Voices of the Diaspora: The Artisans Behind the Canvas

Diana Eusebio is a Peruvian-Dominican textile artist based in Miami. Through intimate portraiture and carefully composed scenes, Eusebio creates visual narratives that foreground dignity, reflection, and quiet strength, offering nuanced representations that challenge historically limited portrayals of Afro-Caribbean women. Working primarily in painting and drawing, Eusebio combines vibrant color, patterned textiles, and richly layered backgrounds to situate her subjects within environments that speak to identity, heritage, and belonging. Her compositions frequently highlight gesture, gaze, and posture, allowing subtle expressions of vulnerability, strength, and introspection to emerge. In doing so, she constructs spaces in which Black femininity is presented with care and nuance, expanding the visual language of contemporary Caribbean portraiture. Eusebio’s practice also reflects broader conversations about representation within global art history. By centering Afro-Caribbean women as complex subjects rather than symbolic figures, her work challenges long-standing hierarchies of visibility and power within visual culture. The intimacy of her paintings invites viewers to encounter her subjects not as distant icons, but as individuals embedded within familial, cultural, and communal contexts. Through expressive figuration and luminous palettes, Eusebio contributes to a growing movement of artists across the African diaspora who are reshaping contemporary portraiture. Her work celebrates the beauty, presence, and multiplicity of Black womanhood while affirming the importance of cultural memory and self-definition within Caribbean visual practice.

Didier William (1983- ) is a Haitian painter. His large paintings explore the intersection of myth, personal history, and Haitian narratives. Many of the figures in his work have eyes on their entire bodies, resisting classification by either race or gender. He is interested in the spaces diasporaic Black and queer communities occupy and how their identities are formed.  William received his BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2007. He received his MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University School of Art in 2009.

Dindga McCannon (born July 31, 1947, Harlem, New York) is an American multidisciplinary artist whose work spans painting, fiber art, assemblage, and mixed media. Emerging during the late 1960s and 1970s, McCannon became associated with the Black Arts Movement and was a founding member of a collective formed in 1971 that advocated for the visibility and recognition of Black women in the art world. Her practice centers the experiences, histories, and cultural contributions of Black women, often portraying figures drawn from everyday life, historical memory, and literary or spiritual traditions. McCannon’s work frequently incorporates textiles, beading, embroidery, and found materials, blending fine art with craft traditions historically associated with women’s labor. Through these material choices, she elevates domestic and communal practices into powerful forms of visual storytelling. Many of McCannon’s works celebrate Black women as caregivers, creators, intellectuals, and community leaders, positioning them as central figures in cultural and political life. Her compositions are often vibrant and richly textured, combining figurative imagery with symbolic motifs and layered surfaces that evoke personal memory, collective history, and diasporic heritage. Beyond her studio practice, McCannon has also been active as an educator and curator, contributing to generations of artists and advocating for expanded representation within museums and cultural institutions. Today she is recognized as a pioneering voice in Black feminist art and an influential figure in the development of fiber-based contemporary practice.

Dineo Seshee Bopape (1981- ) is a South African multidisciplinary artist. She uses natural materials such as bricks, soil, and timber alongside video, sound, and archival images. Her work explores socio-political notions of memory (personal/collective, the known/unknown), narration, and representation as connecting manifestations.  Bopape graduated from De Ateliers in Amsterdam in 2007 and received an MFA at Columbia University in 2010. 

Dionne Lee (born 1988, in New York, New York) is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores landscape, survival, power, memory, and the fraught relationship between blackness and the American land. Working across photography, collage, sculpture, and installation, Lee examines how the natural environment can function simultaneously as a site of refuge, danger, inheritance, and historical erasure through manipulated photographs, fragmented imagery, and materially layered interventions.  Lee received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017. Her work often engages landscape, the body, hunting, camouflage, survivalism, and Black spatial history, using darkroom manipulation, collage, sculptural assemblage, and serial image-making to consider how race shapes belonging, vulnerability, and movement through the natural world. Across her practice, she reworks photographic images to trouble ideas of mastery, ownership, and visibility, often positioning Black presence within terrains historically coded as white, masculine, or exclusionary.  Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. She is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow and has held residencies at Light Work, the Chinati Foundation, and Unseen California. Dionne Lee lives and works in Columbus, Ohio.

