Voices of the Diaspora: The Artisans Behind the Canvas

Merik Goma (born in Manistee, MI in 1987.) is a New Haven-based photographer and alumni of the NXTHVN Studio Fellowship Program, an arts incubator. Goma builds intricate sets within his studio that he uses both as subjects of tableaux and as backdrops for narrative portrait photography. His technique is painterly in execution, with close attention paid to color and lighting. His work has been shown by Tilton Gallery, and is in the collection of 21C Museum, Yale University Art Gallery and the Detroit Institute of Art. 

Merikokeb Berhanu (b. 1977, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) is a contemporary painter known for weaving abstraction and figurative motifs to explore themes of urbanization, nature, memory, and the tensions between technology and the natural world. She is also a founding member of the Nubia Studio, a collective arts space in Addis Ababa. 

Meschac Gaba (1961- ) is a Beninese conceptual artist. His installations of everyday objects whimsically juxtapose African and Western cultural identities and commerce. His work addresses and overturns codes of national and shared identity, along with their inherent value, by blurring the political, the artistic, and the everyday. 

Mestre Didi (b. 1917, Salvador, Brazil – d. 2013, Salvador, Brazil) was a Brazilian artist, priest, and writer celebrated for his sculptural works rooted in Afro-Brazilian spirituality and Candomblé traditions. Drawing upon sacred symbols, ritual practices, and ancestral knowledge, he created intricate sculptures using organic materials such as straw, shells, beads, and cloth. His works embody the spiritual presence of orixás and entities from Yoruba cosmology, transforming ritual aesthetics into contemporary art. Beyond his artistic practice, Mestre Didi was a respected leader in Afro-Brazilian religious life, preserving and transmitting cultural and spiritual heritage through both visual and literary means. He is regarded as a central figure in Brazilian modern and contemporary art, bridging sacred practice and artistic expression while affirming the resilience of African diasporic traditions.

M. Florine Démosthène (born 1971, in New York) is a Haitian-American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores Black womanhood, spirituality, migration, intimacy, memory, and the layered experience of diasporic identity. Working across painting, collage, drawing, installation, and performance-based image making, Démosthène examines embodiment, transformation, and emotional interiority through richly textured compositions, symbolic figuration, and immersive visual worlds shaped by dream, ritual, and personal mythology.  Démosthène earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design in New York and her Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College, City University of New York. Her work often engages migration, Black femininity, spiritual inheritance, and the psychic lives of women, using layered mark-making, collage, color, and figuration to consider vulnerability, resilience, desire, and the ways bodies carry both history and possibility. Sources also note that she has lived and worked across New York, Haiti, and at times Ghana, which informs the diasporic and transnational dimensions of her practice.  Her work has been exhibited at the SCAD Museum of Art, Mariane Ibrahim, Gallery 1957, the Phillips Collection, and the Frist Art Museum, among other venues in the United States, Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center and is based in New York and Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

Michael Armitage (1984- ) is a Kenyan-British painter. Armitage paints with oil on Lubugo, a traditional bark cloth from Uganda, an act complicating the location and production of his work. His work centers East African animals, landscapes, and events. With a flattened perspective, his work flows between figuration and abstraction.  In May 2022, the Royal Mint announced that he would design a new £1 coin for the United Kingdom, to be issued in 2023. Armitage received his BA from the Slade School of Art in 2007. He received his Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy Schools, London in 2010. 

Michaela Yearwood-Dan (1994- ) is a British artist working across painting, works on paper, ceramics, and site-specific mural and sound installations. Her work focuses on Blackness, queerness, femininity, healing rituals, and carnival culture. Her large paintings and smaller, intimate ceramics embody an abstract visual language with lush and bright colors. She often engages colors and materials for their symbolic associations—from the hints of the oranges, pinks, purples, and blues of the lesbian and bisexual pride flags mingling through the compositions to the queer histories. Within the paintings, she writes lines of text—pulled from song lyrics, poetry, or even her diary. Yearwood-Dan received her BA in Fine Art Painting from the University of Brighton in 2016. 

