Voices of the Diaspora: The Artisans Behind the Canvas

Lou Stovall (born January 1, 1937, Athens, Georgia – died September 20, 2023, Washington, D.C.) was an American printmaker, painter, and master screenprinter whose work and leadership profoundly shaped Black print culture in the United States. He was the founder of Workshop, Inc. (est. 1968) in Washington, D.C., one of the most influential print studios supporting African American artists, where he collaborated with generations of artists to produce landmark screenprints. Stovall’s own artistic practice drew from African American history, African and Asian aesthetics, spirituality, music, and community memory, emphasizing rhythm, balance, and graphic clarity. His legacy endures through both his artwork and his pivotal role as a cultural builder and facilitator of artistic production.

Luana Vitra (1995- ) is a Brazilian artist working across sculpture, performance, and installation. Her work is closely tied to her home region, Minas Gerais, Brazil. The starting point for much of her work is iron ore and copper, mineral resources her home is known for. Her installations are symmetrical, a reference to Afro-Brazilian religions, but nonspecific sacred geometries.  Vitra received her BFA in sculpture from Guignard School of Arts in 2018. 

Lubaina Himid CBE RA (1954- ) is a British artist who works across painting, printmaking, and installation. Her work focuses on reclaiming cultural histories and memories. She was also a curator focused on creating space and acclaim for Black artists in the United Kingdom. She paints on various surfaces including wood. This allows the viewer to interact with her work and invites them to the performance in addition to addressing gaps in European art history. Himid was one of the first artists to be involved in the British Black Artist Movement of the 1980s.  Himid received her BA in Theatre Design from the Wimbledon  [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wimbledon_College_of_Art]College of Art, where she studied Theatre Design in 1976. She received her MA in Cultural History from the Royal College of Art in London in 1984.

Luce Turnier (1924-1994) was a Haitian painter, printmaker, and collage artist. Turnier's charcoal and pastels offered an alternative, sensitive depiction of Black women that contrasted with the sexualized and Voodoo themes that were popular at the time. She successfully integrated a Haitian perspective with modernist styles. Many of her works feature women or landscapes. 

Lucia Hierro (1987- ) is a Dominican-American multimedia artist working across sculpture, digital media, and installation.  Her work is a critique of capitalism with "bodega aesthetics". Art movements like Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and European still-life painting influence her work. Hierro's work  Hierro received a BFA from SUNY Purchase in 2010 and an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2013. 

Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara (1987- ) is a Cuban performance artist and activist, known for his public performances that openly criticize the Cuban government and its policies. Since 2018 Alcántara has been arrested dozens of times for his performances in violation of Decree 349, a Cuban law requiring artists to obtain advance permission for public and private exhibitions and performances.⁠

Lulama Wolf (1993- ) is a South African painter. She brings the pre-colonial African experience to the forefront for her viewers. Wolf is influenced by smearing, scraping, and deep pigment techniques that were used in vernacular architecture to decorate African homes.

Lunga Ntila (1995-2022) was a fine art photographer from South Africa. Her photographs primarily take the form of portraits. Through the use of collage and digital manipulation, Ntila addresses concepts such as memory, fragmentation, and identity in her works. 

Lyle Ashton Harris (1965- ) is an American artist who works across photography, video, installation, and performance. Harris explores gender, sexuality, belonging, and cultural narratives. Queerness is a recurring theme in his work with Harris exploring both public and personal dimesons of sexuality. His portraiture and self-portraiture for example, explore drag and self-fashioning.  Harris received a BA from Wesleyan University with an in 1988. He received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1990.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977) is a British painter and writer of Ghanaian heritage, born in London in 1977. Raised by Ghanaian parents who emigrated to the U.K. as NHS nurses, she initially pursued art after a foundation course at Central Saint Martins, then earned her degree at Falmouth College of Art, followed by an MA from the Royal Academy Schools in 2003