Dominic Chambers (1993- ) is an American painter. Chambers' interest in color foregrounds his practice. He studies art historical methods such as color-field painting and gestural abstraction and literature such as Magical Realism and the writing of W.E.B. Du Bois. His work focuses on race and identity and the need for rest and leisure space.  Chambers received his BFA from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2016, and his MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2019.

Dominque White (1993- ) is a British sculptural and performance artist who deals heavily in themes of Afrofuturism, Afro-pessimism, and Hydrarchy. She is deeply interested in the mythology of the ocean and the Black diaspora. Much of her sculptural work incorporates found materials and ships. White is interested in the lives and afterlives of objects as well as the relation of ships to the African diaspora. 

Donald Locke (born September 17, 1930, in Stewartville, Guyana – died December 6, 2010) was a Guyanese artist whose multidisciplinary practice explored colonialism, labor, mythology, ritual, memory, and the material histories of Guyana and the wider Black Atlantic. Working across painting, sculpture, ceramics, drawing, and mixed media, Locke examined landscape, power, and cultural inheritance through abstraction, symbolic form, and experimental use of materials.  Locke studied first in Guyana and later in the United Kingdom, where he received scholarships to attend Bath Academy of Art and Edinburgh College of Art. His work often engages Caribbean history, plantation geography, spiritual symbolism, and the afterlives of empire, using ceramics, wood, metal, painting, drawing, and assemblage to consider both formal invention and historical violence. Over the course of his career he lived and worked in Guyana, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with his final decades spent in Atlanta.  His work has been the subject of major recent survey exhibitions including Donald Locke: Nexus and Donald Locke: Resistant Forms, and it is held in public collections including Tate, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Arizona State University Art Museum, and Clark Atlanta University. Donald Locke lived and worked in Atlanta, Georgia.

Donald Rodney (1961-1998) was a British artist. Rodney worked across sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, and digital media. He was a leading figure in Britain's BLK Art Group. The BLK Art Group was a collective of young Black artists formed in Wolverhampton in 1982. Whether critiquing or exploring illness, racism, or Black masculinity, Rodney's work was biting and evocative. Rodney completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Multi-Media Fine Art at University College London's Slade School of Fine Art in 1987.

Duwane Coates is a contemporary Cuban-American artist whose work spans painting, photography, film, and conceptual practice. His art investigates themes of migration, neo-Black identity, and the lived experiences of Afro-Cuban and diasporic subjects, confronting issues of racism, displacement, memory, and cultural belonging. Through evocative imagery and narrative-driven work, Coates situates personal and communal histories within broader socio-political contexts, using his mixed media practice to challenge and reimagine representations of identity and heritage. 

Ebony G. Patterson (1981- ) is a Jamaican mixed-media artist. Across media, her works address themes of postcolonial space, visibility and invisibility, regeneration, and mourning. Her work touches on class, race, gender, youth culture, pageantry and acts of violence. The results of these explorations are vibrant and colorful mixed media collages and installations.  Patterson received a BFA from Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, in 2004, and an MFA from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis in 2006.

Ed Dwight (1933-) is an artist known for creating sculptures. Taking inspiration from the diasporic history and contributions, Dwight is known for showcasing unique perspectives, and highlighting the diaspora in ways not seen previously. Dwight originally showcased the unknown history of the American West and his artwork evolved to showcase other points in history of the diaspora. His historical art perspective has led to Dwight having his work in countless galleries around the US. 

Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga (1991- ) is an artist from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is a contemporary artist primarily producing paintings. His pieces address themes such as social identity and colonialism, and rely on aesthetic choices such as the use of bright colors and negative space. 

Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907) was an American sculptor. As a young adult, Lewis moved from Oberlin, Ohio to Boston, Massachusetts to become a sculptor. Her early patrons were abolitionists, interested in supporting a young Black budding talent. One of her more well-known sculptures, Forever Free (1867) is a unique example of an abolition celebration because it depicts the Black man standing, not kneeling, as was a common motif during the time. Lewis eventually moved to Rome in 1866, where she lived the rest of her life. She found the Italian more accommodating to her as an artist. 

