Voices of the Diaspora: The Artisans Behind the Canvas

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 Bowling (born February 26, 1934, in Bartica, British Guiana, now Guyana) is a Guyanese-born British painter whose nearly seven-decade practice has radically expanded the possibilities of abstraction through color, material experimentation, geography, and the physical properties of paint. Moving from expressionistic figuration and Pop-influenced imagery in the 1950s and 1960s toward increasingly abstract compositions, Bowling has developed a distinctive visual language through staining, pouring, dripping, layering, collage, acrylic gels, and the incorporation of found materials. His paintings balance deliberate formal experimentation with chance, allowing paint, gravity, surface, and accumulated material to become active agents in the work.  Born in Guyana and based in Britain from 1953, Bowling later established a significant presence in New York, where his encounter with American abstraction profoundly shaped his practice. His celebrated Map Paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s combine expansive fields of color with stenciled images of continents, bringing geography, migration, memory, and the histories of the Atlantic into dialogue with abstraction. Works such as Night Journey use cartographic forms of Africa and South America within luminous fields of paint, while later series moved toward poured color, layered surfaces, sculptural accumulation, and increasingly complex investigations of light and space. Bowling studied at the Royal College of Art from 1959 to 1962, where he received the Silver Medal for painting, and also briefly attended the Slade School of Fine Art, City & Guilds of London Art School, and Chelsea School of Art. His work has been presented in major exhibitions at Tate Britain, the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Dallas Museum of Art, Haus der Kunst, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Sharjah Art Foundation, Museum Ludwig, and numerous other institutions. His honors include two Guggenheim Fellowships, an OBE, election to the Royal Academy of Arts, a knighthood for services to art, and the Wolfgang Hahn Prize. At age 92, Bowling continues to work from his South London studio. 

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. 

Garrett Bradley (born 1986, New York City, New York, United States) is an American artist and filmmaker whose multidisciplinary moving-image practice explores race, class, public memory, justice, and familial intimacy. Working across film, video installation, documentary, narrative, and experimental cinema, Bradley examines social and political life through archival material, close collaboration with her subjects, and a poetic visual language that blends documentary observation with formal experimentation. Bradley studied at Smith College and later earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles; she also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work often engages incarceration, Black life, historical absence, family, and the politics of representation, using black-and-white cinematography, archival research, multichannel installation, and hybrid film structures to consider how lived experience and collective history are shaped by American social systems. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the August Wilson African American Cultural Center. She has received the MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art. Garrett Bradley lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana.

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.

Géraldine Tobé (born February 9, 1992, in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo) is a Congolese visual artist and artivist whose multidisciplinary practice explores trauma, spirituality, ancestral belief, mental health, womanhood, and the social and political conditions of contemporary Congolese life. Working across painting, drawing, smoke-based image making, installation, and performance-inflected practice, Tobé examines personal suffering, collective memory, and the tensions between Indigenous belief systems and Christianity through haunting figuration, ritualized process, and materially charged surfaces.  Tobé studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa. Her work is deeply shaped by her experience of being accused of witchcraft as a child and subjected to violent exorcism, a history she transforms into an artistic language built from soot and smoke. Her practice often engages memory, spiritual violence, social stigma, ancestral transmission, and the psychic burdens carried by women and marginalized people, using oil-lamp smoke, painting, and symbolic imagery to consider both personal healing and wider collective struggle.  Her work has been exhibited at AFIKARIS in Paris, in Brussels through the Lever House exhibition context, and in international presentations connected to restitution discourse and contemporary African art. In 2026, she was included among the artists for the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s pavilion presentation at the Venice Biennale. Géraldine Tobé lives and works in Kinshasa. 

Gerard Sekoto (1913-1993) was a South African painter and musician who was a leading figure in Black South African art .  His art played a large part in the cultural development of the region. Sekoto is primarily known for his paintings of everyday life derived from his own experiences. His paintings of Black urban life advanced a type of Social Realism, a frank depiction of daily life. 

Germane Barnes is an American architect and designer. Barnes’ research and design practice investigates the connection between architecture and identity, examining architecture’s social and political agency through historical research and design speculation. He examines how the built environment influences bBack domesticity. Barnes received a Bachelor's of Science in Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Architecture from Woodbury University. 

