Voices of the Diaspora: The Artisans Behind the Canvas

Rudy H. Cole is a mixed media artist who employs the use of multiple mediums including charcoal, pastels and paper collages. Believing the work should speak for itself, Cole creates these portraits to allow viewers to interpret it based on their own imaginations and point of views. 

Ruth G. Waddy was an influential African American printmaker, organizer, and cultural advocate whose work helped define Black arts activism in the mid-20th century. Best known for her bold linocuts depicting everyday Black life, social struggle, and community strength, Waddy used graphic clarity and powerful symbolism to center dignity, labor, and identity. After moving to Los Angeles in the 1940s, she became a major force in building Black artistic networks, founding Art West Associated—one of the first organizations supporting Black artists on the West Coast. Waddy was co-editor and artist for the groundbreaking anthology Black Artists on Art (1969–1971), which documented and uplifted Black creative voices during a key moment of political and cultural transformation. Her work is held in major museum collections and remains a vital reference point in African American printmaking and arts organizing.

Sable Elyse Smith (1986- ) is an American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator. Her work highlights the ways that our culture overlooks violence, particularly carceral violence. For example, the prison visiting room is a place of interest for Smith. The violence of the police state has private and public implications, harming on a micro and macro scale.  She also explores the limits of the written word and the difficulties in communicating trauma.  Smith holds a BA in studio art and film from Oglethorpe  [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oglethorpe_University]University and an MFA in Design & Technology from the Parsons New School for Design

Sadie Barnette (1984- ) is an American artist who works primarily with drawing, photography, and installation. Much of her work traces familial history and its mirror to largely American histories. This is evident in her project around her father's experience surviving the FBI due to his involvement in the Black Panther Party. For Barnette, history is something to be activated through research and the archives, illuminating oppressive legacies practiced in the United States.  Barnette received her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2006 and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 2012.

Sadie Barnette (born 1984, Oakland, CA) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work transforms personal and political archives into sparkling, rebellious landscapes of Black possibility. She is best known for her reimagining of her father’s 500-page FBI surveillance file—an archive of state violence turned into a site of resistance, tenderness, and radical imagination.  Barnette works across drawing, photography, installation, sculpture, and text, often incorporating elements such as glitter, hot pink, spray paint, family photographs, and everyday domestic materials. Her visual language merges West Coast aesthetics with Afrofuturist sensibilities, blending personal narrative with broader histories of Black radical movements, the Black Panther Party, and queer joy.  Her installations frequently construct intimate, hybrid spaces—bedrooms, living rooms, party scenes—where Black life, memory, and pleasure can thrive outside the gaze of the state. Barnette has exhibited at ICA Los Angeles, Oakland Museum of California, The Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA PS1, and countless national and international institutions. She lives and works between Oakland, CA and Los Angeles, CA.

Sahara Longe (1994-) is a British artist who creates art pieces that showcase everyday life. With the intention of showing ordinary interaction, Longe does so in a large scale way. More specifically, Longe's work stands out due to her portrayal of Black people in some of her pieces. She showcases them in traditional aspects that they were often excluded from. Her work has had her featured in Vogue, and exhibited all over the UK.  @saharalonge

Sam Gilliam (1933-2022) was an American Postwar artist celebrated for his techniques in Color Field painting. One of his most recognizable innovations was his Drape sculpture paintings. These were works that existed beyond the boundaries of a canvas. This gave each work its own unique life and body. His dynamic and experimental approach to color and form has solidified his place as a pivotal figure in the evolution of contemporary art.  Gilliam received both his bachelor's and master's in painting from the University of Louisville in 1955 and in 1961 respectively. 

