Voices of the Diaspora: The Artisans Behind the Canvas

Tabitha Whitley (1987- ) is an American painter and printmaker. Whitley creates portraits celebrating Black life and joy. Many of her works feature nature - either flowers or vines.  Whitley received her MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art, New York, New York in 2011. She received her BFA in Painting from the  Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, New York in 2009.

Tadáskía (1993- ) is a Brazilian artist whose practice spans photography, works on paper, installation, and performance. A common thread in her work is the desire to bring marginalized voices to the center. Other themes in her work are Black freedom, expression, and personhood. Swirling colors on expansive fantastical planes routinely make an appearance.  She received a degree in visual arts from Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro in 2016 and a master's degree in Education from Universidad Federal de Río de Janeiro. 

Tadesse Mesfin (1953- ) is an Ethiopian painter. Mesfin is known for his scenes of women at the market or in other domestic settings. Using flat brushstrokes, he creates works that ask viewers to contemplate the interior lives of his many subjects.  Mesfin attended the Addis Ababa University School of Fine Arts and Design and the Repin Academy of Painting, Architecture & Sculpture. 

Taiye Idahor (1984- ) is a Nigerian artist working in collage, drawing, sculpture, and mixed media. She explores the historic and contemporary place of women in Nigerian society, with special attention to trade, beauty, the environment, and globalization. In recent years, hair has become an important aspect of her work.  Idahor received her Higher National Diploma (HND) in sculpture   Yaba College of Technology Lagos in 2007. 

Tanda Francis is an American artist who created monumental sculptures that aim to change the representation of people in the African diaspora. Much of her work includes large faces and heads. Francis is inspired by rituals and traditions of ancient cultures to help facilitate an understanding of contemporary cultures.  Francis studied graphic design at Drexel University.

Tariku Shiferaw (born 1983, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) is an Ethiopian-American artist whose painting-based practice explores abstraction, mark-making, language, Blackness, and the social and political structures embedded in visual culture. Working across painting, works on paper, installation, and text-based abstraction, Shiferaw examines how formal gestures can hold questions of race, migration, power, and belonging through repetition, seriality, and a restrained but conceptually charged visual vocabulary.  Shiferaw earned his BFA from the University of Southern California in 2007 and his MFA from Parsons The New School for Design in 2015. His work often engages abstraction, language, conceptual art, popular culture, and institutional critique, using monochrome surfaces, repeated marks, titles drawn from music and vernacular speech, and tightly controlled painterly systems to consider the metaphysical possibilities of painting alongside the political and social frameworks that shape it. He has also participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, The Drawing Center’s Open Sessions, and several residencies in New York and abroad.  His work has been exhibited at Smack Mellon, ICA Miami, Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, and galleries including Galerie Lelong, Addis Fine Art, and Vielmetter Los Angeles. He lives and works in New York City. 

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh (1985- ) is an American painter, illustrator, and mixed media artist. Fazlalizadeh's work engages deeply with community engagement and the public sphere. Her site-specific work considers how people, particularly women, queer folks, and Black and brown people, experience race and gender in their immediate environment.  Fazlalizadeh received her BFA from the University of the Arts in 2007.

Tau Lewis (1993- ) is a Canadian artist. Lewis creates sculptures, quilts, and masks using found materials. Her practice is an exercise in spiritual and collective healing through the repetitive process of sewing, carving, and plaster casting. The reuse of materials also references the ingenuity and resourcefulness that immigrant communities exhibit to survive. Lewis’s sculptural portraits draw inspiration from the people around her and her ancestors. 

T. Eliott Mansa (born 1978) is a Miami-born multidisciplinary artist whose sculptural practice draws on African diasporic ritual, memorial traditions, and the aesthetics of Black mourning and resilience. Incorporating materials such as fabric, beads, flowers, latex paint, found objects, and devotional iconography, Mansa creates shrine-like assemblages that honor victims of racial violence and explore the emotional landscape of grief, care, and cultural survival. His work merges Southern Black vernacular practices, Yoruba cosmologies, and contemporary sculptural forms to build spaces of remembrance and spiritual reckoning. Mansa holds an MFA from Yale University and has exhibited widely throughout South Florida and nationally.

