. 

Claudette Johnson MBE RA (1959- ) is a British artist whose primary medium is drawing. Johnson's large-scale works depict the vulnerability and candidness of her subjects. Additionally, she is a founding member of the Black British Arts Movement. Johnson studied Fine Art at Wolverhampton Polytechnic.

Clifford Owens (1971- ) is an American photographer, mixed media, performance artist, writer, and curator. He is best known for his spontaneous works centered around the body and includes interactions with the audience. He challenges the conventional making of art through his physically demanding performances. In these performances, he examines African-American history. Owens attended the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) then transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which he graduated with a BFA in 1998. He received his MFA in 2000 from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. 

Clotilde Jiménez (1990- ) is a multi-disciplinary American artist who works across ceramics, collage, painting, printmaking, and sculpture. His work interrogates race and sexuality, specifically Black queer masculinity. Jiménez's work is a melding of private and public musings referencing historical and contemporary influences.  Jiménez received his BFA in printmaking from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2013 and his MFA from The Slade School of Fine Art in 2018. 

Collen Maswanganyi (b. 1977, Noblehoek, Limpopo, South Africa) is a South African visual artist known for his intricately carved and painted wooden sculptures that explore the intersection of tradition and modern life. Coming from a family of Tsonga woodcarvers, Maswanganyi expands on inherited carving practices by incorporating contemporary narratives, personal symbolism, and social commentary. His expressive figures often depict everyday life, cultural memory, ancestral lineage, and the evolving identity of post-apartheid South Africa, blending craftsmanship with layered storytelling.

Conrad Egyir (1989- ) is a Ghanaian-born, Michigan-based painter. His large-scale surreal works combine West African folklore and domestic scenes. Within this framework he explores themes of triumph, identity, and the collective human spirit. Egyir also uses elements of stamps and passports to trace migration histories.  Egyir received his MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in 2018 and a BFA from Judson University, Elgin, Illinois in 2015. 

American photographer Consuelo Kanaga (1894–1978) was a pioneering figure in socially conscious and modernist photography. Working across photojournalism and fine art, she is best known for intimate portraits—particularly of African American artists and communities—and empathetic documentary work. Associated with straight photography and the San Francisco camera circle, Kanaga used the camera as a tool for social awareness, dignity, and human connection.

Coreen Simpson (born February 18, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American artist whose photographic and design practice explores Black cultural life, portraiture, self-representation, beauty, and the dignity of everyday social worlds. Working across photography and jewelry design, Simpson examines identity, style, and community through portraiture, documentary observation, and object-making that centers Black presence within both visual culture and adornment.  Simpson studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Parsons School of Design, and she also studied with Frank Stewart at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1977. Her work often engages portraiture, nightlife, fashion, Black social history, and the archive, using direct photographic encounters and mobile studio strategies to consider character, visibility, and the richness of Black life in settings ranging from Harlem barbershops and Queens braiding salons to downtown Manhattan clubs. In addition to photography, she created The Black Cameo collection in 1990, a jewelry line that reimagined the cameo tradition through portraits of Black women.  Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the International Center of Photography, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Anacostia Community Museum, and her photographs were also included in the 2025 exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 at the National Gallery of Art. She received the Mary McLeod Bethune Award from the National Council of Negro Women, the Madame C.J. Walker Award, and the National Council of Negro Women’s Legends Award. Coreen Simpson lives and works in New York City.

Corinne Smith (1989- ) is an American multidisciplinary artist working in painting and illustration. Smith is inspired by dreams, plant medicine, and color to explore a deeper relationship to self and spiritual realms. They work to connect with ancestors and decolonize ways of knowing. Ultimately, their work centers joy while navigating grief and loneliness.  Smith received a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Michigan. 

Cornelius Tulloch is an American painter, photographer, and architect. Tulloch's work explores how bodies exist between cultures, borders, and characteristics to create spatial impact. With colorful, bold works, he centers contemporary Caribbean-American life. 

Criola (born 1990) is a graphic artist and muralist based in São Paulo, Brazil. Criola employs graffiti art to celebrate the beauty of black women in her community of Belo Horizonte and the cultural significance of diversity in Brazil. In 2022, Criola was commissioned to create a public mural in the Miami Design District representing the aesthetics of global black women.

Cristiano Mangovo (1982- ) is an Angolan artist. Employing the use of mediums including painting, installation, performance, and more, his work is surreal and expressionistic. Swirling limbs and clothing are reconfigured into new forms. Many of his pieces consider the relationship between humans, plants, and animals. Driven by social and political realities, he critiques corrupt systems.  A recurring motif in his work is double mouths, one restricted by fear and one speaking freely.  Mangovo graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa. 