Sammy Baloji (born 1978, in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo) is a Congolese artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores colonialism, extraction, memory, labor, and the entangled histories of industry, architecture, and power in Central Africa. Working across photography, video, installation, sculpture, and archival research, Baloji examines the social and material afterlives of Belgian colonial rule through juxtaposition, montage, and historically layered image-making rooted in the Katanga region.  Baloji studied computer and information sciences and communication at the University of Lubumbashi and later continued his training in photography and video in Strasbourg. His work often engages archives, industrial heritage, mineral extraction, museum collections, and architectural history, using photography, moving image, found documents, and sculptural installation to consider how colonial violence continues to shape contemporary landscapes, labor systems, and cultural memory. He is also a cofounder of the Rencontres Picha biennial in Lubumbashi, and since 2019 has pursued doctoral artistic research at Sint Lucas Antwerpen.  His work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Kunsthalle Basel, Goldsmiths CCA, the Biennale of Sydney, and major international museums and research institutions. He has received recognition including the BelgianArtPrize and the African Photography Prize. Sammy Baloji lives and works between Lubumbashi and Brussels. 

Samuel Fosso (1962- ) is a Cameroonian-born Nigerian photographer who works primarily in the Central African Republic. Fosso picked up photography as a young man, starting his studio at 13. Eventually, he turned the camera on himself and began the self-portraiture practice for which he is best known.  These early works highlight Fosso's interest in presentation and play. As his practice developed, he explored a growing interest in power and Black visual sovereignty and its manifestations via photography. 

Samuel Levi Jones (1978- ) is an artist based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Jone's work investigates systems of power and oppression through painting and assemblage. A material he uses as part of his part is law books. These allow him to engage directly with primary source material and documentary practices, as vestibules of political and social power.  Jones investigates themes of manipulation and the rejection of authority through his work.  Jones received a BA in communications studies from Taylor University and a BFA in photography from Herron School of Art and Design in 2009. He also received an MFA in Studio Art from Mills College in 2012.

Samuel Nnorom (b. 1990, Nigeria) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice traverses tapestry-like sculpture, textile reworking, and mixed media. Inspired by his early life sketching portraits in his father’s shoe shop and working with fabric scraps in his mother’s tailoring workshop, Nnorom identifies as a “custodian of material culture.” His signature forms—bubbled clusters of fabric-covered foam spheres—constitute what he terms the “fabric of society,” evoking social structure, memory, and community. 

Sandra Brewster (1973- ) is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist. Her early works focused on portraiture. Brewster's practice expanded to include drawings and metallic sculpture. Her practice explores identity and representation, particularly emphasizing Black identity within the Caribbean diaspora.  Brewster received her BFA in Painting and Drawing from York University in 1997. She received her Masters of Visual Studies - Studio from the University of Toronto in 2017. 

Sanford Biggers (1970- ) is an American visual artist based in Harlem, New York. Biggers' work incorporates found objects, vintage fabrics, and historical artifacts, adding layers of meaning and symbolism to his creations. Additionally, he works in print, film, and sculpture. He frequently repurposes these materials to challenge conventional narratives and provide new perspectives on complex issues. Always topical, he focuses on contemporary social, political, and racial discourse. His references can be as varied as Underground Railroad to police brutality.  Biggers received a BA from Morehouse College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1998. 

Sanlé Sory (born 1943, Nianiagara, Burkina Faso) is a Burkinabè photographer based in Bobo-Dioulasso. Working primarily in photography, Sory’s practice documents youth culture, nightlife, portraiture, and everyday life in post-independence Burkina Faso. His work is characterized by vibrant studio portraiture and dynamic images of social life that capture style, freedom, and self-fashioning in the 1960s and 1970s. After learning photography through apprenticeship, including how to use a twin-lens Rolleiflex camera and process prints, Sory opened his studio, Volta Photo, in 1960, the same year Upper Volta began its transition to independence.  Through Volta Photo and his photographs of clubs, concerts, and bals poussières (“dust balls”), Sory created a vivid visual record of a generation shaping new forms of identity and modernity. His portraits foreground music, fashion, and performance while also preserving an important social history of the period. In recent years, his work has received major international recognition through solo exhibitions including Volta Photo at Yossi Milo Gallery, New York (2018), Volta Photo: Starring Sanlé Sory and the People of Bobo-Dioulasso in the Small but Musically Mighty Country of Burkina Faso at the Art Institute of Chicago (2018), Sanlé Sory: Volta Photo at Weinstein Hammons Gallery, Minneapolis (2019), and Sanlé Sory: Volta Photo at M+B Gallery, Los Angeles (2020).  His photographs are held in significant collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the RISD Museum, and the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery. Sory continues to live and work in Bobo-Dioulasso.