Ghada Amer (born 1963, Cairo, Egypt) is a contemporary artist whose practice challenges dominant narratives around gender, sexuality, labor, and representation. Working primarily with embroidery, painting, sculpture, and installation, Amer reclaims traditionally feminized craft techniques—especially needlework—to confront patriarchal structures within both art history and society. Her works often feature layered, stitched images of women drawn from art historical, popular, and pornographic sources, deliberately complicating ideas of desire, agency, and authorship. By merging abstraction with figuration and craft with conceptual rigor, Amer positions embroidery as a site of political resistance and feminist reclamation. She lives and works between New York City and Paris.

Gio Swaby (1991-) is a visual artist from the Bahamas. Working with textile, installation, performance, and more, she is primarily known for her textile works. She creates portraits that address and celebrate Blackness and womanhood. 

Girma Berta (1990- ) is an Ethiopian photographer. His distinct style highlights everyday life in Addis Ababa. Against a mono-colored background residents of the city go about their every day, giving insight into daily life. Berta's photography symbolizes the digital photo revolution happening throughout the continent. 

Gladys Kalichini is a Zambian multidisciplinary artist. Through video, installation, and sculpture she explores colonial and postcolonial histories in Zambia, addressing somber-like themes of trauma and death. Her work highlights the exclusion of Zambian women from Zambian political history.  Kalichini is currently a PhD candidate in Art History at Rhodes University in South Africa. 

Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) is an American conceptual artist whose text-based paintings, neon works, prints and installations examine race, language, desire, sexuality and historical identity. His practice draws heavily on literature, archival sources, and cultural critique, transforming borrowed texts and found images into charged visual form.

Gopal Dagnogo (1973-) is a contemporary painter from the Ivory Coast. Informed by the human relationship to concepts such as memory and recollection, his pieces are known to re-contextualize mythology into contemporary life. 

Gordon Parks (born November 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kansas – died March 7, 2006) was an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explored race, poverty, social justice, Black life, and the complexities of American identity. Working across photography, film, writing, music, and poetry, Parks examined inequality, dignity, and everyday life through documentary image-making, narrative storytelling, and human-centered portraiture.  Parks was largely self-taught as a photographer. His work often engages documentary photography, portraiture, social history, and political witness, using photo essays, cinematic storytelling, and intimate visual observation to consider segregation, labor, family, policing, and Black self-representation in the United States.  His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the High Museum of Art. He received numerous honors, including the National Medal of Arts and the Spingarn Medal. Gordon Parks lived and worked in New York City. 

Gosette Lubondo (born 1993, in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo) is a Congolese photographer and visual artist whose photographic practice explores memory, architecture, absence, and the layered histories of postcolonial space. Working across staged photography, photo-performance, and installation-based presentation, Lubondo examines how abandoned schools, train cars, and other sites carry the traces of personal and collective history through spectral figuration, carefully composed mise-en-scène, and an atmosphere that moves between documentation and dream.  Lubondo studied visual communication at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa, graduating in 2014. Inspired early by her father, a professional photographer, she also participated in workshops with Kinshasa photography collectives including Eza Possible and other local training programs. Her work often engages memory, ruins, colonial and postcolonial history, and the emotional lives of spaces, using staged bodies, repetition, and cinematic black-and-white photography to consider erasure, inheritance, and the invisible presences that linger within abandoned places.  Her work has been exhibited at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, the Lubumbashi Biennale, Addis Foto Fest, and Stevenson, and she has presented solo exhibitions including Juxtapositions and Imaginary Trip. She received the CAP Prize in 2020 and the Maison Ruinart Prize in 2021. Gosette Lubondo lives and works in Kinshasa. 

Gouled Ahmed (1992- ) is a Somali multidisciplinary artist currently based in Ethiopia. Their work explores themes of memory and belonging through the lens of self-portrait photography, self-fashioning, and textiles. Ahmed's work is inspired by Afro-futurism as they envision a more equitable future in the Horn of Africa. They believe in the transformative power of freedom and self-expression.  Ahmed received a bachelor’s degree in historical studies from Bard College. 