Michael Rolando Richards (1963-2001) was an American sculptor of Jamaican and Costa Rican ancestry. Richards explored grief, trauma, and religion in his practice. Richards sought to highlight a Black experience, a real and raw experience through his sculptures and installations. Recurring themes in his work were pilots, airplanes, wings, and targets Richards received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Queens College and a Master of Arts from New York University. 

Mickalene Thomas (1971- ) is an American artist who creates paintings, collages, photographs, videos, and installations. Her pieces reimagine the Black female nude as a subject of desire and center the female gaze. Her complex portraits and landscapes explore gender and sexuality and how pop culture influences how women are represented. Her collages with glitter and rhinestones reconstruct ideas around beauty and sexuality and open conversations around femininity and desire. ⁠ Thomas received a BFA from the Pratt Institute in 2000 and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2002. 

Mildred Jean Thompson (1936-2003) was an American artist who worked across painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and photography. Her abstract paintings pulsate color and radiate movement. Thompson's work focuses on conveying the invisible and microscopic. She was inspired by fields of science and sound, and her work often references quantum physics, cosmology, theosophy, and music (American jazz and classical European).  Thompson received a BA from Howard University in 1957 with a focus on painting, art history, and art education. Thompson was awarded a summer scholarship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. 

Mimi Cherono Ng’ok (1983- ) is a Kenyan photographer whose work is a visual diary of her life. She explores themes of memory, people, and space in her work. Through documenting the mundane and everyday she can capture moments of great personal significance. Her photographs evoke nostalgia and melancholy as she travels across the African continent.  Ng'ok received her BFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2007.  ⁠

Ming Smith (born 1947, Detroit, Michigan) is an American photographer based in New York whose work is known for its poetic, experimental approach to Black life, memory, and spirituality. Working primarily in photography, Smith’s practice explores themes of migration, cultural identity, performance, and the everyday experiences of Black communities. Her work is characterized by soft focus, motion blur, and atmospheric light, creating images that feel dreamlike and emotionally resonant rather than strictly documentary. Emerging in the 1970s, Smith became the first Black woman photographer to have her work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. She was also a member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of Black photographers dedicated to representing Black life with depth and complexity. Her photographs often depict musicians, dancers, and urban environments, capturing fleeting moments that evoke rhythm, movement, and presence. Smith’s work engages both personal and collective histories, using abstraction and improvisation to expand the possibilities of photographic representation. Influenced by jazz, literature, and Black cultural traditions, she approaches photography as a form of visual poetry, where image, time, and memory converge. Her practice resists fixed narratives, instead offering layered impressions of Black life that emphasize feeling, spirit, and transformation. Her work has been exhibited widely in major institutions and is held in significant public collections. Smith lives and works in New York.

Minnie Evans (born December 1, 1892, Long Creek, North Carolina – died December 16, 1987, Wilmington, NC) was an American visionary artist best known for her intricate, spiritually charged drawings and paintings. Largely self-taught, Evans created highly detailed works filled with faces, eyes, botanical forms, animals, and symmetrical patterns, which she described as emerging from dreams, visions, and divine inspiration. Her art reflects a deeply personal cosmology shaped by spirituality, African American folk traditions, and a lifelong practice of introspection. Evans worked for decades as a gatekeeper at Airlie Gardens in Wilmington, where she produced much of her art and gained recognition for a body of work now considered foundational to American visionary and self-taught art.

Moffat Takadiwa (1983- ) is a Zimbabwean sculptor. Takadiwa uses found objects such as computer parts, bottle caps, and toothbrushes to create large, tapestry-like works. His works center on his Kerokero heritage. He also comments on consumerism, inequality, post-colonialism, and the environment through his material usage.   Takadiwa received a BA Honors from Harare Polytechnic College, Zimbabwe in 2008.