Santu Mofokeng (born October 19, 1956, in Johannesburg, South Africa – died January 26, 2020) was a South African photographer whose documentary and conceptual practice explored Black social life, spirituality, memory, land, and the psychic afterlives of apartheid. Working primarily across black-and-white photography, photo essay, archival intervention, and installation, Mofokeng examined everyday experience, faith, displacement, and historical violence through intimate observation, poetic sequencing, and a sustained engagement with the photographic image as both document and metaphor. Mofokeng was largely self-taught, though he later studied at the International Center of Photography in New York through the Ernest Cole Scholarship, and he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2016. He began as a street photographer in Soweto, worked in newspaper darkrooms, joined the Afrapix collective in 1985, and later became a photographer and researcher at the Institute for Advanced Social Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. His work often engages archive, ritual, landscape, and social history, using photographic essays, seriality, altered printing processes, and careful textual framing to consider Black interiority, sacred space, land dispossession, and the instability of historical memory.  His work has been exhibited at Jeu de Paume, Documenta 11, the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, the International Center of Photography, Museo Reina Sofía, and the Walther Collection. He received the Prince Claus Award, the inaugural International Photography Prize from Fondazione Fotografia Modena, the Ernest Cole Scholarship, and the Mother Jones Award for Africa. Santu Mofokeng lived and worked in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Sasha Huber (1975- ) is a visual artist of Swiss-Haitian heritage based in Helsinki, Finland. One of the significant influences on her artistic practice has been her collaboration with the Swiss-Haitian historian and activist Jean Casimir, who has researched the history of Josephine Bonaparte and her connection to Haiti. This collaboration led to the "Demounting Louis Agassiz" project, which explores the legacy of the Swiss naturalist, glaciologist and Louis Agassiz, a Harvard University Professor, known as a racist and proponent of scientific racism that advanced the false theory of hierarchy of intelligence existed among different racial groups, which emboldened the resolve of many pro-slavery white Americans to maintain slavery. Though photography, film, performance work Huber explores the lasting effects of colonialism on society. Colonialism's effect on the environment is of particular interest to her.  She has her MA in visual culture from Aalto University in Helsinki and is currently pursuing a practice-based PhD in artistic research at Zurich University of the Arts

Dominican-American artist Scherezade García creates immersive worlds where personal narrative intersects with collective memory. Working across installation, painting, printmaking, and sculpture, García weaves together devotional iconography, electric color palettes, and carefully chosen found materials—vintage suitcases that carry stories of departure, inner tubes that float between survival and play—to construct visual poems about displacement and belonging.

Sedrick Ervin Huckaby (1975) is an American artist known for his use of thick, impasto paint to create murals that evoke traditional quilts and his production of large portraits that represent his personal history through images of family members and neighbors.

Sekai Machache (1989- ) is a Zimbabwean-Scottish photographer and performer. She also creates works on paper. Machache is interested in imagination and dreams. Her work teases out the role of the artist in developing liminal experiences for healing.  She received a degree from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee, Scotland, in 2012. 

Selma Burke (1900-1995) is an American sculptor. She discovered her love of the medium as a young child, feeling clay from riverbeds flow through her fingers. In the 1920s she moved to New York city from North Carolina where she became part of the Harlem Renaissance. She traveled to Europe twice, once in 1933 on a Rosenwald Fellowship and again in 1936. While in Paris, she met Henri Matisse who expressed enthusiasm for her work. Burke is best known for a bust portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, completed in 1944.  She took art classes at Sarah Lawerence College in New York Burke completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at Columbia University in 1941. 