Terence Ntsako Tako Maluleke is a visual developer and digital artist from South Africa. He takes inspiration from his experiences and daily life, incorporating African identity into his art. His work takes the form of character design and concept art.

Tesfaye Bekele (b. 1982) is an Ethiopian contemporary artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores memory, displacement, spirituality, and the layered histories of Ethiopia and its diaspora. Working across painting, drawing, printmaking, and mixed media, Bekele often incorporates symbolic imagery, text, and gestural abstraction to reflect on political struggle, cultural survival, and personal identity. His work draws from Ethiopian visual traditions while engaging global modernist and contemporary languages, creating compositions that balance introspection with social critique. Through material experimentation and narrative layering, Bekele positions art as a space for reflection, resistance, and historical reckoning.

Tessa Mars (1985- ) is a Haitian artist working across painting and installation. She explores gender, history, and tradition in her practice. Combining painting and sculpture, Mars prompts viewers to consider the Haitian landscape and the geography and its lessons. Using the Haitian Revolution as her starting point, Mars investigates resistance and survival.  Mars received her Bachelor's degree in Visual Arts at Rennes 2 University in France in 2006. 

Thandiwe Muriu (1991- ) explores the color and beauty of “African creation.” Seeking to enhance the value of the Black woman, who is too often excluded from the standards of beauty in her country, Kenya, Muriu’s signature trademarks are ebony skin, extravagant fabrics, and accessories from everyday life. Architectural hairstyles of her models reflect research of an ancestral culture lost by colonization. Muriu won the People’s Choice Award for 2020 Emerging Photographer of the Year at Photo London.

Thando Phenyane (b. 1997, Johannesburg, South Africa) is a South African painter whose background in architecture deeply informs his practice. His figurative works draw on a wide pool of influences—from pop culture and design to psycho-analysis and Afro-Futurist thought—and explore the relationship between Black identity and space. 

Theaster Gates (1973- ) is an American artist who works within social practice installation. Gates has a deep interest in urban planning and land development. Through performance, sculpture, and installation, he explores "forgotten" spaces and underserved neighborhoods and works to revitalize them.   Gates received his BS from Iowa State University in 1996. He received his MA from the University of Cape Town in 1998 and his MS from Iowa State University in 2006. 

Thebetsile "Thebe" Magugu (born 1 September 1993) is a South African fashion designer. Born in Kimberley and based in Johannesburg, he rose to prominence as the winner of the 2019 LVMH Young Fashion Designer Prize, and a finalist in the 2021 International Woolmark Prize. Magugu has released eleven solo collections under his own namesake label since 2017, as well as several capsules in collaboration with international brands such as Dior, Adidas, and AZ Factory.

Theodore Gaffney (b. 1927, Washington, D.C., USA – d. April 12, 2020) was an American photographer and photojournalist whose work documented critical moments in the civil-rights movement and U.S. history. Born into a family whose ancestors had been enslaved, Gaffney served in the U.S. Army during World War II and later became one of the first Black photographers permitted inside the White House. He was perhaps best known for an assignment he undertook for Jet Magazine in 1961: documenting the Freedom Riders as they journeyed to the Deep South to challenge racial segregation. He photographed U.S. Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, and in 1961 traveled with the Freedom Riders to record firsthand the struggle against segregation.

Thomas J. Price (1981- ) is a British multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, works on paper, film, and performance.   Price's work confronts prejudices around representation and identity, foregrounding the innate humanity we all possess.  Price studied at Chelsea College of Art and the Royal College of Art.

