Voices of the Diaspora: The Artisans Behind the Canvas

Debra Cartwright (1988- ) is an American painter and printmaker. Her work balances abstraction and figuration. Cartwright explores the relationship between the Black female body and American medical history. She examines how historical systems have influenced present discrepancies.  Cartwright received her BA in Art History from the University of Virginia in 2010 and AA in Communications Design from Parsons School of Design in 2012. She received her MFA from Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts in 2023. 

Derek Fordjour (b. 1974) is an American interdisciplinary artist who works in video, sculpture, and painting. His work features social gatherings and other cultural rituals with figures such as athletes, performers, and crowds. The background of each work is a carefully constructed collage utilizing cardboard, newspaper, and other materials. The varied textures are as dynmanic as the figures that rest on the surface. Fordjour received a BA from Morehouse College and an Ed. M in Arts Education from Harvard University. He received an MFA from Hunter College in New York.  

Derrick Adams (1970- ) is an artist working across painting, sculpture, collage, performance, video, and public art. Much of his work centers on Black joy and leisure. His recognizable style comprises angular and flat bold colors. In 2022, he established Charm City Cultural Cultivation, a non-profit organization to support and encourage underserved communities in Baltimore through events conducted by three entities: The Last Resort Artist Retreat, a residency program that subscribes to the concept of leisure as therapy for the Black creative; The Black Baltimore Digital Database, a collaborative counter-institutional space for collecting, storing, and safekeeping the data of local archival initiatives; and Zora’s Den, an online and in-person community of Black women writers, including a writers’ circle, and a monthly reading series that strive to promote instruction, support, and social engagement.  Adams received his BFA at Pratt Institute and his MFA at Columbia University

Desmond Beach (born 1978, in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores Black history, ancestral memory, ritual, healing, and the social afterlives of racial violence. Working across performance, sculpture, fiber art, photography, collage, installation, and mixed media, Beach examines the resilience of the African diaspora through layered visual language that transforms grief, rage, and historical trauma into spaces of witness, beauty, and repair.  Beach earned both his BFA and MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, including the Rinehart School of Sculpture. His work often engages archival imagery, protest photography, ritual action, and textile-based construction, using collage, fabric, performance, and material layering to consider how Black experience is shaped across time by the Middle Passage, Jim Crow, and the present. Beach has described himself as an “intercessor,” moving between past and present in order to reclaim silenced histories and create sites of communal reflection and renewal.  His work has been exhibited at the Phillips Collection, the Mattatuck Museum, the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance, and Richard Beavers Gallery. He has participated in fellowships and residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center, Skidmore College, the Women’s Housing Coalition, Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, and the Bayard Rustin Art Fellowship, and he currently serves as Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Lincoln University. Desmond Beach lives and works in New York City. 

Devan Shimoyama (1989- ) is a painter, photographer, and mixed-media artist born and raised in Philadelphia. His colorful, fantastical works explore Black and queer bodies from his perspective. His paintings incorporate materials such as jewels, black glitter, rhinestones, and sequins. These materials point to an inspiration in drag culture and Black culture more broadly. Shimoyama's work uncovers the power of what is underneath the glitter and rhinestones.  Shimoyama earned a BFA from Pennsylvania State University with in Drawing and Painting in 2011 and received his MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University School of Art in 2014.⁠

Devin Allen was born and raised in West Baltimore. Allen gained national attention when Time Magazine @time [https://www.instagram.com/time/] published his documentary photograph of Baltimore Uprising on its cover in May 2015 – only the third time the work of an amateur photographer appeared on Time's cover. These shots are included in his book “A Beautiful Ghetto” (2017). 

Devin B. Johnson (1992- ) is an American multidisciplinary artist. He oscillates being representational and abstract work in a meeting of movement and memory. This alludes to the intangibility of Blackness. His work is layered and textured, a process that communicates his interest in reflecting on urban landscapes and temporal reality.  Johnson received his BA in Fine Arts from the California State University of Channel Islands in 2015 and his Master of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute in 2019.  

Devin N. Morris (1986- ) is an American artist who works across assemblage, collage, video, and installation. Morris's work is an exploration of memory situated in surreal landscapes. His work is an exploration of racial and sexual identity. His work is built from improvisation based on the changing surroundings that are reflection on family and space.  He is the founder of 3 Dot Zine. It is a platform to explore new ideas and show the work of Black and Brown people. 

Devorah Perez is an American sculptural and installation artist. She works across painting, sculpture, and installation. Her minimalist work explores abstraction, materiality, and perception. Perez creates works that serve as resistance, pushing beyond any singular limitation, with interactions between space, material, and light.  Perez received her bachelor’s degree from New World School of the Arts in 2016, and her Master of Fine Arts from Florida International University in 2020.

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.