Senga Nengudi (born September 18, 1943, Chicago, Illinois) is a pioneering American interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the body, movement, ritual, and the elasticity of form. Emerging in the 1970s within the Black avant-garde communities of Los Angeles and New York, Nengudi became known for her groundbreaking use of unconventional materials—particularly pantyhose, sand, and found objects—to create sculptures that respond to gravity, tension, and the physicality of lived experience. Her iconic R.S.V.P. series (1970s–ongoing) consists of nylon pantyhose stretched and weighted with sand, forming biomorphic, sagging structures that evoke the human body—especially the maternal body—and its vulnerability, resilience, and transformation. These works blur distinctions between sculpture and performance, as Nengudi frequently activated them through movement and collaboration with dancers. Throughout her career, she has emphasized process, improvisation, and ritual, drawing influence from African diasporic traditions, Japanese Gutai performance, and her own experiences of pregnancy and motherhood. Associated with the Studio Z collective in Los Angeles, Nengudi collaborated closely with artists such as David Hammons and Maren Hassinger, helping shape a generation of experimental Black conceptual practices. Her work challenges rigid definitions of minimalism and post-minimalism by introducing softness, Black embodiment, and spiritual resonance into sculptural discourse. In recent decades, Nengudi has received renewed international recognition, with major museum retrospectives and exhibitions highlighting her lasting influence on contemporary art. Her work is held in leading institutional collections worldwide, and she continues to be regarded as a critical figure in feminist, performance-based, and Black avant-garde art histories.

Serge Alain Nitegeka (born 1983, Bujumbura, Burundi) is a contemporary artist whose sculptural and installation-based practice explores migration, memory, architecture, and the spatial politics of displacement. Now based in Johannesburg, South Africa, Nitegeka is known for his use of industrial materials—particularly black-painted steel—that reference scaffolding, fences, gates, and architectural fragments. His works evoke both protection and restriction, reflecting lived experiences of exile and the psychological residue of movement across borders. Through abstraction and modular construction, Nitegeka examines how space is shaped by power, history, and survival, transforming minimal forms into charged metaphors for belonging, instability, and resilience.

Seydou Keïta (1921–2001), born in Bamako, Mali) was a Malian photographer whose portrait practice explored modernity, self-fashioning, identity, and social life in mid-20th-century Bamako. Working primarily in black-and-white studio portraiture, Keïta examined personal style, dignity, and representation through carefully staged compositions, patterned backdrops, and close attention to pose, dress, and gesture. Keïta was self-taught and began making photographs after receiving a Kodak Brownie camera in the 1930s. He opened his studio in Bamako in 1948 and later served as an official government photographer after Mali’s independence. His work often engages portraiture, social history, memory, and the photographic archive, using formal precision, natural light, and collaborative studio methods to consider aspiration, status, and the visual culture of a rapidly changing postcolonial society. His work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, and in major international exhibitions devoted to African photography. Keïta is widely recognized as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century, and his portraits remain foundational to the global history of photography. He lived and worked in Bamako, Mali.

Seyni Awa Camara (b. c. 1945, Bignona region, Casamance, Senegal) is a Senegalese sculptor internationally recognized for her powerful, multi-figured terracotta works rooted in ancestral knowledge, spirituality, and personal mythology. Working primarily with clay she gathers herself, Camara hand-builds densely populated sculptures featuring women, children, hybrid beings, and spiritual guardians. Her practice is deeply connected to Casamance cosmology, ritual, and oral storytelling traditions, and she is regarded as one of the most significant contemporary artists of West Africa. Her work has appeared in major global exhibitions, including the Dakar Biennale, the Venice Biennale, and international museum shows highlighting African contemporary art.

Shanequa Gay (1978- ) is an American multidisciplinary artist working across painting, installation, and photography. Gay is interested in counter-narratives, mythology, and an expansion of Black imagery. At the center of her work sits multiple universes that expand narratives around Black women.  Gay received her BA in Painting from Savannah College of Art and Design, AA in Graphic Design and Fashion Marketing from the Art Institute of Atlanta, and an MFA from Georgia State University.