Thony Bélizaire (March 30, 1955 - July 21, 2013, Pétion-Ville, Haiti) was a Haitian photographer and photojournalist whose work documented the political, social, and human realities of Haiti with urgency and clarity. Based in Haiti, Bélizaire worked primarily in photography, creating powerful images that captured moments of crisis, resilience, protest, mourning, and everyday life. His practice was characterized by documentary precision and a deep commitment to visual testimony, positioning photography as both witness and record.  Bélizaire worked for Agence France-Presse for more than twenty-five years after joining the agency in 1987, becoming one of Haiti’s most widely recognized photojournalists. His photographs circulated internationally and helped shape global understandings of Haiti during periods of political upheaval, natural disaster, and reconstruction. He became especially known for his coverage of the 2010 earthquake and its aftermath, producing images that conveyed both devastation and the endurance of Haitian communities.  His work stands as an important contribution to Haitian visual history and documentary photography, reflecting a sustained engagement with the realities of national life. Bélizaire is remembered as one of Haiti’s leading photojournalists, and his images remain central to the visual archive of contemporary Haiti.

Thornton Dial (September 28, 1928 – January 25, 2016) was a self-taught American artist whose monumental assemblages confront the intertwined histories of race, labor, violence, and survival in the United States. Born in rural Alabama to a family of sharecroppers, Dial worked for decades as a laborer and metalworker before gaining national recognition in the late 1980s. Drawing from his lived experience in the Jim Crow South, Dial developed a distinctive visual language rooted in found materials—scrap metal, wood, carpet, wire, clothing, and industrial debris—which he transformed into large-scale sculptural reliefs and mixed-media paintings. Dial’s practice addresses the legacy of slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, economic exploitation, environmental devastation, and global conflict. His works are layered, physically dense, and symbolically charged, often incorporating animals, architectural forms, and abstract gestures to represent struggle and resilience. Despite being frequently categorized within “outsider” or “self-taught” traditions, Dial’s work engages deeply with mainstream art discourse, challenging institutional hierarchies and the boundaries between fine art and vernacular expression. In the early 1990s, Dial received significant critical attention through exhibitions organized by curator William Arnett and later through major museum retrospectives. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the High Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Today, Dial is recognized as one of the most important American artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, whose practice expanded the possibilities of assemblage and redefined narratives of Southern Black creativity.

Tiffanie Delune (1988- ) is a Belgo-Congolese French artist working across painting, textiles, and works on paper. Through a love of storytelling, she hopes to evoke emotions through intuitive swirling forms. Her work is embedded with symbols of femininity and spirituality. 

Tiffany Alfonseca (1994- ) is a Dominican-American mixed-media artist and contemporary painter based in the Bronx, New York. Her work weaves together beauty, diversity, and multilingualism to highlight the diversity of Afro-Latine and Black experiences. She is interested in the concept of "double consciousness" coined by W.E.B. DuBois and its relation to the experience of Black and Brown people. The bright and vibrant, pink, blue, and green palate she often uses in her work references her childhood memories in the Dominican Republic but also the Black and Brown joy she hopes to capture.  Alfonseca received her BFA at the School of Visual Arts in 2020.

Tiona Nekkia McClodden (born 1981, Blytheville, Arkansas) is an American interdisciplinary artist based in Philadelphia. Working across film, video, sculpture, sound, and installation, McClodden’s practice explores race, gender, sexuality, spirituality, and the afterlives of Black genealogies. Her work is characterized by ritual, archival inquiry, and interdisciplinary forms that merge personal devotion with social critique. Her projects frequently engage Black diasporic spiritual practices, embodied research, and narrative biomythography to examine how histories of colonialism, Christianity, and kinship shape contemporary life. Through documentary film, experimental video, sculptural objects, and sound installations, McClodden constructs works that move between intimate ritual and broader cultural analysis. In works such as I prayed to the wrong god for you., she has merged her artistic practice with her spiritual life as a priestess of Ogun, tracing diasporic devotion across the United States, Cuba, and Nigeria.  McClodden was selected for the 2019 Whitney Biennial and received that year’s Bucksbaum Award. She was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2018 and is the founder and director of Conceptual Fade in Philadelphia. Her work has been presented at institutions and venues including The Shed, Performance Space New York, Recess, 52 Walker, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and is held in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Rennie Museum.