Lynthia Edwards (born 1978, in Alexander City, Alabama) is an American multidisciplinary artist whose collage-based practice explores Black girlhood, memory, Pentecostal upbringing, and the emotional textures of life in the American South. Working across collage, quilting, painting, and mixed media, Edwards examines race, gender, isolation, beauty, and self-fashioning through vivid color, patterned surfaces, and figures that often function as reflections of her younger self.  Edwards studied at the Art Institute of Atlanta, Auburn University of Montgomery, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Her work often engages Southern Black life, family memory, faith, and the inner worlds of young Black girls, using collage, paint, quilting, and expressive figuration to consider both the tenderness and constraint of growing up within racialized and gendered expectations. She has also described her practice as rooted in everyday encounters, historical research, and the desire to “glorify black girl magic.”  Her work has been exhibited at Untitled Art Miami Beach, the Gadsden Museum of Art, the Tennessee Valley Museum of Art, the Kentuck Art Center, and Richard Beavers Gallery. She has received the Alabama State Council for the Arts Fellow Award, Purchase Awards from the Alabama Art Colony, and “Best of Show” in the Montgomery Art Guild and Regions Bank Exhibition. Edwards lives and works in Birmingham, Alabama

Maganga Mwagogo (1997- ) is a Kenyan photographer. He works primarily as a fashion photographer. 

Dame Magdalene Anyango Namakhiya Odundo DBE (b. 1950, Nairobi, Kenya) is a Kenyan-British studio potter renowned for her hand-built, coiled ceramic vessels that bridge tradition, form, and memory. Her work merges influences from African pottery traditions, ancient vessel forms (like Greek and Native American), and her own sensibility for the human body in shape and surface. Each vessel is crafted slowly, burnished to a luminous finish and often fired multiple times to achieve glowing terracotta or deep, reduction blacks. Her pieces are widely recognized as both ancient-feeling and modern.

Maïmouna Guerresi (1974- ) is an Italian-Senegalese artist working across photography, sculpture, textile, installation, and video. Her work focuses on human spirituality in relation to mysticism. Influenced by Sufi practices in Africa, her work is grounded in a shared humanity. 

Malaika Temba (born Feb. 22, 1996, in Washington, D.C.) is a Tanzanian-American artist whose textile-based practice explores labor, trade, Black diasporic lineage, gendered care, and the cultural histories embedded in fabric and image-making. Working across analog and digital weaving, tapestry, collage, and textile-based installation, Temba examines intimacy, exploitation, and resilience through layered imagery, symbolic forms, and visual references drawn from contemporary media and found images from Tanzania.  Temba studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and later completed an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work often engages globalization, auntie and femme labor, East African marketplaces, craft histories, and the politics of material softness, using weaving, collage, and painted tapestry to consider how care and capitalism become entangled across diasporic and transnational experience. Sources also note that she grew up across Saudi Arabia, Uganda, South Africa, Morocco, and the United States, a transnational background that shapes her attention to exchange, migration, and cultural hybridity.  Her work has been exhibited at Gaa Gallery, Mindy Solomon Gallery, and in YoungArts presentations, including solo exhibitions such as Ni Hivi Hivi Duniani, This Bridge Called Our Backs, and Sugarcane Is Sweetest at the Joint. She received a YoungArts award in Visual Arts in 2014 and the Jorge M. Pérez Award from YoungArts in 2021. Malaika Temba lives and works in New York.

Malick Sidibé (1935-2016) was a Malian photographer. He is known for his black and white photographs of youth culture in Bamako, Mali. His introduction to the photographic sciences was decorating the studio of French photographer, Gérard Guillat. Impressed by him, Guillat took Sidibé on as his apprentice. Starting his solo practice in 1957, with taking photos of nightlife, Sidibé opened his own studio in 1962. His photographs show Malian modernity, documenting times of transition and youthful fun. Following the opening of his own studio, he began taking photos of national, cultural, political, and artistic events.  Sidibé graduated from Maison des Artisans Soudanais with a degree in jewelry making in 1955. 

Manuel Mathieu (1986- ) is a Haitian multi-disciplinary artist working across painting, ceramics, and installation. His work investigates themes of historical violence, erasure, and cultural approaches to physicality, nature,e and spiritual legacy. He pulls from Western art movements as a framework to explore how individual identities are situated into larger social-political contexts.  Mathieu received his bachelor in arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal in 2010 and his MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2016. 