Grada Kilomba is a Portuguese interdisciplinary artist and writer whose works critically examine memory, trauma, gender, racism and post-colonialism. She uses various formats to express herself ranging from text to scenic reading and performance (performing knowledge).

Gregory Rick (1981- ) is an American visual artist from South Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work takes the form of painting, works on paper, and sculpture. Much of his work aims to create narratives considering memory and history.  Rick's work starts with his personal history and then extends outwards into wider narratives and discourse. Rick has called his work "history paintings" carefully archiving the social and political environment. His bold paintings are expressionistic and passionate. He received his BFA from California College of the Arts in 2019 and graduated from Stanford University with an MFA in Art Practice in 2022.

Guido Llinás (born March 21, 1923, in Pinar del Río, Cuba; died in 2005 in Paris, France) was a Cuban painter and printmaker whose abstract practice explored gesture, signs, memory, materiality, and African diasporic visual traditions. Working across painting, engraving, woodcut, collage, and artist books, Llinás combined expressive mark-making with pictographic forms and richly textured surfaces, developing a body of work he called Pintura Negra, or Black Painting.  Llinás attended the School of Fine Arts in Pinar del Río, graduated from the Teachers’ School there in 1942, and earned a degree in pedagogy from the University of Havana in 1953. He later received a Cuban government scholarship to study silkscreen and printmaking in France. As a founding member of Los Once, he helped advance abstraction in 1950s Cuba before settling permanently in Paris in 1963. His work often engaged African sculpture, masks, body painting, textile patterns, calligraphy, exile, and cultural memory, using burlap, paper, oil paint, printed marks, and collage to connect Afro-Caribbean histories with European and American postwar abstraction.  His work was exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial, the Paris Biennale, the Grand Palais, Florida International University’s Art Museum, and the Centre Pompidou. He received a Gold Medal at the Norwegian International Print Triennale in 1995, and his work is held by the Centre Pompidou, Brooklyn Museum, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Cuba, and the University of Essex. Guido Llinás lived and worked in Paris and its surrounding communities from 1963 until his death.

Hako Hankson (1968- ) is a Cameroonian painter. His gestural paintings recall ancestral rites and abandoned beliefs. He sees modernization as a threat to African cultural heritage and religion. Hankson's work is a reminder of these values and a plea to reengage with traditional heritage values. In 2015 he founded In and Off Art Center in Douala, Cameroon.

Hank Willis Thomas (1976- ) is an American conceptual artist. His work focuses on identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. In recent years he his practice has grown to include mirrors and reflective vinyl to challenge perspectives in his work. Thomas wants viewers to consider who is included in history and who is erased, illuminating the bias of history. Thomas received his BFA in Photography and Africana studies from New York University in 1998. He received his and an MFA in Photography and Visual Criticism from the California College of the Arts in 2004. 

Harmonia Rosales (1984- ) is an Afro-Cuban American artist who creates large-scale paintings. Rosales works mostly as a classical painter depicting Black and Latine folks in Renaissance paintings. She incorporates West African mythology including references to Yoruba orishas to center Afro-diasporic perspectives. A consistent thread in her work is to affirm the beauty and dignity of Black women. 

Hayward Oubre (born 1916, in New Orleans, Louisiana – died 2006) was an American modernist artist and educator whose multidisciplinary practice explored abstraction, African American life, design, and the structural possibilities of line, color, and space. Working across sculpture, painting, drawing, and printmaking, Oubre examined form, movement, balance, and Southern Black experience through wire constructions, geometric abstraction, and figurative imagery rooted in memory.  Oubre was the first student to graduate from Dillard University with a BFA in 1939. He continued his studies at Atlanta University under Hale Woodruff and Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, and after military service in World War II he earned an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1948. His work often engages modernist abstraction, material experimentation, and Black social life, using wire hangers, paint, prints, and works on paper to consider both formal innovation and cultural memory.  His work has been the subject of Hayward Oubre: Structural Integrity, the first monographic retrospective devoted to his art, organized by the Birmingham Museum of Art and shown at the Stanley Museum of Art and later NOMA. He also taught for decades at Alabama State University and Winston-Salem State University, where he founded or shaped art departments and influenced generations of Black artists. 

