Voices of the Diaspora: The Artisans Behind the Canvas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987-) Ghanaian author and artist transforms materials to explore themes such as commodities and primary goods, trade, migration, globalization, and economic exchanges. Often made in collaboration with others, his large-scale installations employ materials collected from urban environments, such as scraps of wood or jute bags that are sewn together and placed on architectural structures.⁠

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

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

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

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

Ivna Esajas is a Dutch artist whose drawing- and painting-based practice explores family history, personal memory, connection, silence, and the fragile relationships between bodies, time, and space. Working across large-scale drawings on canvas, painting, and installation-based presentation, Esajas examines intimacy, interdependence, and emotional resonance through fluid line, layered figuration, and an improvisational approach that moves between abstraction and representation.  Esajas graduated from the Utrecht School of the Arts in the 1990s and later completed the Blacker Blackness master’s program at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam in 2023. Her work often engages memory, family histories, Black life, and embodied connection, using charcoal, pencil, paint, and ink on canvas to consider what is carried across generations and what can be sensed between people, rather than only seen directly.  Her work has been exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museum de Fundatie, Metro54, Amsterdam Museum, CBK Zuidoost, and Kunstenlab. She received the ABN AMRO Art Award 2025 and the Mondriaan Fund Kunstenaar Start grant in 2024. Ivna Esajas lives and works in Amsterdam. 

Jack Whitten (1939-2018) was an American painter and sculptor.  Coming of age during the Civil Rights Era, he moved from Tuskegee, Alabama to New York City to focus on his growing interest in art. While in New York, he became involved with the Abstract Expressionists their influence is evident in his early work. Much of his work was inspired by his experiences with the Civil Rights Movement and his pursuit of "truth" and "soul". Moving away from the 1960s, his practice focused on experimental aspects of process and technique.  Whitten attended the Tuskegee Institute and the Southern University in 1959 and 1960 respectively. He graduated from Cooper Union in 1964 with his BFA. 

Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) was an American painter known for his works detailing contemporary Black life and historical figures and moments.  ‍ Jacob Lawrence's first narrative series, "The Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture," 1936–38, was inspired by Lawrence's desire to celebrate black cultural expression and pride. L'Ouverture was born a slave in 1743. He was part of the rebellion in Haiti from its beginnings and rose to become commander-in-chief of the revolutionary army.

Jamel Shabazz (b. 1960, Brooklyn, New York, USA) is an American photographer whose body of work over four decades documents Black youth culture, street style, urban life and community in New York City and beyond. His images of everyday people—youth in parks, subways, brownstone stoops—capture moments of dignity, style and resilience in neighbourhoods often overlooked. 

James Barnor  (born 6 June 1929) is a Ghanaian photographer who has been based in London since the 1990s. His career spans six decades, and although for much of that period his work was not widely known, it has latterly been discovered by new audiences. In his street and studio photography, Barnor represents societies in transition in the 1950s and 1960s: Ghana moving toward independence, and London becoming a multicultural metropolis.

James Van Der Zee (1886-1983) was an American photographer. He and Gaynella Greenlee opened their studio, Guarantee Photo Studio, in 1916 in Harlem. He is Van Der Zee began his photography as a young man, documenting life in Lenox, Massachusetts. Through his studio, he documented the emerging Black middle class during the 1920s and 1930s, a period that would later be known as the Harlem Renaissance. Most of his work was standard commercial studio, including weddings, funerals, family groups, teams, clubs, and those who simply wanted a record of themselves. He supplied the props that would be used in his studio. Some of his more famous clients include mong his Marcus Garvey and Countee Cullen.

Jammie Holmes (b. 1984, Thibodaux, Louisiana, USA) is a self-taught painter whose work explores Black life in the Deep South through intimate portraiture, ritual scenes, and symbolic storytelling. Raised in a place marked by the legacies of poverty, racism, and the Thibodaux Massacre, Holmes draws on childhood memory, community, and family to create vivid, emotionally charged canvases that balance realism and abstraction

Jasmine Ross is an Oakland-based lens-based and multimedia artist whose practice explores identity politics, intergenerational memory, fictive kinship, and Black social life. Working primarily through fine-art documentary photography, Ross uses medium- and large-format analog cameras to create images shaped by slowness, attention, and care. Her work is grounded in honoring community-builders and making visible the emotional and social worlds that sustain Black life.  Ross earned a B.A. in Ethics, Politics, and Economics and Art from Yale University. Her interdisciplinary background informs a practice that moves between documentary observation and conceptual framing, with particular attention to how everyday spaces hold histories of intimacy, labor, beauty, and belonging. Through portraiture and community-centered image making, she considers the social meanings embedded in local environments and the people who shape them.  Her debut institutional solo exhibition, Beauty Plus, opened at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco on March 18, 2026, as the first exhibition in MoAD’s 2026–2027 Emerging Artist Program. The exhibition centers the final days of a 31-year-old Black-owned beauty supply store in New Haven, Connecticut, documenting its closure while reflecting on Black beauty culture, communal care, small business ownership, and survival. Ross lives and works in the Bay Area and currently serves as Gallery Associate at SF Camerawork.