Manuel Mendive (born December 15, 1944, in Luyanó, Havana, Cuba) is a Cuban artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores Afro-Cuban spirituality, Yorùbá-Lucumí cosmology, ancestry, nature, slavery, and the interconnectedness of living beings. Working across painting, sculpture, performance, body painting, installation, and drawing, Mendive examines the continuing influence of African oral, religious, and philosophical traditions on Cuban culture.  Mendive graduated from the San Alejandro Academy in Havana in 1963, specializing in painting and sculpture. He also studied ethnology and folklore at the Academy of Sciences of Cuba and art history at the University of Havana. His work often engages Regla de Ocha, commonly known as Santería, as well as ritual, transformation, mythology, enslavement, ecology, and collective memory, using organic imagery, hybrid human-animal figures, painted bodies, ceremonial movement, and symbolically charged natural materials.  His work has been presented at the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Biennial, the Havana Biennial, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, and the California African American Museum. Mendive received Cuba’s National Plastic Arts Award in 2001, the Order of Félix Varela in 1994, and France’s distinction of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1994. He lives and works in San José de las Lajas, Cuba.

Manyaku Mashilo (1991-) is mixed-media South African artist whose work explores themes of ancestry, spirituality, belonging and fantasy. Inspired by archives, she tells fictional stories through her pieces that often offer ideas of a future. Through her work she highlights the richness of African culture and tradition. Her pieces have been showcased throughout South Africa with her work a part of collections in the US, UK, Nigeria and Korea. @manyaku_mash

Maren Hassinger [https://www.moma.org/artists/41280] (1947- ) is an American artist and educator whose career spans four decades. She uses sculpture, film, dance, performance, and public art to explore our relationship to nature, movement, transformation, and industrial materials. Her artistic process uses everyday materials like plastic bags, dirt, leaves, and newspaper.

Maria Lídia Magliani⁠ (1946-2012) was a Brazilian painter, engraver, and illustrator.⁠ Magliani⁠'s was focused on addressing conditions of humanity and transcended topics of blackness and femininity. Much of her work contains female subjects. Ultimately, her work pulls from the country's cultural and political situations.  ⁠Magliani⁠ was one of the first Black women to graduate in Arts at the Universidade Federal do the Rio Grande do Sul in 1966. That same year she held her first solo exhibition at Galeria Espaço in Porto Alegre, then a new gallery in Rio Grande do Sul. In 1967 she obtained a postgraduate specializing in painting. 

María Magdalena Campos-Pons (born August 22, 1959, in La Vega, Matanzas, Cuba)  is a Cuban-American multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, performance, painting, sculpture, drawing, film, video, watercolor, and immersive installation. Deeply autobiographical while simultaneously addressing expansive histories of the Black Atlantic, her work examines memory, migration, gender, spirituality, labor, family, and the ways colonialism and forced displacement shape individual and collective identity.  Campos-Pons grew up on a sugar plantation in a family with Nigerian, Chinese, and Hispanic ancestry. Her Nigerian ancestors were brought to Cuba through the transatlantic slave trade, while her Chinese ancestry connects her family history to histories of migration and indentured labor. These intertwined genealogies are foundational to her practice. Drawing on Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions, particularly Santería and its Yoruba roots, she uses ritual, procession, the body, ancestral symbolism, and natural elements to address histories that have often been suppressed or fragmented. Water and the sea recur throughout her work as sites of memory, movement, separation, spiritual connection, and diasporic identity.  Campos-Pons graduated from the National School of Art in Havana in 1980, studied painting at the Higher Institute of Art in Havana, and earned an MFA in Painting and Media Arts from Massachusetts College of Art in 1988. She taught at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana before moving from Cuba in the early 1990s and later taught for many years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Since 2017, she has served as the Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Her work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, Tate Modern, Venice Biennale, documenta, Sharjah Biennial, Gwangju Biennale, Havana Biennial, Dakar Biennale, and Johannesburg Biennale. In 2023, she received a MacArthur Fellowship, followed by an ARTnews Lifetime Achievement Award in 2024 and recognition as an Established Artist medalist in the 2026 Art Basel Awards. 

Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien (b. 1990, Paris, France) is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose work bridges the craft of her Guadeloupean and Ivorian heritage with contemporary installation, textile art, and sculptural practice. Raised in a trans-Atlantic context between Côte d’Ivoire, Guadeloupe and France, she draws on ancestral craft, materials of industry, and poetic narrative to compose layered “maps” of identity, memory, body and cosmos. 

Marielle Plaisir is a French-Carribbean multimedia artist who has been exploring the concepts of social domination  Beginning as a painter first, she currently considers herself an activist artist. For Plaisir power is not a natural fact, but a socially constructed one. Through her work, she deconstructs these conditions and imagines a world free of prejudice and imbalance. She sets out to create intense visual experiences for the audience.  Plaisir received a Master of Applied Arts from the University of Bordeaux III, France and a graduate degree in art and scenography from the Honors Advanced School of Fine Arts and Decorative Arts of Bordeaux, France. 

Marius Dansou (1984) is a Beninese sculptor making hairstyles from steel. Dansou incorporates the movements of braiders into his sculpture, creating new styles. He is inspired by West African hairstyles, street and hair salons, fashion trends, and even shapes from every objects for his work. 

Mark Bradford (1961- ) is an American painter known for his abstract painting and his multimedia pieces where he affixes paper to canvas. Bradford’s large works engage in mapping and interrogating social and political issues affecting marginalized communities. His work has been described as “social abstraction”, an understanding that the use of materials he uses precedes their artistic purpose. ⁠Many of the materials he uses are discarded from cities in Southern California.  Bradford received both his BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1995 and 1997 respectively. 

Mark Delmont (born 1990, in Miami Gardens, Florida) is a Haitian-Jamaican multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores Black Miami, labor, community, car culture, family dynamics, and the visual languages of working-class life. Working across textiles, sculpture, portraiture, assemblage, and mixed media, Delmont examines the lives of blue-collar workers, neighborhood figures, and underrepresented Black and Brown communities through large-scale “fiber sculptures” and materially layered forms that foreground presence, dignity, and local memory.  Delmont is a self-taught artist with more than a decade of experience in mechanical contracting, a background that informs both his material intelligence and his focus on labor and everyday infrastructure. His work often engages Black iconography, cinema, hip-hop, and the built environment, using chicken wire, steel, fiber, wood, upcycled materials, and textile construction to consider how place, masculinity, aspiration, and survival shape life in Miami neighborhoods such as Carol City. His portraits and sculptural forms are frequently rooted in local histories while also drawing from artists and writers such as Ernie Barnes, Jacob Lawrence, and Octavia Butler.  His work has been presented through Oolite Arts, MASS MoCA residency programming, Untitled Art Fair, Miami MoCAAD, and other contemporary art platforms in South Florida and beyond. He received a 2025 South Florida Cultural Consortium grant, a 2025 Miami Independent Artist grant, a 2024 Harpo Foundation grant, and a 2026 Back River Road Residency through the Harpo Foundation. Mark Delmont lives and works between Miami and Brooklyn.

Mark Fleuridor (born 1996, Miami, Florida) is a Haitian-American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores personal history, family, religion, memory, and the visual textures of Miami and the Caribbean diaspora. Working across painting, quilting, collage, patternmaking, photography, and performance, Fleuridor examines intimacy, ancestry, and storytelling through layered compositions that draw from family photographs, tropical landscapes, domestic space, and diasporic cultural memory.  Fleuridor received his BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2019. His work often engages Haitian background, familial religious experience, archival imagery, and the subtropical environment, using painting, quilting, collage, photography, and found materials to consider how memory and inherited narratives shape present-day identity. Recent descriptions of his work emphasize the way he reconstructs family, friendship, and home through layered visual language rooted in both ancestral lineage and the lived atmosphere of South Florida.  His work has been exhibited at YoungArts, Untitled Art Fair, Prizm Art Fair, Sperone Westwater, Johansson Projects, and the Art and Culture Center/Hollywood. He has completed residencies at Oolite Arts, Oxbow, Vermont Studio Center, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Art Omi, and the Textile Arts Center. Fleuridor received the Oolite Arts Ellies Award in 2020 and the Knight Champion Award in 2022. He lives and works in Miami, Florida. 