Hector Hyppolite (born 1894, in Saint-Marc, Haiti – died 1948) was a Haitian artist whose self-taught painting practice explored Vodou spirituality, religious symbolism, portraiture, and everyday Haitian life. Working primarily across painting on found and humble surfaces, Hyppolite examined sacred presence, ritual, and vernacular experience through vivid color, direct figuration, and imagery that moved fluidly between the devotional, the symbolic, and the intimate.  Hyppolite was self-taught. Before turning fully to painting, he made shoes and painted houses, and he was also a third-generation Vodou priest, or oungan, a spiritual and cultural role that deeply shaped his visual language. His work often engages spirituality, folklore, and Haitian cultural history, using enamel, oil, pencil, and improvised supports such as cardboard and doors to consider the relationship between ritual practice, artistic vision, and popular painting. He later joined the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince, where his work gained wider visibility.  His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and has been included in major narratives of Haitian modern painting and Surrealism. He is widely regarded as one of the best-known and most influential Haitian painters, in part because André Breton championed his work during his visit to Haiti in 1945–46. Hector Hyppolite lived and worked in Haiti, including Saint-Marc and Port-au-Prince.

Helena Uambembe (b. 1994) is an Angolan-South African multidisciplinary artist working with textiles, printmaking, photography, and performance. Her work deals with the relationship between personal politics and global politics. Using her family's history, particularly that of her father, she connects Angolan, South African, and South African history. The 32nd Battalion and her Angolan heritage occur often in her work. Archives, memory, body, and language are starting points for her to explore history and stories. 

Helina Metaferia (1983- ) is an interdisciplinary research artist who integrates archival research, and works across collage, assemblage, video, performance, and social engagement. A daughter of Ethiopian activists who grew up in Washington, D.C., Metaferia is well positioned to explore questions about American-ness melded with African sensibilities. 

Henry Taylor (1958- ) is an American painter who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Most of his work is figurative, though he does not classify himself as a portrait artist. Subjects appear in his paintings include family members, friends, neighbors, celebrities, politicians, strangers, and psychiatric patients. His work is characterized by its loose brushstrokes and emotional intimacy. These intimate looks seek to condense societal and political affects that can influence a person. His style is a window into daily life in the United States.  Taylor received his BFA from the California Institute for the Arts in 1995.  He also studied at Oxnard College.  ⁠

Hervé Yamguen (born June 17, 1971, in Douala, Cameroon) is a Cameroonian multidisciplinary visual artist, poet, writer, photographer, performer, and scenographer whose practice spans painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, performance, public art, poetry, and theatrical set design. Based in Douala, where he was born and continues to live and work, Yamguen has developed a practice over more than three decades that moves fluidly between the visual and literary arts. Although largely self-taught, he later undertook a year of training at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg in 2000–01.  At the center of Yamguen’s work is an imaginative world in which distinctions between human, animal, vegetal, spiritual, and cosmic life become unstable. Birds, trees, flowers, hybrid heads, lovers, faces, bodies, masks, and dreamlike creatures recur across his paintings and sculptures. His bronze figures often merge human bodies with branches, birds, plants, or other forms, turning metamorphosis into a way of visualizing interdependence.  Yamguen describes his practice as emerging from a stream of consciousness and from a desire to move beyond ordinary material reality toward the invisible forces connecting living beings. His work is informed by animist understandings of the world, spirituality, dreams, eroticism, poetry, memory, and a sense of wonder toward everyday existence.  Yamguen is also deeply connected to the cultural ecology of New Bell, the Douala neighborhood in which he has lived and worked. In 1998, with Salifou Lindou, Hervé Youmbi, Blaise Bang, and Jules Wokam, he co-founded Cercle Kapsiki, a collective devoted to intervening in Douala's urban environment and creating spaces for artistic exchange. The group later established K Factory, combining a contemporary-art space with an interdisciplinary residency program. Yamguen's public projects—including Néons d’Amour, Les mots écrits de New-Bell, and, with Hervé Youmbi, Les Fables du calao—bring poetry, visual art, sound, and community participation directly into streets and neighborhoods.  His work has been shown internationally at institutions including the Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, Hamburger Bahnhof–Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, S.M.A.K., doual’art, Institut des Cultures d’Islam, and Cité internationale des arts, as well as at international fairs including 1-54, AKAA, Art Brussels, Untitled Art Miami, and artgenève. His works have entered the collections of TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and S.M.A.K. He currently has a solo exhibition, Nos géographies intimes, at AFIKARIS in Paris, on view September 5–October 31, 2026.