Edouard Duval-Carrié (born 1954, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti) is a Haitian-American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores Haitian history, Vodou spirituality, migration, colonialism, and the layered cultural memory of the Caribbean diaspora. Working across painting, sculpture, mixed media, and installation, Duval-Carrié examines political history, myth, and identity through luminous surfaces, dense symbolism, and visual languages drawn from Haitian iconography, religious imagery, and historical narrative.  Duval-Carrié studied at Loyola College in Montréal and later at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Born and raised in Haiti, he left the country during the Duvalier era and later lived in Puerto Rico, Canada, France, and the United States, experiences that continue to shape his attention to exile, displacement, and creolized identity. His work often engages Vodou, revolution, migration, and the afterlives of colonial violence, using resin, glittering surfaces, painting, sculptural relief, and layered mixed-media compositions to consider how history, spirituality, and imagination intersect within Haitian and diasporic life.  His work has been exhibited at Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Fowler Museum, the Bass Museum, Brown University, and major galleries including Pan American Art Projects, and it is held in collections including the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the National Gallery of Art, the Frost Art Museum, the Lowe Art Museum, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey. He lives and works in Miami, Florida, where he is also active as a curator and cultural leader. 

Eilen Itzel Mena (1994- ) is a Dominican artist, writer, and community organizer. She works across painting, printmaking, drawing, and installation. Mena uses various colors in an abstract setting to expand and revise what is communicated through our relationships with ourselves, others, the earth, and the universe. She documents a femme Afro-diasporic intersectional experience.  Mena received her BA in Fine Arts with an emphasis on sculpture from the University of Southern California in 2017. She received her MFA in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Arts in 2024. 

El Anatsui (1944- ) is a Ghanaian sculptor who has worked most of his career in Nigeria.  Anatsui had a large role in constructing African modernist forms. During his time as a young art student, he wanted to build a practice grounded in African art traditions. El Anatsui's use of discarded materials reflects his belief in the transformative power of reusing materials and the connection of that process to Africa. He is well known for his large bottlecap sculptures that reflect on the history of colonialism, trade, and textile traditions. His other works using found materials include wood sculptures and pottery.  Anatsui received his BA and postgraduate diploma both from the  Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana in 1968 and 1969 respectively. 

Eldzier Cortor (1916-2015) was an American printmaker and painter. Cortor often depicted his subjects in elongated forms. Many of his works featured women and working class Black Americans. He is considered one of the first Black artists to depict nude women as the central theme of his work. He sought to show the strength of Black women. He was active in the South Side Community Art Center and the wider Works Progress Adminstration program.  Cortor received his bachelor's degree with the Art Institute of Chicago in 1936. 

Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) was an American and Mexican sculptor and printmaker. Her work spoke to the experiences of working-class people, laborers, and women. In 1946, Catlett moved to Mexico as a guest artist at the printmaking collective, Taller de Gráfica Popular. Here, she is exposed to Mexican social realist techniques and themes that influence her work. The United States government declared her an “undesirable alien,” which impaired her ability to return to the United States. In 1962, she became a Mexican citizen. Catlett received her BS at Howard University in 1935. She received her MFA in sculpture from the University of Iowa in 1940. 

Ellen Gallagher (1965- ) is an American visual artist from Providence, Rhode Island. As Gallagher's career progressed, her art evolved to become more experimental and conceptually layered. Her work often addresses the complexities of Black identity, challenging stereotypical portrayals and offering new narratives that celebrate resilience and cultural heritage. Gallagher's unique style incorporates a wide range of media, including painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. She often employs a meticulous and labor-intensive approach to her art, blending elements of abstraction, symbolism, and surrealism.  Gallagher spent one year at Oberlin College in Ohio (1982–1984) and studied writing. She did not finish her degree there and ended up joining a carpenters' union in Seattle. She attended Studio 70 in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, in 1989 before earning a degree in fine arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1992. Her art education continued in 1993 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture for additional training.