Dumile Feni (May 21, 1942–October 16, 1991), born in Withuis, Worcester, South Africa, was a South African artist and sculptor whose monumental drawings and expressive figurative works confronted apartheid, racial violence, poverty, labor, exile, and the broader vulnerabilities of human existence. Working primarily in charcoal, pencil, ink, Conté crayon, and sculpture, Feni developed a highly distinctive language of elongated, distorted, and entangled human and animal forms. His intense use of line gave his drawings a sculptural quality, while their monumental scale transformed drawing from an intimate medium into a vehicle for political, psychological, and historical witness. He became known during the 1960s as the “Goya of the townships,” although his work exceeded straightforward social realism, combining observations of Black urban life with spiritual, symbolic, and modernist forms.  Feni’s artistic development took place largely outside formal art-school structures. A compulsive drawer from childhood, he was influenced by San rock paintings and later learned clay modeling and bronze-casting techniques while working at a sculpture, pottery, and plastics foundry in Johannesburg. During treatment for tuberculosis at the Charles Hurwitz SANTA Hospital in Soweto in 1963, he met artist Ephraim Ngatane, who became an important mentor, and the two painted murals throughout the hospital. Feni later attended classes led by Ngatane at the Chiawelo Centre and became connected to artists and cultural figures including Bill Ainslie, Cecil Skotnes, Barney Simon, and Gallery 101 director Madame Haenggi.  His best-known work, African Guernica (1967), uses charcoal and pencil to create a densely populated world of distorted bodies, animals, shadows, and gestures of suffering. Produced against the backdrop of institutionalized racial violence under apartheid, the drawing exemplifies Feni’s capacity to combine political urgency with formal experimentation. In 2026, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid placed African Guernica directly in dialogue with Pablo Picasso’s Guernica—the first time Feni’s work had ever left South Africa—positioning him as a crucial figure within histories of African and global modernism.  Feni represented South Africa at the 1967 São Paulo Biennial, but escalating surveillance and harassment under apartheid eventually pushed him into exile in 1968. He first settled in London, where he exhibited at Grosvenor Gallery and Camden Arts Centre, before relocating to the United States in the late 1970s. He was an artist-in-residence at the Institute of African Humanities at UCLA, later studied film and television at New York University, and eventually settled in New York. Throughout his years in exile, Feni continued producing drawings and sculptures while also designing album covers, posters, calendars, and illustrations. He died of a heart attack in New York on October 16, 1991, shortly before a planned return to South Africa. His body was returned to South Africa and buried in Lenasia. 

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 (born 1994 in the United States) is an Afro-Dominican American artist, writer, and community organizer from the South Bronx, New York, currently based in London. Working across painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, installation, performance, and social practice, Mena explores how people throughout the African Diaspora and Latin America pursue joy, purpose, healing, and self-knowledge while navigating histories of colonialism, displacement, and cultural erasure. Her practice moves between figuration and abstraction, combining saturated color, expressive mark-making, recurring symbols, fragments of the body, and spiritual references to create spaces where personal memory, ancestral history, and imaginative possibility converge.  Mena’s Afro-Dominican upbringing is central to her visual language. She has described childhood memories of vibrantly painted homes in the Dominican Republic and the cultural intersections of the South Bronx as important sources for her intense palette and layered compositions. Palms, hearts, rainbows, clouds, flowers, hands, feet, heads, acrylic nails, lipstick, and other recurring forms operate as parts of what she describes as an expanded visual language. Rather than treating color simply as decoration, Mena uses its intensity to oppose the psychological and cultural invisibility imposed upon Black and Brown bodies, histories, and creative practices.  Mena received a BFA in Fine Arts from the USC Roski School of Art & Design in 2017 and an MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London in 2024. She received the Adrian Carruthers Studio Prize for her Slade MFA Degree Show presentation and previously received the Slade’s Terence Cuneo Prize. Her work has been presented internationally in London, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Mexico City, Berlin, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Recent projects include La Subida del Destino (Destiny’s Climb) at Moosey, In Her Spirit with Bolanle Contemporary and The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ, Under the Palm’s Grace at Untitled Art Miami Beach, and the 2026 group exhibitions Syntax, I, too, overflow, and Cosecha. Mena was an ACME Early Career Programme artist in London in 2025 and will participate in Fountainhead’s Miami residency from September 16 to October 14, 2026. 

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. 

Estéban Whiteside (born 1985 in Asheville, North Carolina) is an American self-taught artist whose paintings, sculptures, and mixed-media works confront racism, political power, capitalism, policing, colonialism, religion, inequality, and other structures shaping contemporary American life. Using bold color, intentionally reductive figures, cartoon-like forms, text, parody, and references to popular culture, Whiteside creates images that can initially appear playful before revealing pointed critiques of social and political violence. He describes his approach as “Concrete Oppressionism,” a visual language designed to communicate political ideas directly rather than leave their central message ambiguous. Whiteside began painting around 2013 after making an inexpensive handmade gift for his then-girlfriend, now wife. After relocating to Washington, D.C., he worked as a museum assistant at The Phillips Collection, an experience he has described as formative to his artistic development. His earliest work leaned toward abstraction, with influences including Romare Bearden and Abstract Expressionism, but the 2014 killing of Michael Brown became a turning point. Whiteside subsequently committed his practice to addressing issues affecting Black communities and other marginalized groups, describing his purpose as both amplifying oppressed voices and publicly confronting systems and people responsible for oppression. His work often borrows the visual familiarity of cartoons, advertisements, television, board games, religious imagery, political propaganda, and American consumer culture. Series and individual works have addressed police corruption, mass shootings, white supremacy, economic exploitation, war, American nationalism, and right-wing politics. Works such as Racism, Where?, Cops Plant Drugs, Kill Your Masters, and The Passion of the Right combine humor with deliberately blunt political messaging, using satire to make subjects that might otherwise feel overwhelming immediately legible.  Whiteside has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), LatchKey Gallery, Phillips, Richard Beavers Gallery, Allouche Gallery, Homme, and other spaces. His 2025 exhibition Beyond Rage at MoCADA was described by the museum as his first solo survey and brought together more than thirty works spanning painting, resin, found objects, and repurposed materials. Multiple works by Whiteside also appeared in the second season of Spike Lee’s Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It. Whiteside is currently based in Durham, North Carolina. 

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.