Hervé Youmbi (born March 25, 1973, in Bangui, Central African Republic) is a Cameroonian artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores identity, power, colonialism, the commodification of African art, and the shifting boundary between ritual tradition and contemporary global art. Working across installation, portraiture, hybrid masks, video, beadwork-based projects, and collaborative ceremonial forms, Youmbi examines how African visual traditions circulate, are categorized, and are transformed across local communities, museums, and international markets.  After his family returned to Cameroon and settled in Douala, Youmbi began formal art study as a teenager. He attended the Institut de Formation Artistique in Mbalmayo from 1993 to 1996 and later pursued practice and research at the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg from 2000 to 2001. His work often engages portraiture, Grassfields ritual traditions, leadership, colonial history, and the global art market, using collaboration with carvers, beaders, ritual specialists, and performers to create hybrid masks and installations that challenge fixed ideas of what counts as “traditional” or “contemporary” African art.  His work has been shown in major international contexts including Skulptur Projekte Münster, the Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations. He is also one of the founding members of Cercle Kapsiki, an artist collective established in 1998 in Cameroon. Hervé Youmbi lives and works in Douala. 

Hettie Inniss (b. 1999, London, UK) is a British-Caribbean painter whose immersive work investigates memory, identity, and the sensory dimensions of space. Living and working in London, Inniss employs paint to reconstruct architectural or semi-architectural interiors—charged by atmospheric cues, faint scent-triggers, and visceral textures—to evoke how spaces carry emotion, memory and layered experience. Her practice privileges abstraction, texture and colour over literal depiction, allowing interior spaces to become sites of psychological resonance rather than strict representation. Trained in fine art, she completed her BA in Art & Design at the University of Leeds in 2022, followed by an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London in 2023. During her MA she was awarded the prestigious Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship (2022) and later received a ColArt Winsor & Newton Bursary (2023). Inniss’s emerging recognition includes a commission by the Tate Collective (October 2023) to respond to a work in the Tate collection, and her inclusion in the 2025 edition of the Artsy Vanguard, a feature that highlights the most promising contemporary artists working today.

Holly Bass (born June 23, 1971, in Travis, California) is an American multidisciplinary performance artist, choreographer, writer, and cultural worker based in Washington, D.C. Working across performance, dance, theater, poetry, photography, installation, video, and participatory practice, Bass examines American history, generational labor, liberation, race, gender, power, and the ways bodies are watched, valued, disciplined, and commodified. Her background in journalism informs a research-driven practice that frequently brings historical material into dialogue with contemporary social and political life.  Bass is particularly known for performances that use the Black female body as a site through which to examine labor, spectacle, national identity, and cultural memory. In Moneymaker, an endurance performance first presented in conjunction with 30 Americans, she uses dance and repetition to interrogate histories of the exploitation and objectification of Black women. American Woman, a durational performance and video installation, considers Black women’s contributions to American political and cultural life, while The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company uses speculative theater to follow three Black women moving between the present and the Reconstruction era in search of the meanings of freedom.  Bass earned a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she concentrated in creative writing, social sciences, and contemporary dance, and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She also studied modern dance with Viola Farber and was a Cave Canem fellow. Her work has been presented by the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Pérez Art Museum Miami, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Art Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, New York Live Arts, Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Venice Biennale. In 2026, the University of Michigan Museum of Art will present We Hold These Truths…, Bass’s largest exhibition to date, opening October 3. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art and Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. 