Monetta Sleet Jr. (1926-1996) was an American photographer. He worked as a staff photographer for Ebony magazine. In 1969, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for his photograph of Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow, at her husband's funeral. Due to that photo, he became the first Black man, first Black person in journalism, and first and still the only person working for a Black publication to win the Pulitzer Prize.  Sleet Jr. received his BA from Kentucky State Collegea in 1947. He received his master's degree in journalism from New York University in 1950. 

Morel Doucet (1991- ) is a Haitian-American multidisciplinary artist and arts educator. He works with ceramics, illustrations, and prints to discuss the impact of climate gentrification, migration, and displacement affecting Black communities in the African diaspora. His work speaks to the urgency of climate change.  Doucet received his BFA in CeramicMaryland Institute College of Art in 2013. 

Moridja Kitenge Banza (1980- ) is a Congolese artist working across painting, photography, film, drawing, collage, installation, and performance. He blurs the lines between fiction and reality exploring history and memory. He reappropriates codes of religious, cultural, political, social, and economic representations. Banza's diverse practice brings forth a Congolese perspective that speaks to global influence.  Banza received degrees from the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa, the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nantes Métropole, and the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences at the Université de La Rochelle.

Moses Salihou (1981- ) is Cameroonian painter. He explores the ideas of belonging and existence by creating work that blends elements of portraiture and abstraction. Central to Salihou’s work is his belief that human beings are composites of various identities, experiences, beliefs, and emotions. Salihou’s gestural application leaves the defining features on the faces of his portraits only loosely representational. 

Murielle Kabile is a photographer known for her expertise in styling Afro-textured hair. She works to ensure the hair is accepted and that the beauty comes through. 

Myrlande Constant (born 1968, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti) is a Haitian artist whose textile-based practice explores Vodou spirituality, ritual, mythology, and the visual power of Haitian cultural memory. Working across hand-beaded and sequin-embellished textiles, Constant examines sacred iconography, ceremonial tradition, and contemporary Haitian life through monumental drapo Vodou that transform a devotional form into complex narrative tableaux.  Constant is known for expanding the scale and formal ambition of the drapo Vodou tradition, a medium historically associated with ceremonial flags used in Vodou practice. Her work often engages spirituality, symbolism, and communal memory, using beads, sequins, embroidery, and densely worked textile surfaces to consider radiance, protection, power, and the relationship between the sacred and the contemporary. She has described her process as a kind of painting with beads, and institutions frequently note the way her work bridges ritual practice and contemporary art.  Her work has been exhibited at the Fowler Museum, the Venice Biennale, Fort Gansevoort, and other major museums and galleries, and it is held in collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the American Folk Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Myrlande Constant lives and works in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. 

Na Chainkua Reindorf (1991-) is a visual artist from Ghana. She works mainly with textile, using techniques such as weaving and threading to reference traditional West African textile. She aims to transform spaces, and is heavily informed by narratives regarding gender roles and self expression.

Nadia Huggins (born 1984, Port of Spain, Trinidad) is a leading contemporary visual artist whose photography and video practice explores the boundaries between land, sea, memory, and the evolving identities of Caribbean youth. Working primarily in the underwater environment, Huggins documents the body in relation to the ocean, capturing moments where vulnerability and transformation collide. Her work investigates themes of belonging, adolescence, ecology, and the inherited mythologies of the Caribbean, often blending documentary clarity with poetic abstraction. Huggins is co-founder of ARC Magazine and has exhibited internationally across the Caribbean, the Americas, and Europe, with her work included in major regional institutions and biennials. She currently lives and works in St. Vincent & the Grenadines.

Nahom Teklehaimanot (1991- ) is an Ethiopian artist who creates collages and paintings. He takes inspiration from the creativity of children's stories and lullabies. His work sits in the space between migration and lived experiences.  Teklehaimanot received a Diploma in ICT (Information Communication Technology) from the SMAP Institute of Training, Education, and Consultancy, Eritrea.