Elsa James (1968-) deemed one of the Most Influential People in Essex with work in the collection such as Government Art Collection and Beecroft Art Gallery, Elsa James is a London born conceptual contemporary artist and activist. Drawing inspiration from her background and experiences, James' work tends to be pieces that capture your attention and that explore themes of the diaspora, gender, belonging. Her pieces also draw from her own identity in terms of being black and the experiences and stereotypes that follow. Her more recent notable work explores these themes in a past and present context that is showcased through a three part installation called Othered in a region that has been historically Othered (2022).   Instagram and Twitter: @thisiselsajames

Emanoel Araújo (1940-2022) was a Brazilian visual artist and museologist. In the 1960s, Emanoel Araújo moved from Bahia to São Paulo, where he established himself as an influential sculptor in Brazil. During this period, he also embarked on a journey of discovering and preserving African and Afro-Brazilian art forms, recognizing the importance of these cultural treasures in the formation of Brazilian identity. Emanoel Araújo's work is characterized by a harmonious blend of African, Afro-Brazilian, and modernist aesthetics. His sculptures often feature human figures, mythological beings, and abstract forms, imbued with a sense of spirituality and cultural significance. Araújo's work celebrates the beauty and diversity of African and Afro-Brazilian heritage, highlighting themes of identity, memory, and resilience. Some specific influences include Yoruba textile traditions and orisha mythos.  He founded the Museu Afro Brasil in 2004 and served as curator and executive director until he died. He studied printmaking and engraving at the Escola de Belas Artes da Bahia (UFBA). 

Emeka Ogboh (1977- ) is a Nigerian sound and installation artist. He creates sound "portraits" of Lagos that immerse listeners in the specific sounds for the city. His installations and culinary projects are collages of sensory elements, aimed at exploring the translation, transformation, and encoding of private, public, and collective memories and histories into diverse sensorial experiences.  Ogboh studied art at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka and graduated in 2001. 

Emily Moore (1983-) is a London based visual artist who creates through installation pieces, textile work and painting. Describing her own work as wildness, it is evident she takes that approach in her unique stylistic approach to contemporary art. She has stated that her approach is to address her perspective on the state of contemporary art through art history in today's context.

Emma Amos (born March 16, 1937, in Atlanta, Georgia – died May 20, 2020, in Bedford, New Hampshire) was an American artist, educator, and activist whose multidisciplinary practice explored race, gender, identity, labor, and cultural history. Working across painting, printmaking, weaving, textiles, and collage, Amos examined the politics of representation through vibrant color, figuration, pattern, and sustained critique of racism and sexism in the art world.  Amos studied at Antioch College, the London Central School of Art, and New York University. Her work often engages feminism, Black cultural history, self-portraiture, and art-historical critique, using painting, weaving, printmaking, and fabric to consider who gets seen, how bodies are framed, and how Black women move through systems of exclusion and visibility. She was also the only woman and youngest member of Spiral, the important Black artists’ collective formed in 1963.  Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, and in major exhibitions including Soul of a Nation and We Wanted a Revolution. Amos was also a longtime professor and chair at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts. Emma Amos lived and worked in New York. 

Ephrem Solomon (1983-) is an Ethiopian mixed media artist. Solomon’s works consider climate change, the human experience, and transformation. His works rely on the result of observation and symbolism, resulting in his distinct artistic style. 

Ernest Dükü, born in 1958 in Bouake, Ivory Coast, lives and works between Paris and Abidjan. He began his studies at the School of Fine Arts in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in 1982.His works are linked with the language of symbols and the ideograms from Akan signs. Always searching for confluences between the spirituality from ancestor, symbolism and syncretism. He is working with drawing, painting and sculpturing as a medium.

Ernest Levi Tsoloane Cole (March 21, 1940 – February 19, 1990) was a South African photographer whose work offered one of the earliest and most unflinching visual records of apartheid. Born in Eersterust, Pretoria, Cole became interested in photography at a young age and went on to become one of South Africa’s first Black freelance photographers, working for publications including Drum, the Rand Daily Mail, and the Sunday Express.  Cole is best known for House of Bondage (1967), his landmark photobook documenting the daily violence, humiliation, and structural brutality of apartheid in South Africa. After leaving South Africa in 1966, he lived in exile in New York, where he continued photographing and later turned his lens toward Black life in the United States. His images combine documentary urgency with formal precision, revealing how race, labor, space, and surveillance shape everyday life. 