Titus Kaphar (b Aug. 17, 1976, Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA) is an American painter, sculptor, filmmaker and installation artist whose multidisciplinary work interrogates the representation of Black subjects in Western art-history and the shaping of memory through image. He deconstructs canonical visual forms—cutting, tarring, draping and reconfiguring paintings and sculptures—to reveal hidden narratives, marginalized figures and the mechanics of exclusion. His practice proposes an amended, more inclusive account of history in which Black lives are visible, and visual language is expanded. 

Tizta Berhanu (1991- ) is an Ethiopian painter. Her figurative pieces explore intimacy and emotion. Vibrant and subdued colors cushion her subjects. Her paintings are typically composed of various hues of a singular color, heightening the emotional reality of the work.  Berhanu received her BFA in Painting from Addis Ababa University, Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in 2019. 

Tomashi Jackson (1980- ) is an American multimedia artist working across printmaking, sculpture, photography, video, fibrework, and performance. Jackson's assemblages are entrenched in a deep research process centered around systemic abuse, disenfranchisement, and displacement of communities of color. She connects histories and archives with to present moment.  Jackson received her BFA from Cooper Union in 2010. She received her MS from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning in 2012 and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2016.

Tom Lloyd (b. 1929 – d. 1996) was an American artist, activist, and community organizer known for pioneering work in electronically programmed light sculpture and socially-engaged art. He studied at the Pratt Institute (1949–1952) and the Brooklyn Museum Art School (1961) and began making art that fused abstraction, technology and community activism in the 1960s. Lloyd’s sculptural works harnessed electric bulbs, lenses, wiring and motion to explore light, perception and presence; he also co-founded the exhibition and institutional arm of Black and Puerto Rican art through community spaces such as the Store Front Museum / Paul Robeson Theatre in Jamaica, Queens. 

Torkwase Dyson (1973- ) is an American multidisciplinary artist working across drawing, painting, installation, sculpture, and sound. Her work is inspired by her theory of Black Compositional Thought. Describing herself as a painter, her abstract works explore the relationship between continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture and how black and brown people negotiate space.   Dyson received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1999. She received her MFA in painting/printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2003.

Tourmaline (born 1983, Roxbury, Massachusetts) is an American artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist whose practice centers Black trans life, queer history, abolitionist thought, and the radical possibilities of freedom. Working across film, photography, installation, writing, and public history, she creates works that honor historical figures, recover overlooked narratives, and imagine liberatory futures rooted in pleasure, care, and collective memory. Her practice moves fluidly between archival research and speculative worldmaking, using visual and narrative strategies to foreground the lives and legacies of Black trans women and queer communities too often excluded from dominant historical accounts.  Tourmaline studied Comparative Ethnic Studies at Columbia University, a foundation that continues to shape her interdisciplinary approach to art and political memory. Her work often draws from community history, performance, and cinematic storytelling to build emotionally resonant portraits of resistance, intimacy, and transformation. Across her films and visual art, she returns to themes of Black feminist freedom, trans embodiment, joy as a political force, and the power of reimagining the archive.  Her work has been exhibited internationally and included in major museum presentations and collections. Tourmaline has participated in the Whitney Biennial and has had work shown at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Museum Brandhorst. Her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, Tate, and the Whitney. She is also a Guggenheim Fellow and a TIME100 honoree. Tourmaline lives and works in New York. 

Toyin Ojih Odutola (1985- ) is a Nigerian-American artist who creates works on paper. She is interested in skin texture and has reduced her materials to the basics, such as ballpoint pens, pencils, pastels, and charcoal. This results in a very distinctive mark-making style. Developed over months, narratives that emerge through a series resemble a chapter book. Recently, she has created works around landscapes, architecture, and domestic interiors.  Odutola received a BA from the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and an MFA from the California College of the Arts. 