Honor Titus (1989- ) is an American multidisciplinary artist who works in drawing and painting. Titus’s paintings reference the portraiture of American predecessors like Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, and Edward Hopper. The Chicago Imagists considered the aesthetics of advertising and modern urban life and the sense of isolation that it created.  Titus renders his subjects in self-contained moments of solitary reflection and intimacy. His paintings place his figures against semi-abstracted, color-blocked compositions that locate them as the centers of their own private worlds. 

Howardena Pindell (1943- ) is an American painter and mixed-media artist. Following her graduate studies, she began working at the Museum of Modern Art, where she stayed until 1979. Beginning as an exhibition assistant, she eventually became the Associate Curator and Acting Director in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books. This made her the museum's first Black curator. Through abstraction, she explored the metaphorical processes of destruction/reconstruction. She used cut strips of paper, collage elements, and her unique brand of pointillism to create her abstract pieces.  Pindell received her BFA degree from Boston University in 1965. She received her MFA from Yale University in 1967.

Hugh Hayden born in Dallas, Texas in 1983 and lives and works in New York City. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University. practice considers the anthropomorphization of the natural world as a visceral lens for exploring the human condition. Hayden transforms familiar objects through a process of selection, carving and juxtaposition to challenge our perceptions of ourselves, others and the environment. 

Hurvin Anderson (born Feb 25, 1965, Birmingham, UK) is a British painter whose work explores memory, migration, and identity through richly layered depictions of interiors and landscapes. Of Jamaican descent, Anderson draws from personal and cultural histories tied to the Caribbean diaspora in Britain, often focusing on spaces such as barbershops, bar interiors, and domestic environments that function as sites of community, belonging, and cultural continuity. His paintings frequently begin with photographic or observed references but evolve into compositions that balance figuration and abstraction. Anderson often constructs his images through multiple iterations, layering paint to create surfaces that feel both familiar and unstable. Figures may appear partially rendered or dissolve into their surroundings, emphasizing the fluidity of memory and the complexities of representation. In series such as his barbershop paintings, Anderson investigates how everyday spaces hold histories of migration and identity, capturing both their social significance and their visual rhythms. His landscapes, often inspired by travels to Jamaica, similarly reflect a tension between recollection and perception, using color, pattern, and repetition to evoke the sensory experience of place. Through his practice, Anderson engages broader questions about visibility, cultural inheritance, and the diasporic condition, using painting as a means of navigating the intersections between personal memory and collective history. His work has been widely exhibited internationally, and he represented the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale in 2017. He lives and works in London.

Hyacinthe Ouattara (born 1981, Burkina Faso) is a Burkinabè artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores memory, matter, human connection, and the place of the body within the universe. Working across textile sculpture, installation, painting, and drawing, Ouattara examines emotional memory, anatomy, and organic transformation through knotting, layering, cartographic figuration, and materially dense abstraction.  Ouattara is largely self-taught, though sources note training in live model drawing, graffiti, and painting, as well as workshop-based formation in Burkina Faso. His work often engages ancestral memory, texture, cellular form, and “human cartographies,” using fabric, thread, spontaneous painterly gesture, and sculptural construction to consider how bodies, spirits, and histories remain linked through material form.  His work has been exhibited at 193 Gallery, Ronewa Art Projects, Galerie DuflonRacz, the Dakar Biennale, the Congo Biennale, and the 15th Bienal de La Habana. Ouattara lives and works in Paris, France.