Nakeya Brown (1988- ) is an American photographer who creates work that references Black beauty culture. Some of her photographs critique the way hair products and services and the work they do to reinforce Eurocentric beauty standards.  Brown received her Bachelor of Art from Rutgers University and her Master of Fine Arts from George Washington University.

Nandipha Mntambo (1982- ) is a Swazi photographer, painter, and sculptor. Many of her sculptures incorporate cowhides as a nod to her cultural background. They also speak to her interest in the connections between the animal and human world. Mntambo is deeply interested in the human body and explores dichotomies like femininity/ masculinity, attraction/repulsion, life/death in her work.  Mntambo received a Master’s in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town in 2007.

Nari Ward (1963- ) is a Jamaican-American installation artist. His sculptural pieces uses found materials like strollers, bottles, and doors he finds his neighborhood. Ward then recontextualizes these objects into large works with metaphorical meaning around social and political issues around race and class. Viewers are invited to create their own meaning with prompting from the work.    Nari Ward received a BA from City University of New York, Hunter College in 1989, and an MFA from City University of New York, Brooklyn College in 1992.

Naudline Pierre (1989- ) is an American artist who create large fantastical paintings full of celestial beings. Jewel tones are her palette of choice. Pierre's swirling beings exist outside of time and space and center ecstasy, devotion, and tenderness. These sweeping scenes facilitate a space for viewers to contemplate rescue and healing.  Pierre received an MFA from the New York Academy of Art, New York, New York, and a BFA from Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan.

Nellie Mae Rowe (1900-1982) was a self-taught American  artist known for her vibrant and whimsical creations. Her work, often featuring lively depictions of animals, people, and fantastical scenes, has earned her a lasting legacy. She created works across various mediums including paper, collages, altered photographs, dolls, home installations, and sculptural environments. Rowe believed that art-making was a way to recover a girlhood lost to poverty and labor. 

Nelo Teixeira (1974- ) is a Congolese multidisciplinary artist working across painting, collage, assemblage, sculpture, and installation. He uses found materials such as metal cans, wooden crates, plastics, fabrics, and urban debris in his works. He combines visual and linguistic to evoke feelings of memory, precarity, and resilience. 

Nelson Makengo (born 1990, in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo) is a Congolese artist, filmmaker, director, and producer whose multidisciplinary practice explores contemporary Congolese life, urban experience, infrastructure, memory, and the social and political realities of Kinshasa. Working across film, photography, and moving-image-based installation, Makengo examines power, visibility, precarity, and everyday survival through documentary observation, atmospheric cinematography, and an approach that moves between contemporary art and cinema.  Makengo graduated from the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa in 2015 and later trained at La Fémis in Paris. He is also described as a self-taught photographer and filmmaker whose practice draws from visual archives, sound, and urban imagery to reconstruct fragmented histories of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and its capital. His work often engages social history, infrastructure, night, electricity, city life, and postcolonial experience, using documentary film, visual rhythm, and carefully composed moving images to consider how people inhabit conditions of uncertainty and transformation.  His work has been presented at Berlinale Talents, IDFA-related platforms, the Lubumbashi Biennale, and major international film festivals and contemporary art contexts. His short film Up at Night screened at more than one hundred festivals worldwide, and E’Ville won the Sharjah Art Foundation Prize at the Videobrasil Biennial. Nelson Makengo lives and works in Kinshasa. 

Nelson Stevens (1938-2022) was an American muralist, printmaker, painter, as well as a member of AfriCOBRA. He joined in 1969, a year after the collective was founded. His bright, vibrant pieces seek to inspire pride in Blackness. His work with AfriCOBRA sought to develop a Black aesthetic to uplift and inspire the Black community towards self-determination.  Stevens received a BFA from Ohio University in 1962 and in 1969 he earned a MFA in studio art and art history from Kent State University in 1969.