Tsedaye Makonnen (b. 1984, Washington, D.C., U.S.) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, researcher, and cultural producer. Makonnen’s practice weaves together Black feminist theory, site-specific research, performance, installation, sculpture, textile work, film, and curatorial projects. Her work is deeply informed by her identities as the daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, a mother, doula, and sanctuary builder. 

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones (1992- ) works across painting, drawing, and printmaking to explore his Nigerian Yoruba background. With a focus on contemporary perceptions of the Black body, Adeniyi-Jones depicts figures captured mid-dance as a tool to illuminate the significance of body language and dance in a continent with numerous spoken languages. Androgynous forms, deities, and animals populate his work in a celebration and acknowledgment of African identity.  Adeniyi-Jones received his BFA from The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford in 2014 and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2017. 

Turiya Magadlela (1978- ) is a South African artist using textiles with charged stories to create work. Her materials range from pantyhose to correctional service uniforms. Magadlela's work focuses on her experiences with womanhood and motherhood and the loaded history of Black South Africans. Magadlela received her Certificate in Fine Arts from Funda Community College in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1998. She received her National Diploma of Fine Arts from University of Johannesburg, South Africa in 2001. 

Tyler Mitchell (1995- ) is an American, Atlanta born and based fine art and commercial photographer. Much of his fine photography is focused on Black leisure and joy. He seeks to create a "Black utopic vision" with an emphasis on Black enjoying and existing outdoors. His bold colors are moody and contemplative. In 2018 Mitchell was commissioned to photograph Beyoncé for the Vogue September edition. In doing so, he became one of the youngest photographers and the first Black photographer to photograph a Vogue cover. 

Uche Okeke (born April 30, 1933, in Nimo, Anambra State, Nigeria – died January 5, 2016) was a Nigerian artist whose multidisciplinary practice explored Igbo visual culture, postcolonial identity, modernism, folklore, and the development of a distinctly Nigerian artistic language. Working across painting, drawing, illustration, sculpture, and writing, Okeke examined cultural memory, indigenous knowledge, and national self-definition through linear abstraction and the theoretical framework he called “Natural Synthesis.”  Okeke studied fine art at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria, later incorporated into Ahmadu Bello University, where he became a founding member and leading voice of the Zaria Art Society. His work often engages folklore, social history, indigenous design systems, and aesthetic theory, using line, calligraphic mark-making, and adaptations of uli wall and body painting traditions to consider decolonization, modern African identity, and the relationship between local tradition and contemporary artistic form. After the Nigerian Civil War, he became head of the Fine Arts Department at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he helped shape what became known as the Nsukka School.  His work has been exhibited through major presentations on Nigerian modernism and postcolonial African art, including at Tate Modern and in collections and exhibitions connected to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art. He is widely recognized as a foundational figure in Nigerian modernism and as one of the key theorists of post-independence African art. Uche Okeke lived and worked in Nigeria, including Nsukka and Nimo. 

Unathi Mkonto (1982- ) is a South African artist working across drawing, installation and sculpture. Drawing is a foundational aspect of his practice. His drawings sometimes act as blueprints for his sculptures, referencing his background in architecture.  Mkonto's work is abstract and takes viewers through his life situating them spatially in everyone's experience.  He received his BA in Architecture from Nelson Mandela University. 

Uzo Egonu (1931–1996) was a Nigerian-born artist who settled in Britain and worked there for most of his career. He is widely acknowledged for merging his Igbo heritage and African visual culture with European modernist idioms—challenging conventional narratives about African art and modernity. 

vanessa german (b. 1976, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA) is an American sculptor, painter, performance artist, poet and community-activist who describes herself as a “citizen artist.” Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, German creates deeply expressive mixed-media sculptures and immersive installations that draw from found objects, ritual, storytelling and Afro-diasporic traditions. 