Mark Thomas Gibson (1980- ) is an American visual artist working in painting, print, ink, and watercolor. Through the medium of comics, he explores Black representation. He believes this can function as a tool for social justice. Gibson arrives at a satirical, dystopian America where every viewer can also be a potential character.  Thomas Gibson received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2002 and his MFA from Yale School of Art in 2013. 

Martine Syms (born 1988 in Los Angeles, California) is an American artist, filmmaker, writer, publisher, and director whose multidisciplinary practice spans film, video, installation, performance, photography, drawing, sculpture, sound, programming, theater, and publishing. Combining conceptual experimentation, humor, technical precision, and social commentary, Syms examines how identity is constructed and performed through media, language, gesture, technology, and popular culture.  Her work is particularly concerned with representations of Blackness, Black vernacular culture, race, gender, surveillance, digital communication, and the circulation of images. Drawing from television, cinema, social media, advertising, comedy, music, Black radical thought, and everyday interactions, Syms creates fragmented narratives that move between autobiography and fiction. Her films and installations frequently use repetition, nonlinear editing, multiple screens, text messages, avatars, artificial intelligence, and appropriated media to explore how people produce and manage versions of themselves before different audiences.  Syms earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2017. After completing her undergraduate studies, she cofounded Golden Age, a Chicago bookstore and project space devoted to independent publications. After returning to Los Angeles, she established Dominica Publishing, an artist-run press focused on Black art, writing, and visual culture. Her publishing practice remains closely connected to her work in cinema, installation, and institutional exhibition-making.  Syms’s work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, Lafayette Anticipations, Carré d’Art, Fridericianum, Secession, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Hammer Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Studio Museum in Harlem. She wrote and directed the feature film The African Desperate, which premiered during the 2022 New Directors/New Films program presented by MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Her honors include a 2025 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2022 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2021 Creative Capital Award, and a 2020 United States Artists Fellowship. Syms lives and works in Los Angeles, where she is developing another feature film and preparing a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles for 2027.

Martin Puryear (born May 23, 1941, in Washington, D.C.) is an American artist whose sculptural practice explores form, craft, history, identity, and material knowledge. Working across sculpture, drawing, and printmaking, Puryear examines abstraction, labor, allegory, and public memory through refined handmade construction, organic form, and a deep sensitivity to wood and other materials.  Puryear studied at the Catholic University of America, the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm, and Yale University, where he earned an MFA in sculpture in 1971. He also spent two years in Sierra Leone with the Peace Corps, an experience that shaped his understanding of vernacular building, craftsmanship, and the relationship between object-making and lived culture. His work often engages craft traditions, abstraction, architecture, and social history, using carved, bent, joined, and carefully finished materials to consider freedom, shelter, labor, democracy, and the symbolic weight of form.  His work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Venice Biennale, where he represented the United States in 2019 with Martin Puryear: Liberty. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Gold Medal in Sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Medal of Arts. Martin Puryear lives and works in Accord, New York. 

Mary Ann Carroll (1940-2019) was an American landscape painter. She was part of the group, "The Highwaymen" dubbed so because they sold their work out of the trunks of their cars along the eastern coastal roads In Florida. They also sold their door-to-door and to hotels from the mid-1950s through the 1980s. 

Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter (1981- ) is an advocate, visual artist, and educator from Philadelphia. Her work is highly multidisciplinary, employing the use of mediums including performance, film, music, and more. Baxter's works consider themes including gender, justice, identity, and the industrial prison complex. Pulling heavily from her own experiences, her works focuses on the challenges women of color face in the system.  She is a co-founder of the Dignity Act Now Collective. Consisting of activists and artists directly impacted by incarceration they advocate for legal reform. 