Neo Matloga (b. 1993) is a South African visual artist whose large-scale mixed-media works blend drawing, collage, and painting to explore domestic life, memory, and identity in post-apartheid South Africa. His monochromatic palette and layered imagery depict intimate scenes of family, community, and togetherness, reconfigured through his signature technique of cut-out photographic elements, charcoal and ink. 

Ngozi Ajah Schommers (1974- ) is a German-Nigerian artist working across drawing, installation, painting, photography, and performance art to explore women's experiences and histories from pre-colonial West Africa. She is also interested in Igbo hair heritage and the realities faced by African migrants in Europe. 

Ngozi Schommers (1974- ) is a Nigerian German multidisciplinary artist based in Bremen, Germany and Takoradi, Ghana. Her work focuses on subjects of identity, equality, memory, culture, migration and colonialism. Schommers uses the body and experiences of the female gender, archival materials and memories of her childhood in tackling these subjects.

Nicholas Hlobo (born 1975, in Cape Town, South Africa) has a multidisciplinary practice that explores masculinity, sexuality, Xhosa identity, ritual, and the tensions between tradition and contemporary life in post-apartheid South Africa. Working across sculpture, installation, drawing, performance, and works on paper, Hlobo examines intimacy, desire, cultural inheritance, and social transformation through materially dense forms made from rubber inner tubes, ribbon, leather, lace, and found objects.  Hlobo studied Fine Art at Technikon Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, earning his Bachelor of Technology in 2002. His work often engages ritual, language, abstraction, queer identity, and social history, using cutting, stitching, binding, and layered material assemblage to consider healing, conflict, embodiment, and the afterlives of colonialism and patriarchy. The visible seams and “baseball” stitching in his sculptures have become central to his visual language, signaling rupture, repair, and the unstable boundaries between categories such as masculine and feminine, sacred and bodily, personal and political.  His work has been exhibited at Tate Modern, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Venice Biennale, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, SCAD Museum of Art, Uppsala Konstmuseum, and Museum Beelden aan Zee. He has received the Tollman Award for Visual Art Standard Bank Young Artist Award, the VILLA Extraordinary Award for Sculpture, and he was a Rolex Visual Arts Protégé.  Nicholas Hlobo lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. 

Nick Cave (born February 4, 1959, Fulton, Missouri) is an American artist, educator, and designer whose multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, performance, installation, and fashion. He is best known for his iconic Soundsuits—elaborate, wearable sculptural forms made from found objects, textiles, beads, and other materials—that conceal the wearer’s identity while amplifying movement, sound, and presence. Cave began developing Soundsuits in the early 1990s in response to the beating of Rodney King, creating works that function as both armor and instrument. These suits transform the body into a site of protection, resistance, and celebration, obscuring markers of race, gender, and class while producing sound through motion. Activated through performance, they blur boundaries between sculpture, dance, and ritual. Across his broader practice, Cave addresses issues of race, violence, identity, and social justice, often using exuberant color, pattern, and material excess to confront difficult histories. His installations frequently incorporate immersive environments and community participation, creating spaces that balance critique with joy, spectacle, and collective experience. In addition to his studio work, Cave has had a significant impact as an educator, serving as a professor and former chair of the Fashion Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited widely at major institutions internationally and is held in leading museum collections. He lives and works in Chicago.

Nina Chanel Abney (1982- ) is an American visual artist. During her career, Abney's style continued to evolve. She incorporated more complex compositions and began experimenting with larger-scale works and mixed-media installations. Her pieces explore themes such as identity, social justice, and societal power dynamics. Much of her work comprises of bright, graphic elements composed with an angular composition. Abney attended Augustana College in where she received a BFA with a dual major in studio art and computer science in 2004. She also attended the Chicago Art Institute and the Parsons School of Design where she received an MFA in 2007. A

Nneka Jones (1997- ) is an American multidisciplinary artist interested in painting, drawing, sculpting, and embroidering. Her work responds to social and environmental issues. Her artwork advocates for the protection of women of color and is most known for realistic embroidered portraits. Jones’ ongoing “Target” series confronts the trafficking of girls and women in the Caribbean.  Jones received a BFA from the University of Tampa in 2020. 