Esther Mahlangu (1935- ) is best known for large-scale works that reference her Ndebele heritage, including vibrant and geometric influences from Ndebele clothing and jewelry designs. Mahlangu gained worldwide recognition in 1989, when her work was included in an exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris: Magiciens de la Terre (Magicians of the World). Her "African Art Car" commissioned by BMW in 1991, featured Ndebele patterns and was exhibited in 1994 at Washington, D.C.'s National Museum of Women in the Arts. She was the first non-Western and female designer to present work on one of these art cars. 

Esther Ofosu (1987- ) is a Ghanaian multidisciplinary artist who works and sculpture and painting Her work evokes emotions drawn from issues happening in and around her environment. In her current work, she puts thousands of rattan shavings together, plaits them into thick heavy strands, dyed, coiled, and converts into fluffy circular mats, objects, and installations. By going through these processes, she explores and expands the ideologies of craft labor into various dimensions to include support and the body. Ofosu received her B.Ed. Art from the University of Education, Winneba and earned her Master of Fine Art from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology

Eva Obodo (b. 1963, Nigeria) is a contemporary Nigerian visual artist whose sculptural-painting practice explores extraction, memory, materiality and repair through fibre and charcoal. Based in Nsukka, Nigeria, his work transforms discarded media such as charcoal fragments, jute and nylon threads via wrapping, bundling and tying into reliefs and freestanding forms. ■ His tactile surfaces evoke socio-political narratives about natural-resource economies, labour, and the architecture of memory. 

Evelyn Adams is a Ghanaian-American artist who works across painting, drawing, ceramics, and performance. Her works celebrate the beauty of Black women on a monumental scale. The women in her works are sourced from photographs from personal archives of my family, close acquaintances, and myself, as well as historical sources. Through her work, she affirms the inherent humanity of Black women. She also includes textiles and traditional Ghanaian clothing to reflect the country's rich textile history.  Adams received her MFA in  Studio Art and Art History from the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2023. She received her BFA in Studio Art and Art History from Long Island University-Post, School Of Visual And Performing Art in 2015. 

Evita Tezeno (born May 9, 1960, in Port Arthur, Texas) is an American artist whose collage-based practice explores Black life, family, joy, memory, and everyday experience in the American South. Working across collage, painting, and mixed media, Tezeno examines intimacy, community, and cultural memory through hand-painted paper, found objects, vivid pattern, and scenes drawn from childhood, family life, and personal reflection.  Tezeno studied graphic design at Lamar University, earning a B.S. in 1984. Her work often engages family history, southern Black life, storytelling, and domestic memory, using layered collage, decorative surfaces, and rhythmic composition to consider beauty, resilience, and the emotional richness of ordinary life. Influenced by artists such as Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, and William H. Johnson, she creates images that counter reductive narratives by centering warmth, pleasure, and connection.  Her work has been exhibited at the Houston Museum of African American Culture, Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, the African American Museum in Dallas, and the Dishman Art Museum at Lamar University. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023 and the Elizabeth Catlett Printmaking Award. Evita Tezeno lives and works in Dallas, Texas. 

Faith Ringgold (1930-2024) was an American painter, mixed-media sculptor and textile artist. She is known for her story quilts depicting various aspects of Black life. These quilts are often open ended and use surreal settings. Ringgold sought to create to work in a medium that was uniquely her own to fully embody a celebration of Black visual culture. Her early paintings use flat colors and figures, characterized by by heavy line work. Since the 1960s she has been an advocate for the inclusion of Black people and women in museum spaces. 

Fatimah Tuggar (1967- ) is a Nigerian multidisciplinary artist raised in the United Kingdom and based in the United States. Her work uses technology as both medium and subject to serve as metaphors for power dynamics. She pulls from the language of advertisement, popular entertainment, and folklore to explore the implications of technology.  Also a teacher, challenging the segregated borders of aesthetics and cultural perceptions and facilitating diverse ways of knowing, making, and contributing is critical to her practice.  Tuggar studied at Blackheath School of Art in London. She received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and received her MFA in sculpture at Yale University in 1995. 

Fatric Bewong is a Ghanaian interdisciplinary artist. Bewong sculpts with reused materials and sound improvisation to transform them into formal objects. Through photographs and videos of herself dressed under the guise of Mother Earth, she re-contextualizes traditional Ghanaian proverbs to open up dialogues and discussions on class systems, labor, love, healing, self-care, and self-actualization. Bewong received a BFA from  Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in 2006. She received her  MFA degree from the University of Hartford in 2019.