Shani Crowe is an American photographer. Her work focuses on Black hair, its adornment and beauty rituals, and how they can foster connection. She is most known for creating intricate corn-rowed hairstyles, and then capturing them as large photographic portraits. Crowe received her BFA in film production from Howard University’s John H. Johnson School of Communications in 2011.

Shannon Bono (1995- ) is a British multidisciplinary artist, curator, and writer. She often uses oils, acrylics, and spray paints in her work. Bono is interested in centering Black womanhood and asserting it as a source of knowledge. Common reference points include African spirituality, Christian iconography, and Renaissance art. Her various mediums mix meld  Bono received her MA in Art & Science from Central Saint Martins University, her Associate Fellowship in higher education from the University of the Arts London and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art.

Sharon Norwood (1991-) is a Jamaican artist whose pieces deals with identity, race, gender, beauty and class, using the line as a way to explore complex relationships. Aiming to create work that disrupts the white gaze, Norwood works to develop her own understand in regards to the political and racial history of black people.

Shinique Smith (1971- ) is an American artist known for expansive practice including fabric sculptures and abstract paintings incorporating calligraphy and collage. Pulling from personal histories, her work is a documentation of "things".  Smith received a BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art, She earned a MA in education from Tufts University in 2000 and a MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2003.

Sidney Blu is a Nigerian-born contemporary artist whose work spans painting (often large-scale canvases) and sculptural forms. His art is deeply personal and autobiographical, frequently addressing themes of identity, mental health, and personal struggle. Blu’s creative practice is rooted in storytelling and self-reflection, often using his own experiences as mnemonic material for his visual narratives. 

Simone Leigh (born 1967, Chicago, IL) is an internationally acclaimed sculptor and multimedia artist whose work centers Black women’s histories, labor, beauty, and interior worlds. Rooted in Black feminist thought, her practice engages ceramic traditions, African and diasporic aesthetics, architectural forms, and ethnographic histories to interrogate how Black women have been represented — and misrepresented — in art, anthropology, and public memory. Leigh creates monumental bronzes, ceramic forms, installations, and videos that honor Black womanhood as a site of knowledge, resilience, and power. Her sculptures often merge the human figure with domestic, ritual, or architectural forms such as dwellings, water vessels, and ornamental structures.  In 2022, Leigh became the first Black woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, earning the Golden Lion for Best Participant for her presentation in The Milk of Dreams. Her solo exhibitions have been presented at the ICA Boston, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and numerous international institutions. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Simphiwe Mbunyuza (1989- ) is a South African ceramicist and sculptor. His sculptures draw heavily from his Xhosa heritage. He uses the coiling technique used for generations by the Xhosa people. Mbunyuza uses all of the sculptures’ surface to recreate cultural scenes, mimic landscapes, and add appendages that represent animal, human, or decorative flourishes.  Mbunyuza received his Masters of Fine Art from The University of Oklahoma and a Fine Art degree from Walter Sisulu University in South Africa.

Sir John Akomfrah (born May 4, 1957, in Accra, Ghana) is a Ghanaian-born British artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores memory, migration, postcolonialism, race, temporality, and the environmental and political conditions shaping global modernity. Working across film, video installation, photography, writing, and curatorial practice, Akomfrah examines diasporic experience, historical violence, and collective remembrance through archival montage, multichannel moving-image environments, poetic narration, and layered sound.  Akomfrah studied sociology at the University of Portsmouth and was a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective in London in 1982. His work often engages archives, social history, Black British identity, colonial aftermaths, and ecological crisis, using essay film, documentary strategies, montage, and immersive installation to consider how histories of displacement, resistance, and belonging are carried across image, landscape, and voice. His practice is especially noted for bringing together archival fragments and newly shot footage to create expansive meditations on migration, memory, and loss.  His work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Lisson Gallery, Tate, and other major international institutions and exhibitions. He won the Artes Mundi Prize in 2017, was elected a Royal Academician in 2019, and was knighted in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to the arts. Sir John Akomfrah lives and works in London.