Noah Davis (1983-2015) was an American painter. He sought to depict Black life outside of negative stereotypes. Inspirations for his work include everyday life, family histories, ancient Egyptian cosmologies, the racism of American media, art history, and architecture. Rich and varied color palettes are employed to create work that sits between the surreal and real. In 2012, Davis founded the Underground Museum alongside his wife, Karon Davis, as not only an exhibition and community programming space.  Davis studied painting at the Cooper Union School of Art from 2001 to 2004. 

Nona Faustine (1977-2025) was an American photographer. Early in her career, she focused on documentary photography. She eventually pivoted towards conceptual work focused on the Black female experience and American history.  Faustine received a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1997, and an MFA from the International Center of Photography at Bard College in 2013. 

Nontsikelelo Mutiti (1982- ) is a Zimbabwean visual artist and educator. She takes a conceptual view of publishing, archiving practices, and institution building. She approaches books as a time-based medium that physically engages the viewer. As her educator, she is interested in systems of communication and learning that pre-date colonial frameworks of the written word in Zimbabwe.  Mutiti holds a diploma in Multimedia from the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts (ZIVA) and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, with a concentration in Graphic Design. 

Norman Lewis (1909-1979) was an American painter and printmaker. He was a prominent member of the Harlem Renaissance movement in New York. Early in his career, he created figurative work in the social realist school. He felt later that social realism was unable to invoke the social changes he wanted so he shifted his style towards abstract expressionism. Despite, this stylistic shift he remained committed to social change. 

Nyancho NwaNri is a Gambian-Nigerian photographer. NwaNri's work focuses on the environment, social issues, languages, and history.

O Bastardo (b. 1997) is a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, engaging themes of power, violence, masculinity, colonial legacy, and social control. His work often employs raw, confrontational imagery and symbolic figures to examine how systems of domination—political, religious, and cultural—shape bodies and behavior. Drawing from Brazilian history, street culture, and contemporary global politics, O Bastardo creates works that oscillate between satire and brutality, exposing the psychological and structural forces underlying oppression. His practice is marked by an aggressive visual language that challenges viewers to confront discomfort, complicity, and resistance within contemporary society.

Odili Donald Odita (born 1966, Enugu, Nigeria) is a Nigerian-American painter known for his vibrant, geometric abstractions that engage color, architecture, and spatial perception as tools for exploring identity and history. Raised in Nigeria before relocating to the United States during the Biafran War, Odita’s work is shaped by experiences of migration, displacement, and cultural hybridity. Working across painting, mural installation, and site-specific environments, Odita creates dynamic compositions of angular forms and bold color fields that extend beyond the canvas into architectural space. His wall paintings often transform entire rooms, activating corners, edges, and surfaces to produce immersive environments that shift with the viewer’s movement. Through this expansion of painting into space, Odita examines how color can function both visually and conceptually—as a language for emotion, memory, and social experience. Odita’s practice also engages art historical traditions, particularly modernist abstraction and color theory, while reinterpreting these frameworks through a diasporic lens. By situating abstraction within narratives of migration, colonial history, and Black identity, he challenges assumptions about the neutrality of geometric form and color. His work proposes abstraction as a site of cultural meaning and lived experience rather than purely formal exploration. In addition to his studio practice, Odita is a writer and educator, contributing essays and critical texts on contemporary art and culture. He has exhibited widely at major institutions and biennials, and his work is held in significant museum collections. He lives and works in Philadelphia.

Olyseye works across sculpture and photography. He is deeply interested in the Black experience. Oluseye coined the term "diasporic debris", to describe the artifacts, discarded materials and found objects he collects during his travels. He believes that Blackness is something unfixed and ever-changing and so much must his practice, blending the contemporary and historical.  Oluseye received a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and a Masters of Science in Entrepreneurship from Bayes Business School, University of London, UK. 

