Voices of the Diaspora: The Artisans Behind the Canvas

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. 

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.

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. 

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.