Velaphi George Mzimba (b. September 1959 – d. June 2021) was a South African painter known for his expressive, large-scale portraits, still lifes, and figurative works. Born in Dube, Soweto, his vibrant paintings reflect both the daily life and socio-political realities of township South Africa, merging aesthetic boldness with human dignity.

Veronica Ryan (born 1956, in Plymouth, Montserrat) is a British artist whose sculptural practice explores memory, migration, healing, care, and the layered histories of Caribbean and diasporic life. Working across sculpture, installation, assemblage, and drawing, Ryan examines absence, resilience, inheritance, and belonging through delicate arrangements of organic and manufactured materials, including seeds, pods, textiles, bronze, plaster, and found objects.  Ryan studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the Slade School of Fine Art, and the University of London’s Institute of Education. Her work often engages botanical form, domestic space, loss, and postcolonial memory, using repetition, casting, stitching, and material juxtaposition to consider how personal and collective histories are carried through bodies, objects, and everyday acts of preservation. Her sculptures frequently evoke containment and fragility while attending closely to the afterlives of displacement and the sustaining forms of care that emerge within diasporic experience.  Her work has been exhibited at Tate Britain, the Hepworth Wakefield, the Brooklyn Museum, Spike Island, and in major international exhibitions including the Liverpool Biennial. She received the Turner Prize in 2022, becoming the first Black woman to win the award. Veronica Ryan lives and works in New York and Bristol. 

Vickie Pierre (born in Brooklyn, New York) is a Haitian-American multimedia artist whose practice explores self-identity, femininity, dream states, mythology, and the cultural politics that shape Black diasporic experience. Working across painting, collage, works on paper, mixed media, and installation, Pierre examines psychological interiority, transformation, and ornamentation through anthropomorphic forms, layered decorative surfaces, and surreal visual language drawn from personal and diasporic memory.  Pierre earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1997. Her work often engages Haitian and Yoruba mythologies, fantasy, memory, and gendered representation, using pattern, glitter, decorative paper, and richly layered compositions to consider vulnerability, resilience, and the porous boundary between the sacred, the subconscious, and the bodily. Institutional and artist profiles describe her practice as one shaped by both deeply personal symbolism and broader diasporic cultural histories.  Her work has been exhibited at Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Bass Museum of Art, the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico, Habitation Clément in Martinique, and the International Museum of Modest Arts in France. She received the South Florida Cultural Consortium Award in 2017, was a finalist for the Orlando Museum of Art’s Florida Prize in Contemporary Art in 2019, and in 2023 was selected by the Art in Embassies Program for display at the U.S. Embassy in Prague. Vickie Pierre lives and works in Vero Beach, Florida.

Victoria-Idongesit Udondian (born 1982, in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria) is a Nigerian artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores labor, migration, Black history, postcolonial identity, and the global circulation of clothing and textile waste. Working across textile installation, sculpture, performance, painting, and socially engaged practice, Udondian examines how garments carry histories of trade, power, memory, and self-fashioning through stitched, repurposed, and materially layered forms.  Udondian studied painting at the University of Uyo and later earned an MFA in Sculpture and New Genres from Columbia University; she also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Before formally studying art, she trained as a tailor and fashion designer, a background that remains central to her practice. Her work often engages textiles, archives, social history, and the secondhand clothing economy, using fabric manipulation, installation, and performance to consider cultural identity, invisible labor, environmental extraction, and the afterlives of colonial exchange.  Her work has been exhibited at Smack Mellon, the 56th Venice Biennale, the British Textile Biennial, and other international venues, and she has received a MacDowell Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grant. She lives and works between Lagos and New York.

Virgil Broodhagen is a Barbadian painter and sculptor known for his evocative depictions of Caribbean life, landscapes, and cultural narratives. He is the son of Karl Broodhagen, a prominent Barbadian sculptor and painter, and inherited a deep connection to Barbadian visual culture and identity.