Ibrahim Mahama (born 1987 in Tamale, Ghana) is a Ghanaian multidisciplinary artist whose monumental installations, sculptures, textile works, photography, video, architectural interventions, and archival projects examine labor, colonialism, global trade, migration, industrialization, economic inequality, and the social histories embedded within materials. Working across Accra, Kumasi, and Tamale, Mahama is particularly known for transforming used jute sacks, railway components, shoemaker boxes, sewing machines, colonial-era school furniture, maps, textiles, and other discarded objects into expansive environments that reveal the human labor and economic systems through which those materials have circulated. His practice has expanded considerably beyond jute. Works such as Parliament of Ghosts repurpose abandoned materials from Ghana’s colonial railway system to consider the promises and failures of post-independence industrialization, while projects involving discarded sewing machines, hospital stretchers, school desks, blackboards, metal headpans, and industrial remnants examine how political and economic histories persist through objects. Mahama describes this process as a kind of “time travel,” redirecting materials associated with failed colonial and postcolonial projects toward new social possibilities. His 2025 exhibition Zilijifa at Kunsthalle Wien, for example, placed a full-size locomotive in relation to thousands of worn headpans and X-ray images documenting spinal damage associated with carrying loads, connecting infrastructure directly to the bodies whose labor sustains it.  Mahama earned a BFA in Painting from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in 2010, an MFA in Painting and Sculpture in 2013, and a PhD in Fine Art from KNUST in 2015. Alongside his international exhibition practice, he has redirected substantial resources from his art career toward building cultural infrastructure in northern Ghana. He founded the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) in Tamale in 2019, Red Clay Studio in nearby Janna Kpeŋŋ in 2020, and Nkrumah Volini in 2021, creating spaces devoted to exhibitions, archives, education, experimentation, and community-based learning. Mahama has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, documenta 14, Sharjah Biennial, Bienal de São Paulo, Biennale of Sydney, Centre Pompidou, Barbican Centre, Kunsthalle Wien, Fruitmarket, Norval Foundation, High Line, and numerous other institutions internationally. His recent honors include the 2026 Arnold Bode Prize, 2025 Art Basel Gold Award, 2024 inaugural Sam Gilliam Award, 2021 Pino Pascali Award, and 2020 Prince Claus Award. In 2025 he became the first African artist to rank number one on ArtReview’s Power 100 list. In 2026, his projects include The God of Small Things at Art Basel, Labyrinths at MAPS Museum in Denmark, A Shea Garden in Venice, and the forthcoming major Fondation Cartier exhibition The Harvest Season in Paris. 

Ilana Harris-Babou (born 1991, Brooklyn, New York) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work critically examines consumer culture, race, beauty standards, and systems of wellness and self-improvement in contemporary society. Working across video, sculpture, installation, and performance, Harris-Babou often adopts the visual language of advertising, lifestyle branding, and online tutorial culture to reveal the ideological frameworks embedded within everyday products and media. Through humor, satire, and carefully staged performances, Harris-Babou interrogates how consumer industries—from cosmetics and fitness to home goods and self-care—construct narratives around identity, success, and bodily perfection. Her work frequently mimics the polished aesthetics of marketing campaigns and instructional videos, only to disrupt them through absurdity, exaggeration, or critical commentary. This strategy exposes the racialized and gendered assumptions underlying capitalist systems of aspiration and consumption. Harris-Babou’s practice also engages the politics of domestic space and the emotional labor tied to self-improvement culture. By placing herself or performers within staged environments that echo infomercials or lifestyle media, she reveals how ideals of productivity, wellness, and transformation are marketed as accessible solutions to structural inequalities. Her work ultimately questions who these promises serve and who remains excluded. Her work has been widely exhibited at museums, galleries, and international exhibitions, and she has been recognized for her incisive approach to media critique and cultural satire. Harris-Babou lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Inga Somdyala (1994- ) is a South African multidisciplinary artist. Somdyala works with sculpture, painting, and printmaking, though is less interested in labels. He prefers to let the materials work through/with him in his reckoning with the post-Apartheid generation. His work communicates a deep interest in isiXhosa cultural history and South African political and its intersection with his lived experience.  Somdyala received an MFA (2019) at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art.

Iona Rozeal Brown, better known as Rozeal (1996- ) is a painter exploring the cultural exchange between Black Americans and Japan. Her work heavily pulls from ukiyo-e, woodblock prints popular in Japan between the 17th through 19th centuries. During the 1990s she noticed the ganguro trend where Japanese women would bleach their hair, darken their skin, and dress loudly. This along with an early exposure to kabuki theatre, sparked an interest in how Black culture was being consumed globally.  

Sir Isaac Julien CBE RA (February 21, 1960- ) is a British filmmaker and installation artist. He hopes to break down barriers between different disciplines to create immersive experiences. His work is mined from historical and contemporary events or figures and invites alternative readings of events that build powerful narratives. Julien received a BA in fine art film from Central Saint Martins School of Art in 1984. He completed his postdoctoral studies at Les entrepreneurs de l'audiovisuel européen in 1989.