Mary Lovelace O’Neal (February 10, 1942 – May 10, 2026, Jackson, Mississippi) is an American painter, printmaker, mixed-media artist, and arts educator whose work bridges abstraction, figuration, and political memory. Active since the 1960s, she has developed a distinct visual language shaped by Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism, and Black cultural and political life, using painting and printmaking to explore race, gender, joy, mythology, history, and the sublime. Her work is at once personal and public-facing, often moving between gestural abstraction and references to social struggle, civil rights, and African American experience.  O’Neal earned her BFA from Howard University in 1964 and her MFA from Columbia University in 1969. While at Howard, she was involved in the civil rights movement, and that history of activism continues to inform the emotional and political force of her practice. Across more than six decades, she has experimented with scale, surface, and materials, creating paintings that can feel monumental, intimate, improvisational, and sharply reflective all at once.  She taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1978 to 2006 and later became Chair of the Department of Art Practice, helping shape generations of artists while sustaining her own studio practice. Her work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, including solo and featured presentations at SFMOMA, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Mnuchin Gallery, Marianne Boesky Gallery, and institutions and exhibitions connected to the Whitney Museum. She is recognized as a major figure in postwar and contemporary American art whose work has received renewed institutional attention in recent years.  She taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1978 to 2006 and later became Chair of the Department of Art Practice, helping shape generations of artists while sustaining her own studio practice. Her work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, including solo and featured presentations at SFMOMA, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Mnuchin Gallery, Marianne Boesky Gallery, and institutions and exhibitions connected to the Whitney Museum. She is recognized as a major figure in postwar and contemporary American art whose work has received renewed institutional attention in recent years. 

Mary Sibande (1982- ) is a South African visual artist whose work is highly multidisciplinary, employing mediums including sculpture, painting, photography, and more. Sibande's art is informed by themes including race, gender, and identity. A large aspect of her work is exploring the repercussions of apartheid and its effect on her and her family. She does this through her sculptural alter ego, Sophie.  Through Sophie, Sibande is able to rewrite her family's history, paying close attention to domestic service.  Sibande received a degree in Fine Arts at The University of Johannesburg in 2007. 

Masa Zodros is a digital photographer from La Guadeloupe in the Antilles. Zodros seeks to create a landscape where Black men and women exist free from trauma. Her photographs are personalities and kémites characters. She incorporates wax fabric and African masks. This connects her subjects to an African present allowing her to present where Black people are joyful and regal.  She received a BFA from Les Beaux-Arts de Marseille. 

Matthew Thomas (1943-) is an artist and professor who creates multimedia art. Taking inspiration from spirituality, religion, and meditation, Thomas is known for his use of symbolism and references to the five elements in his works.

Maud Sulter (b. September 19, 1960, Glasgow, Scotland – d. February 27, 2008, Dumfries, Scotland) was a Scottish-Ghanaian writer, photographer, fine artist, curator and feminist cultural historian whose practice centred on the visibility of Black women in art, culture and history. She worked across photography, photomontage, writing (poetry and plays), and curatorial projects, combining aesthetic intervention with activist scholarship.

Mavis Pusey (September 17, 1928 – April 20, 2019) was a Jamaican-American painter and printmaker known for her rigorous geometric abstractions that explored structure, rhythm, and spatial tension. Born in Retreat, Jamaica, Pusey moved to New York in the 1950s, where she became part of the vibrant postwar art scene. Her work developed in dialogue with modernist abstraction, yet remained deeply informed by her experiences navigating transnational identity and urban life. Pusey’s paintings often feature interlocking planes, grids, and architectural forms that evoke cityscapes, machinery, and the built environment. Through carefully calibrated color relationships and precise compositional structures, she created dynamic surfaces that balance movement with order. While her work engages the formal language of abstraction associated with artists such as Piet Mondrian and the Constructivists, Pusey reinterpreted these influences through a personal visual vocabulary grounded in rhythm and structure. Throughout her career, Pusey worked across painting and printmaking, producing etchings and other graphic works that extended her investigations of geometry and spatial relationships. Despite contributing significantly to the development of postwar abstraction, her work was historically underrecognized within dominant narratives of modernism. In recent years, however, renewed scholarly and institutional attention has highlighted her role as an important figure within both Caribbean and American art histories. Pusey exhibited widely during her lifetime, and her work is held in the collections of major museums. Today, she is increasingly recognized for her contributions to geometric abstraction and for expanding the presence of Caribbean-born artists within the broader history of modern art.