Sokari Douglas Camp (1958-) is a Nigerian artist who works primarily with steel. Her sculptures are a contemporary and unique representation of the human experience. Camp aims to address socio-political issues in her art, as well as takes inspiration from her individual heritage.  

Soly Cissé (1969-) is a Senegalese painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. Interested in duality he explores the tension between modernity and tradition, man and nature, and the spiritual and the secular. His painting practice is multi-modal, using brush, hand, and knife. His work is known for its thick brushstrokes and fantastical landscapes with animals, humans, and creatures abound. Growing up in Dakar during a time of transition and political unrest, art became a vehicle for social change. Cissé graduated from the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Dakar in 1996.

Sonia Boyce, OBE RA (1962- ) is a British-Caribbean visual artist from London, England. She works across painting, film, photography, print, sound and installation. Boyce's work invites the viewers to become active participants in art. She is interested in art as a social practice and the resulting dialogue. Over her career, she has collaborated with many artists, most notably during the British Black Art Movement in the 1980s.  Boyce is a Professor of Black Art and Design at the University of the Arts London. Boyce completed a Foundation Course in Art & Design at East Ham College of Art and Technology in 1980. She received a BA degree in Fine Art at Stourbridge College in 1983. 

Sonia Gomes (b. 1948, Caetanópolis, Minas Gerais, Brazil) is a Brazilian sculptor and assemblage artist renowned for transforming found textiles, fabrics, cords, driftwood, and everyday objects into dynamic, large-scale sculptures. Her work combines abstraction with tactile, organic forms and draws heavily on Afro-Brazilian traditions, memory, and cultural heritage. Through stitching, tying, and suspending materials, Gomes explores themes of resilience, transformation, and the histories embedded in discarded or overlooked objects. Her sculptures have been featured in major international exhibitions and biennials, and she is recognized as one of the leading contemporary artists engaging with materiality and Afro-Brazilian identity today.

Sonia Lynn Sadler, artist and designer, was born at Fort Riley, an army base in Kansas. Being an army brat meant traveling to different countries and living in five different states. She currently manages her time painting in Bowie,Maryland and West New York, New Jersey. Sonia Lynn attended the Maryland Institute College of Art, studying fine art and illustration. She transferred to Parsons School of Design where she received a Bachelor of Fine Art in Fashion Design. The Hallmark Golden Key Award was presented to Sonia Lynn for her art work by the Hecht Co. in Washington D. C. Sonia Lynn has had a career in fashion, working for Anne Klein, Jones New York and Liz Claiborne. Her accessories have been featured in the New York Times and Women's Wear Daily. On her own she has begun work under her own name Sonia Lynn Sadler Arts, which encompasses fine art work, children's book illustration and a line of greeting cards featuring her art work. Sonia's art work has been featured in the Washington Post, Valentine New York, Washington Woman, The Daily News, Washington Woman, Essence and the Gleaner. On her own she has begun work under her own name Sonia Lynn Sadler Arts which encompasses various mediums of artwork and her own line of greeting cards. Sonia also illustrates and writes children’s books.

Sonya Clark (1967-) is an artist known for her mixed media work. Born to parents from Trinidad and Jamaica, her Afro-Caribbean heritage has influenced her work. Clark's artistic interest started by watching her maternal grandparents' sewing and woodworking craftsmanship. The Spelman Museum exhibited her work in Material Girls in 2011 and Brides of Anansi in 2014. Her work is exhibited throughout the US and Europe.

Sophia Lacroix (1969- ) is a Haitian painter. Lacroix creates oil paintings depicting everyday life in Haiti. Her vibrant, lush scenes show a photo-realistic view of the island are intertwined with a loving nostalgia for home. From still lifes to portraits, Lacroix's paintings are portal into life in Haiti. 