C. Rose Smith (1995- ) is an American photographer who is interested in photography’s role in constructing identity. Her work subverts social norms as it interrogates history.  Smith received her MFA in Photography & Related Materials from Rochester Institute of Technology in 2024 and her BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2017. 

Crystal Z Campbell (1980- ) is an American sculptor, printmaker, and experimental filmmaker of  Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descent. Campbell's work excavates lesser-known histories and "underloved" stories. They work through and within and the archives omissions, finding complex­ity in public secrets. 

Cydne Jasmin Coleby (1993- ) is a Bahamian interdisciplinary artist working in digital and mixed media. Starting with personal and family photographs and other archival materials, Coleby transcribes their experiences through the visual motifs such as Bahamian Junkanoo and bright, vibrant colors. Processing trauma, she complicates the narrative of a tropical paradise.  Coleby received her associate's degree from the University of the Bahamas in 2013. 

Daniel Arnan Quarshie (born 1995, in Ghana) is a Ghanaian artist whose drawing-based practice explores memory, grief, intimacy, healing, and the unstable relationship between personal experience and social reality. Working primarily across charcoal on paper, plywood, canvas, and other supports, Quarshie examines emotional and political life through dense tonal surfaces, fragmented figuration, and compositions that move between portraiture, abstraction, and sculptural form.  Quarshie completed a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi. His work often engages memory, family photographs, oral history, love, loss, and spiritual presence, using charcoal, pastel, and cinematic montage to consider how intimate feeling can be carried through objects, bodies, and built space. Gallery 1957 describes his practice as an effort to expand drawing so that it operates with the force of painting and sculpture.  His work has been exhibited at Gallery 1957, Compound House Gallery, and through Gallery 1957 presentations such as Unlimited II and Art X Lagos. He lives and works between Accra and Kumasi.

Danielle McKinney (born 1981, Montgomery, Alabama) is an American painter whose intimate, psychologically charged works center Black women in moments of solitude, reflection, and interiority. Working primarily in oil on linen, McKinney creates quiet, atmospheric scenes drawn from memory, personal photographs, and imagined narratives, often depicting women alone in domestic or private spaces. Her paintings resist spectacle, instead foregrounding stillness, vulnerability, and self-possession as forms of power. Through muted palettes, sparse compositions, and deliberate pacing, McKinney reclaims space for Black female interior life beyond stereotype or performance. She earned her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art and has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and internationally. McKinney lives and works in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Daniel Lind-Ramos (born 1953) is an African-Puerto Rican painter and sculptor who lives and works in Puerto Rico. Lind-Ramos paints on canvas with oil using traditional and uncommon applications techniques from brushes to spatulas. He also works with recycled or reused materials such as cardboard, wire screen, discarded appliances, car parts, the foliage of coconut palm trees, broken musical instruments and other used items.

Daniel Morel (1951- ) is a Haitian photographer. He takes pictures of his natal country, capturing culture, history, and people. His photographs have been featured in national and international publications such as The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The Wall Street Journal. 

Darrel Ellis (1958-1992) was a mixed-media artist whose unique approach to creating portraits with painting and photography depicted family through a reimagined lens, bringing a new life and fresh perspective in black and white. His life was cut short at the age of 34, but his work continues to be exhibited.

David Driskell (June 7, 1931 – April 1, 2020) was an American artist, scholar, curator, and educator whose work explored African American history, spirituality, and cultural identity. Working across painting, printmaking, drawing, and collage, he blended abstraction with African, European, and American artistic traditions to create richly layered compositions. Widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in African American art history, Driskell transformed the field through his groundbreaking scholarship, landmark exhibitions, and decades of mentorship, helping bring greater recognition to Black artists in museums and academia.

David Emmanuel Noel (1972- ) is a British painter, illustrator, and designer—much of his work centers on family, relationships, society, and environmental issues. His paintings often feature swirls of vibrant colors highlighting his expressive brushstrokes. 

David Hammons (1943-) is an American artist who works to create sculptures, installation art, performance art, and more. He is known for taking inspiration from personal experience as well as providing a platform for the life and experiences of African-American individuals. Hammons creates narratives from important influences in the production of visual art such as Dada and the Black Arts Movement. 

David Hartt (born 1967, Montreal, Canada) is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist based in Philadelphia. Working across photography, film, installation, and sound, Hartt’s practice explores history, architecture, modernity, and the cultural conditions that shape social and built environments. His work is characterized by research-driven inquiry and a cinematic visual language that blends documentary and speculative approaches. Hartt received a BFA from the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa in 1991 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994. He has received numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a United States Artists Fellowship. He has participated in major international exhibitions and biennials, including representing Canada at the Venice Biennale in 2013. His work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and is held in the collections of major museums across North America and Europe. 