Wangechi Mutu (1972- ) is a Kenyan-American visual artist, known for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work. Much of Mutu's work has explored the female body as subject through collage, installation, and performance. Mutu is She is interested in questions of gender, cultural trauma and transmission, and environmentalism. Her work also pulls from myths and cultural influences from the "Eastern" and "Western" pantheons creating a unique reference point. Strict dichotomies of East/West, beauty/grotesque, and sacred/profane are of little interest to her.  She is interested in that space in the middle where hybridity thrives.   Mutu received a BFA degree from Cooper Union in 1996 and an MFA in sculpture from Yale School of Art in 2000.

Wayne Lawrence @waynelawrence was born in St. Kitts and is now based in Brooklyn. His work represents a visual diary of his life’s journey and focuses on communities overlooked by mainstream media. Wayne’s photographs have been exhibited in a number of museums, including the African American Museum of Philadelphia.

Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) was a Cuban painter and printmaker of African and Chinese descent. He spent about 14 years in Spain starting in 1923 to 1938. He then moved to Paris before settling in New York. His art drew from personal experience during thee Spanish Civil War, both as a soldier and observer, and grief in his personal life. Lam was engaged in Modern movements such as Cubism and Surrealism. His work draws heavily from his experiences in Cuba with special attention to Afro-Caribbean religions such as Santería. He synthesized these two world views resulting in a visual language rich with thin figures, distinct, vertical linework, and a vibrant palette. 

Widline Cadet (born 1992, Haiti) is a Haitian-American artist whose photographic and video-based practice explores family, migration, memory, and the complexities of diasporic identity. Raised in the United States, Cadet often turns to her own family archive as both subject and method, creating images that navigate the emotional terrain of separation, reunion, and belonging across geographic and generational distances. She earned a BA in studio art from the City College of New York and an MFA from Syracuse University.  Working primarily in photography, Cadet constructs intimate, staged, and documentary-inflected portraits that center her mother, relatives, and extended community. Her work frequently examines the psychological and emotional impact of migration, particularly the experience of growing up between cultures and the evolving dynamics of familial relationships shaped by displacement.  Cadet’s images often blur distinctions between performance and documentation, using gesture, proximity, and spatial arrangement to convey subtle emotional tensions. Her work emphasizes the body as a site of memory and connection, capturing moments that feel both deeply personal and widely resonant within diasporic experience. Through this approach, she expands contemporary portraiture to include layered reflections on identity, intimacy, and cultural inheritance. Her recent solo exhibitions include “Currents 40: Widline Cadet” at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI, USA (May 8–August 9, 2026); a solo exhibition at Nazarian / Curcio, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2025); PHotoESPAÑA at Casa de América, Madrid, Spain (2024); Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2023); and “Se Sou Ou Mwen Mete Espwa m (I Put All My Hopes On You)” at Deli Gallery, New York, NY, USA (2021).  Cadet lives and works in New York.

William H. Johnson (1910-1970) was an American painter. He worked through many styles throughout his life including academic, Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, German Expressionism, to "conscious naiveté” or a folk style. In 1926 he traveled to France and this is credited as some of his earliest exposure to modernist forms. He traveled around Europe and returned to New York in 1938 at the onset of World War II. On returning to the United States he d Johnson studied at the National Academy of Design in New York. 

William Pajuad (1925-2015) was an American painter. He is most known for his watercolor works. He often painted Black women, jazz funerals, street scenes, and memories of his childhood in New Orleans and his adult life in Los Angeles. He built the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Fine Art Collection, one of the best collections of Black art in the Western region.  Pajaud earned a BFA from Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans in 1941. He also received a degree in graphic design from Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles.   

Williams Chechet is a Nigerian visual artist. Known for his graphic design and murals, Chechet’s art takes inspiration from popular culture, hip hop, and graffiti. Heavily influenced by his personal background, his work combines the visual narratives of the past with that of the present.