Favour Jonathan (1996- ) is a Nigerian multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, painting, photography, and installation. She creates work that explores femininity and identity from her experience of living in London. 

Ferrari Sheppard (b. 1983, Chicago, IL, USA) is an American painter whose work merges figuration and abstraction to celebrate Black humanity, memory, and emotional intensity. Based in Los Angeles, Sheppard draws inspiration from lived experience, diaspora, and visual history to create large-scale canvases that blend acrylic, charcoal, 24-k gold leaf and layered surface. 

Ficre Ghebreyesus (born March 21, 1962, in Asmara, Eritrea – died April 4, 2012) was an Eritrean-American artist whose painting practice explored migration, memory, displacement, landscape, and the layered emotional textures of exile and belonging. Working across painting, drawing, and print-related practices, Ghebreyesus examined history, dream imagery, cultural memory, and personal experience through vibrant color, shifting spatial logic, and compositions that moved fluidly between abstraction, figuration, and surreal narrative.  Ghebreyesus studied at Southern Connecticut State University, the Art Students League in New York, and Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop before earning his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2002, where he received the Carol Schlossberg Prize for Excellence in Painting. His work often engages migration, war, food, landscape, and remembrance, using acrylic and oil painting, layered imagery, and richly atmospheric compositions to consider the psychic and sensory afterlives of Eritrea, refugee movement, and diasporic life. He was also known as a chef and co-owner of Caffè Adulis in New Haven, a role that shaped the social and communal dimensions of his life and practice.  His work has been exhibited at the Museum of the African Diaspora, Modern Art in London, and Galerie Lelong, and has received major posthumous recognition through institutional and gallery exhibitions devoted to his paintings. He is now widely regarded as an important Eritrean-American painter whose work bridges personal history, political upheaval, and imaginative painterly form. Ficre Ghebreyesus lived and worked in New Haven, Connecticut. 

Firelei Báez (1981- ) is a Dominican artist working across painting, installation, sculpture, and works on paper. Her work includes references to regionally specific mythology, science fiction, and fantasy. She often paints over historical material, such as found maps, manuals, and travelogues, layering figures over them. Much of her work features female characters and self-portraits.  Báez received her BFA from Cooper Union in 2001 and her MFA from Hunter College in 2010. She also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. 

Folashade Thomas-Fahm (1933- ) is a Nigerian fashion designer. She is regarded as Nigeria's first modern fashion designer and was the first fashion designer to open a fashion boutique in Nigeria. After returning to Nigeria in 1960 from her studies in London, she opened a factory and the first fashion boutique in Nigeria under the name, Maison Shade (later becoming Shade's Boutique). She used traditional Nigerian fabrics (aso oke, adire, akwete, and okene) in her designs.  Thomas-Fahm studied fashion at St. Martins College of Art and Design, beginning in 1953. She became a qualified fashion designer in 1959, becoming the first Nigerian woman to acquire such qualifications. 

Fowokan (1943- ) is a Jamaican sculptor, photographer, and video artist. He is inspired by his ancestral history, the culture of pre-colonial Africa, and ancient Egypt. Through his sculpture, he wants to center an African worldview.

Francisco Masó (born 1988, Havana, Cuba) is a Miami-based AfroLatinx visual artist whose work examines power, surveillance, and the aesthetics of state control through photography, painting, installation, and archival-based research. Drawing from his lived experience in Cuba’s political and visual culture, Masó investigates how systems of authority—military structures, propaganda, police presence, and public space—shape behavior and perception. His practice incorporates found documents, code-based mark-making, and abstractions derived from uniforms, insignia, and bureaucratic design to question who is seen, who is watched, and who holds power. Masó has exhibited nationally and internationally, and his work has been featured in institutions such as Pérez Art Museum Miami, Oolite Arts, and various Latin American contemporary art platforms.