David Sanou (born 1969, in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso) is a Burkinabè artist and master sculptor whose masquerade practice explores cultural continuity, social prestige, family lineage, and innovation within Bobo-Dioulasso’s masquerade traditions. Working across carved wooden headpieces and full masquerade commissions, Sanou examines how inherited forms can remain socially and ceremonially active while also adapting to contemporary patrons, museums, and new visual demands.  Sanou is a third-generation sculptor who assumed artistic control of his father André Sanou’s studio in 2009 after his father’s retirement. His work often engages masquerade, funerary commemoration, patronage, and artistic inheritance, using carved wood and collaborative costume production to consider both fidelity to regional mask genres and the creation of new forms, including “Compromise Kimi” headpieces and emblematic portraits of deceased community members danced in annual funeral celebrations.  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, San Antonio Museum of Art, and Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.  His clientele includes chiefs, affluent masquerade patrons, and museums abroad. David Sanou lives and works in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. 

David Shrobe (1974-) is a mixed media artist known for his assemblage paintings which take everyday materials and combine them to create art. His works piece together items from his life in Harlem, New York, allowing him to create narratives about history, identity, and memory. Shrobe is also known to challenge traditional portraiture and actively aims to create new and timeless work. 

Dawit Adnew (1973- ) is an Ethiopian painter based in Addis Ababa. He is influenced heavily by his studies of African masks and iconography and his background as a textile designer. Being drawn to beauty and serenity, much of his portraits feature lush, vibrant scenes filled with fruits and flowers.  Adnew studied at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design, Addis Ababa University. 

Dawn Okoro (1980- ) is a multidisciplinary artist who employs the use of fashion mixed with her love of art. Taking inspiration from fashion design. Okoro is known for her figurative work whether it is painting, drawing, etc. The featured work was used as part of her solo exhibition VantaBlack, at Rice University. The event features acrylic paintings on canvas. 

Dawoud Bey (born 1953, Queens, New York) is an American photographer and educator whose work centers Black life, history, and representation through deeply engaged portraiture and landscape practices. Emerging in the 1970s with a series of street portraits taken in Harlem, Bey has consistently used photography as a means of collaboration, dialogue, and witnessing, often working closely with his subjects to create images that foreground presence, dignity, and agency. Over the course of his career, Bey has developed a range of photographic approaches, from large-format portraiture to immersive landscape and historical projects. His work frequently addresses themes of memory, community, and the afterlives of slavery and racial violence in the United States. In projects such as The Birmingham Project (2012), he commemorates the victims of the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing through paired portraits of young people and adults, creating a temporal dialogue across generations. In Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017), Bey turns to landscape photography to evoke the experience of the Underground Railroad, using dark, atmospheric imagery to suggest movement, concealment, and the search for freedom. Bey’s practice emphasizes the ethical dimensions of representation, positioning the photographic encounter as a space of mutual respect and shared authorship. His work challenges historical and contemporary visual narratives by centering Black subjects as complex individuals rather than objects of observation. In addition to his artistic practice, Bey has had a significant impact as an educator, mentoring generations of artists through his teaching. His work has been exhibited widely at major institutions internationally and is held in leading museum collections. Bey lives and works in Chicago.

Deana Lawson (born 1979, in Rochester, New York) is an American artist whose photographic practice explores Black intimacy, identity, spirituality, desire, family, and the visual politics of representation across the African diaspora. Working across staged portraiture, large-scale photography, moving image, and assemblage, Lawson examines the emotional and symbolic dimensions of Black life through carefully composed tableaux, vernacular references, and a richly cinematic attention to gesture, space, and adornment.  Lawson studied photography at Pennsylvania State University, where she received her BFA in 2001, and later earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004. Her work often engages portraiture, social history, family album aesthetics, spirituality, and diasporic visual culture, using staged interiors, found imagery, and highly choreographed compositions to consider beauty, vulnerability, power, and the contradictions of photographic truth. She is also the inaugural Dorothy Krauklis ’78 Professor of Visual Arts at Princeton University.  Her work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, the High Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. She received the Hugo Boss Prize in 2020, becoming the first photographer to win the award, and has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Siskind Fellowship Grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant. Lawson lives and works between New York and Los Angeles. 

Deborah Roberts (1962-) is an artist known for her use of  mixed media. Her work takes the form of social critique, aiming to address beauty standards and stereotypes. Specifically, her art considers women of color and incorporates symbolism and multiple layers to create varied and individual meaning.

Deborah Willis (1948- ) is an American photographer and scholar. Much of her work - both artistic and academic - centers on Black aesthetics and beauty. Willis works closely with the archives, sometimes pulling from personal histories. She is also a quilter, incorporating photographs into her finished quilts.  Willis received her BFA in photography from Philadelphia College of Art in 1975, an MFA in photography from Pratt Institute in 1979, an MA in art history from City College of New York in 1986, and a PhD from the Cultural Studies Program of George Mason University in 2001.