Stacey Gillian Abe (born 1995, London, UK) is a British-Nigerian interdisciplinary artist whose work explores intimacy, desire, vulnerability, and the politics of looking through painting, drawing, performance, and video. Her practice centers the Black femme body as a site of tenderness and agency, often depicting close-cropped figures, fragmented forms, and moments of quiet eroticism. Abe’s work resists spectacle in favor of softness and interiority, using gesture and scale to examine how Black bodies are seen, held, and imagined. Through a pared-down visual language, she creates emotionally charged works that foreground care, presence, and self-possession.

Stefan Smith is an American painter and muralist. An accomplished muralist with a keen eye for detail and a deep appreciation for the human experience, Stefan’s work often combines elements of nature, such as foliage, plants, and humans. He seeks to demonstrate the transformative potential of creativity and leave a lasting impact, particularly in underserved communities.

Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist who produces experiences that spark dialog about race, gender, aging, and our collective future. Not the Only One (featured here) is an experiment creating a multigenerational memoir of a Black American family using deep learning artificial intelligence.

Stephanie Mei-Ling is an American photographer. Her work explores identity, culture, and community. She builds in mediation as a creative tool.  Mei-Ling received her degree in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley.

Stephen Towns (1980- ) creates work highlighting the strength of enslaved ancestors. His Harriet Tubman quilt series reimagines history and uplifts Harriet Tubman. We Shall Pass through the Combahee refers to the Combahee River Raid, celebrating Tubman as the only woman to lead a military operation during the Civil War. 

Steven Schmid is a Bahamian multidisciplinary artist. He explores masculinity and otherness through his abstract portraits. Schmid uses collages and paintings to narrate his personal stories and tell a nuanced story of a kind of masculinity.  Schmid received his BFA in Film, Video and Integrated Media from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2016 and a MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Media & Design from Ontario College of Art & Design University in 2022.

Stina Baudin is a Haitian-Canadian artist and scholar whose interdisciplinary textile practice explores Black culture, geography, mythology, storytelling, and the material construction of memory. Working across weaving, textiles, sound, text, archival materials, and oral histories, Baudin examines Black life and its contested histories through hand-built forms that move between data, myth, and embodied narrative.  Baudin studied at Concordia University in Montréal and the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, and she graduated from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2025, where she was also a Gilbert Foundation Fellow. Her work often engages archives, ancestry, Black time, migration, Vodou symbolism, and architectural composition, using woven structures, mixed media, and research-based processes to consider how fragmented histories can be reassembled into forms of cultural continuity, resistance, and remembrance.  Her work has been exhibited through the Toronto Biennial of Art, PHI, Centre Clark, grunt gallery, and other contemporary art platforms in Canada and beyond. She lives and works between Montréal and the United States, and recent sources also place her between Montréal and Detroit.

Sungi Mlengeya (b. 1991, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania) is a self-taught painter who works primarily in acrylic on canvas. Her works are marked by minimalism and strong use of negative space. She often depicts dark figures—mostly Black women—in black or brown tones against white backgrounds. These portraits evoke strength, calm, presence and pay tribute to the women in her life, exploring balance between stillness and movement. 

Suzanne Jackson (b. 1944, St. Louis, Missouri) is an American painter, poet, and educator whose practice spans more than five decades. Emerging in Los Angeles in the 1960s, she founded Gallery 32, an influential artist-run space that supported Black artists during the Black Arts Movement. Jackson’s work has evolved from figurative and symbolic compositions to materially innovative abstractions composed of poured acrylic “skins” that detach from traditional canvas supports. Her atmospheric, sculptural paintings explore gesture, color, ecology, and spirituality while expanding the boundaries between painting and installation.

Sybil Coovi Handemagnon (1988- ) is a French multidisciplinary artist. With a starting point of Western photography archives, she interrogates the medium as a tool of truthful documentation. Through sculpture, video, and installation, Coovi Handemagnon works with the imprisoned “specters”, listening to them and creating connections and inability to categorize them. She is interested in the archival understanding and how meaning is continuously reinscribed.