Ja'Tovia Gary (born 1984, Dallas, Texas) is an American interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker based between Dallas and New York. Working across film, video installation, performance, and collage, Gary’s practice explores Black feminist thought, archival memory, race, and spiritual survival through experimental moving image. Her work is characterized by layered montage, archival intervention, and poetic visual language that reconfigures historical narratives. Gary has received numerous recognitions and has exhibited at major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work is held in leading public collections.

Jayson Musson (1977- ) is an American artist working across various mediums such as drawing, textile, performance, painting, and music. ⁠Musson has an alter ego, Hennessy Youngman. Through Youngman he explores the hypocrisy of the art world through satire. He is known for his Coogi sweater painting series exploring the relationship "high" art and craft. His works on paper include vibrant colored figures engaging in seems of whimsical folly. Musson received a BFA in photography from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 2011, he completed an MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania.

Jazlyne Sabree (b. 1990, Willingboro, NJ) is a multidisciplinary artist whose vibrant practice explores Afrofuturism, Black femininity, and ancestral memory through painting, digital art, and mixed-media installation. Blending spiritual symbolism with bold color and geometric form, Sabree creates visual worlds that center liberation, joy, and the multidimensional experiences of the African diaspora. Her work imagines future possibilities informed by cultural heritage, using portraiture and cosmic landscapes to reframe Black identity beyond the constraints of the present. Sabree’s art has been exhibited nationally in galleries, public art initiatives, and cultural institutions, and her community-centered projects emphasize creativity as a tool for empowerment and collective healing. She is based in Washington, D.C.

José Antônio Cunha (1948- ) is a Brazilian visual artist, graphic designer, scenographer, and costume designer. Cunha is deeply interested in Afro-Indigenous cultures in Brazil and in Northeast Brazil.

J. D 'Okhai' Ojeikere (1930-2014) was a Nigerian photographer. Ojeikere photographed the hairstyles of Nigerian women every day in the street, at the office, at parties, systematically, from behind. Ojeikere preserved an important aspect of Nigerian cultural heritage through this project. 

Jean-Claude "Tiga" Garoute (December 9, 1935 – December 14, 2006) was a Haitian painter and sculptor. Born in Jérémie, Garoute co-founded a museum of ceramic art in Haiti named Poto-Mitan. An abstract painter, he participated in art festivals throughout the world. Tiga and Maud Guerdes Robard founded the Saint-Soleil post-naïve school of Haitian painting. The school was born when they offered farmers in Soisson-La-Montagne, a rural area near Port-au-Prince, drawing and painting materials. Out of the movement came such painters as Levoy Exil, Louisiane Saint Fleurant, St-Jean, and Dieuseul Paul to name a few. The movement drew the eye of French author André Malraux who dedicated a chapter to it in his book L'Intemporel.

Jean-Claude "Tiga" Garoute (1935-2006) was a Haitian painter and sculptor. His paintings are abstract, often featuring broad brushstrokes and muted colors. Garoute often used the "Solèy Brulé" method in his work, a mixture of ink and acid.  He co-founded the Saint-Solei school, a Haitian art school that focused on naïve painting. 

Jean-Michel Basquiat (born December 22, 1960, in Brooklyn, New York – died August 12, 1988) was a Puerto Rican/Haitian American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explored race, power, language, history, anatomy, music, and the psychic force of Black life in America. Working across painting, drawing, works on paper, assemblage, and graffiti-based interventions, Basquiat examined inequality, cultural memory, and self-invention through text, symbols, fractured figuration, and an improvisational visual language that fused street culture with art history.  Basquiat was largely self-directed as an artist and did not build his practice through a conventional art-school path. His work often engages poetry, jazz, anatomy, Afro-Caribbean identity, and historical critique, using crowns, skeletal forms, repeated words, crossed-out phrases, and layered painterly marks to consider authorship, violence, celebrity, and Black subjectivity. In the late 1970s he became known in downtown New York through the graffiti tag SAMO, and by age twenty-two he was one of the youngest artists to exhibit in the Whitney Biennial.  His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA, and The Broad, and it remains central to major museum collections and histories of late twentieth-century art. Basquiat is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of his generation. 

Jeffrey Meris (b. 1991, Haiti) is an artist who works across sculpture, installation, performance, and drawing to consider ecology, embodiment and various lived experiences while healing deeply personal and historical wounds.