Frank Wimberley (b. August 31, 1926 – d. October 9, 2025) was an American abstract painter whose six-decade career bridged the legacy of Abstract Expressionism with the experience of African American artists in the post-war era. Born in Pleasantville, New Jersey, Wimberley studied at Howard University with instructors including Loïs Mailou Jones, James Lesesne Wells and James A. Porter — deeply rooting his practice in African American art traditions. His paintings are distinguished by richly textured surfaces, layered pigment application and gestural brushwork that echo jazz improvisation and evoke luminous space and emotional depth. 

Frantz Patrick Henry is a multidisciplinary artist of Haitian heritage whose practice explores becoming, reconstruction, personal mythology, migration, and the material conditions through which identity is continually remade. Working across sculpture, painting, installation, photography, and animation, Henry examines transformation, instability, and renewal through lyrical forms, reworked everyday objects, and construction materials that function as metaphors for collapse, repair, and emergence.  Henry graduated from the Université du Québec à Montréal in 2019 and later completed an MFA in sculpture at the Yale School of Art. His work often engages social history, migration, geography, and self-reconstruction, using gypsum cement, dry pigment, recuperated materials, carving, scale shifts, cropping, and spatial arrangement to consider how fixed categories give way to changing states of being. Across his practice, he reinterprets mythical and social stories by hybridizing his own history with those of broader protagonists, building installations that invite viewers to approach the work through both geographic and social experience.  His work has been exhibited at the Yale School of Art Gallery, Centre Optica, Art Souterrain, and Centre Clark, and he has received the McAbbie Foundation Grant for Excellence in Sculpture, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, and support from the Canada Council for the Arts. Recent sources also note his fellowship at NXTHVN in New Haven. Frantz Patrick Henry lives and works in Montréal.

Franz Caba (1991- ) is a self-taught Dominican artist whose work includes drawings, installations, and tattooing. Cabo's work explores the body, vulnerability, and identity. Some of his work seeks to extract the relationship between the body and the Caribbean as "paradise". Caba received a bachelor's degree in architecture from the Autonomous University of San Domingo in 2017. He studied for a  master's degree from the same institution.  

Frederick Bamfo is a Ghanaian artist working across architectural landscapes and textiles. His work questions issues around spatiality, material history, constructed sociocultural hierarchies, borders, migration, and geopolitics of the 21st-century globalization climate. Bamfo is a PhD candidate in Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. He earned his MFA in 2014 and his BFA from the same institution in 2010. He also studied Fashion Design and Textiles from Kumasi Technical University. 

Fred Eversley (1941- ) is an American sculptor born in New York, greatly influenced the rise of contemporary art in California and is known for his abstract sculptures. He began his career as an engineer who collaborated for NASA and other large aerospace companies and changed his career path after he developed an interest in the Parabola–a type of curve such as that made by an object thrown up in the air and falling to the ground in a different place. It also is the only shape that concentrates all forms of energy to a single focal point. His artwork explores energy, light, and space. Eversley works with resin, plastic, and polyester challenging materials. Once in large cylinders, he transforms them as he experiments with Light and Color and seeks to uncover the hidden realities of the human mind.  Parabolic Flight was one of the first Art in Public Places (APP) works in Miami-Dade County and the very first public art commission by the APP Trust for MIA. The work was commissioned in 1980. This work can be seen at the entrance to the Miami International Airport. Eversley received a BS in electrical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. 

Gabrielle Goliath (1983- ) is a South African multimedia artist. Goliath's practice works with and within the histories, lifeworlds and present-day conditions of black, brown, femme, and queer life. It rejects classification in a racial-sexual paradigm of violence that dictates a postcolonial world. Her work collapses a heteropatriarchal worldview to build a community built on relation and love. 

Gary Simmons (born 1964, New York, NY) is an American contemporary artist known for his powerful explorations of race, memory, and the afterlives of American popular culture. Working across painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, and photography, Simmons interrogates the visual codes of cartoons, cinema, sports, music, and architecture to reveal how racial stereotypes are embedded in collective memory. He is best known for his signature “erasure drawings,” in which he smudges chalk drawings on black walls or panels to create ghostly, blurred images—figures that haunt historical narratives and expose the persistence of racist iconography in American culture. Simmons’s work is deeply rooted in the landscapes of urban America, Black cultural histories, and the politics of visibility. Over his three-decade career, Simmons has exhibited at the Whitney Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Venice Biennale. In 2023, he was the subject of the major retrospective Public Enemy at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. He lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.