Maxwell Pearce is a mixed media artist and Harlem Globetrotter whose work interrogates how athletes—and Black athletes in particular—are perceived inside and outside sports. His practice transforms sports materials (like shoelaces, equipment) into textured works that acknowledge athletic achievement while also examining identity, social justice, and agency

Maya Freelon (b.1982) is an award-winning artist. The late poet Maya Angelou described Freelon's work as "visualizing the truth about the vulnerability and power of the human being." Both delicate and resilient, Freelon’s use of tissue paper poses questions surrounding preservation, “high” and “low” art, “what is strength?” and “How do we find strength and power in fragility?”

McArthur Binion (born November 25, 1946, Macon, Mississippi) is an American artist whose work bridges abstraction, personal history, and conceptual practice. Associated with the development of Minimalism and conceptual abstraction in the late twentieth century, Binion is best known for his distinctive “hand:work" paintings that layer minimalist formal structures over photocopied images of personal documents such as birth certificates, address books, and pages from his passport. Raised in rural Mississippi before relocating to Detroit as a teenager, Binion’s early experiences in the American South and the industrial Midwest continue to inform his practice. His paintings often consist of repeated hand-drawn marks—usually in grid-like compositions—made with oil stick, crayon, or ink on surfaces that incorporate these photocopied autobiographical materials. The resulting works operate simultaneously as abstractions and as records of lived experience, embedding personal narrative within formal systems associated with modernist painting. By merging autobiography with minimalist language, Binion repositions abstraction as a vehicle for identity, memory, and Black lived experience. His method emphasizes labor, repetition, and material presence, foregrounding the physical act of mark-making as both a conceptual and emotional gesture. The visible layering of text, photographs, and documents beneath his painted surfaces creates a tension between concealment and revelation, suggesting that personal histories remain embedded even when partially obscured. Binion’s work has been widely exhibited internationally and is held in major institutional collections. Over the past decade, he has gained renewed critical attention for his significant contributions to contemporary abstraction and his role in expanding the narrative possibilities of minimalist painting. He lives and works in Chicago.

Mehdi-Georges Lahlou (born 1983, Les Sables-d’Olonne, France) is a French-Moroccan visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores identity, gender, representation, memory, and the body. Working across performance, sculpture, photography, drawing, video, and installation, Lahlou examines cultural and religious codes, social attributes, and collective memory through surreal, transgressive, and symbolically layered forms.  Lahlou studied at the École régionale des beaux-arts de Nantes Métropole and later completed advanced study at St. Joost Academy in Breda, where he earned a PhD in Fine Arts in 2010. He also completed postgraduate study in art and business in Nantes in 2014. His work often engages the body, space, spirituality, colonial memory, and the archive, using performance, staged imagery, sculptural objects, and hybrid visual symbols to consider how identities are formed, hidden, and transformed across cultural contexts.  His work has been exhibited at Palais de Tokyo, the Centre Pompidou Málaga, the Arab World Institute, the Dakar Biennale, the Havana Biennial, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, Botanique Museum, and Galerie Transit. He was artist-in-residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie from 2019 to 2020 and served as associate artist at CDN Normandie–Rouen from 2017 to 2020. Mehdi-Georges Lahlou lives and works between Paris, Brussels, and Casablanca.

Meleko Mokgosi (b. 1981, Francistown, Botswana) is a painter and educator whose large-scale figurative works critically examine history, democracy, colonialism and national identity. His practice merges cinematic and historical painting tropes with text, research and layered visual narratives—inviting reflection on power, representation and subjectivity. His large-scale figurative paintings and text-based canvases draw on cinematic composition, the tradition of history painting, and post-colonial theory to explore themes of nationhood, democracy, subjection, and liberation. Mokgosi’s series such as Pax Afrikaner and Pax Kaffraria examine how national identity and xenophobia are manufactured in southern Africa; his ongoing Spaces of Subjection project considers the mechanisms by which power-relations construct subjecthood across Africa and the diaspora. 

Melvin Edwards (b. 1937, Houston, Texas, USA) is an influential American sculptor, printmaker, and educator whose work bridges abstraction, industrial materials, and social-history narratives. He began his artistic career as a painter, but in the early 1960s transitioned into welded-steel sculpture, forging chains, spikes, barbed-wire and found-metal elements into powerful assemblages that reference African-American experience, collective memory and global diaspora. 

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.