Omar Victor Diop (1980-) is a Senegalese photographer. Diop is both a fashion and fine arts photographer. At one point in time, he produced seventy percent of Dakar's commercial advertising. His fine art photographs meld photography with other art forms, including textile design, fashion design, and creative writing. Serving as subject, his portraits explore historical events or model him after African leaders. Additionally, environmentally is explore through his work.  graduated from the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris in France. 

Osaji Chinedu George is a Nigerian multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the fragility of memory, truth, and identity through surreal, dreamlike visual languages. Working across new media, drawing, installation, and conceptual frameworks, George examines mythology, existential tension, and the relationship between the individual and the state. His work is informed by archival research and layered storytelling, creating immersive spaces that interrogate how memory is constructed, preserved, and destabilized. George invites contemplation on the ephemerality of being and the forms memory takes within personal and communal contexts. His work has been featured in exhibitions including SKETCH (Alliance Française de Lagos), Between Fragments (Yenwa Gallery), Africa Foto Fair (Côte d’Ivoire), At Once, Then Again (Rele Gallery), ATO Connects (Art Twenty One Gallery), Impart Art Fair (Lasmara), and Everything Good Will Come (Latitudes Online), and his project Gently Open The World was broadcast on Oroko Radio (Ghana) and Refuge Worldwide (Berlin). 

Oscar Murillo (born 1986, La Paila, Colombia) is a contemporary artist whose expansive, multidisciplinary practice examines labor, migration, globalization, and collective identity. Raised in Colombia before relocating to London at a young age, Murillo’s work is deeply informed by transnational movement and the social conditions of working-class communities. His paintings, installations, performances, and participatory projects frequently incorporate raw canvas, industrial debris, stitched fabric, dirt, and text, reflecting both material histories and lived experience. Murillo first gained international attention for his large-scale abstract canvases, which often evoke factory floors, protest banners, or architectural remnants. These works combine gestural abstraction with fragments of language and layered surfaces, emphasizing process, labor, and the politics of production. Over time, his practice has expanded to include immersive installations and socially engaged projects, most notably Frequencies, an ongoing global initiative that distributes canvases to schoolchildren worldwide, inviting collective mark-making as a record of shared experience across cultures. His work consistently blurs distinctions between abstraction and social documentation, studio production and collective authorship. Murillo’s installations often transform gallery spaces into sites of communal gathering or industrial tension, foregrounding questions of belonging, precarity, and economic systems. In 2019, he was one of four artists awarded the Turner Prize collectively, reflecting his commitment to collaboration and shared authorship. Murillo has exhibited widely at major international institutions and biennials, and his work is held in prominent museum collections. He lives and works between London and La Paila, Colombia.

Oumar Ka (born 1930, Kel, Senegal; died 2020, Touba, Senegal) was a Senegalese photographer whose work documented rural life, portraiture, and self-fashioning in postcolonial Senegal. Based in Touba and active across the Senegalese interior, Ka worked primarily in photography, creating carefully composed portraits that situated his subjects within domestic, agricultural, and village settings. His work is characterized by formal clarity, attention to environment, and an emphasis on how people represented themselves through pose, dress, and place.  Ka apprenticed under the Senegalese photographer Cheikh Kane before beginning his own career in 1959 as an itinerant photographer, traveling to villages in the Baol region and beyond. Unlike many better-known West African studio photographers of the period, Ka often photographed his clients in their lived surroundings, allowing landscape, architecture, and personal belongings to become part of the portrait. His many self-portraits further reflect this approach, presenting the self through environment, gesture, and objects.  In recent years, Ka’s work has gained major international recognition through exhibitions including Oumar Ka: Voltaic and Rural Portraits at Axis Gallery and presentations at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, where his photographs are held in the collection. His work has also entered major institutional collections and is now recognized as an important contribution to the history of African photography and portraiture.