Voices of the Diaspora: The Artisans Behind the Canvas

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.  

Sola Olulode (born 1996, London, UK) is a British-Nigerian painter whose work explores intimacy, queer desire, and tenderness within Black communities. Working primarily in oil on canvas, Olulode depicts softly rendered figures in moments of closeness and vulnerability, emphasizing touch, gaze, and emotional connection. Her paintings resist spectacle and stereotype, instead offering quiet, affirming representations of Black queer love and interior life. Through restrained palettes and gentle brushwork, Olulode centers care, softness, and mutuality as radical forms of presence.

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. 

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. 

Tafari Melisizwe (born in Santa Clara, California) is an American Pan-Africanist photographer and cultural worker whose photographic practice explores Black life, cultural connection, history, and collective memory. Working primarily through photojournalistic portrait photography, Melisizwe examines relationships among people of African ancestry through intimate documentation, interviews, and visual storytelling grounded in Pan-Africanist thought.  Melisizwe’s practice has developed through community-based cultural work, photography, design, and more than a decade of teaching film, photography, history, architecture, and social studies in African-centered educational spaces. His work often engages Black elders, everyday life, political organizing, cultural continuity, and transnational relationships, using portraiture and documentary observation to connect Black communities across geography, language, and history. His work has been presented in the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry’s Black Creativity Juried Art Exhibition, Ceremonial Rites in Chicago, the Hapeville Art Trail Exhibition, and publications including A Gathering Together, African Lens, Root Work Journal, and Black Boy Journal. He received the “Black Unity” category award from the Black Alliance for Peace’s The Role of Culture in Resistance and Revolution initiative. Tafari Melisizwe lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. 

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 (born 1973, Chicago, Illinois) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines the relationship between Black spatial practices, architecture, and environmental conditions. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, Dyson investigates how Black bodies navigate and shape space, particularly in relation to histories of displacement, resistance, and freedom. Her practice is grounded in an ongoing inquiry into what she terms “Black spatial liberation,” a framework that considers how geography, infrastructure, and environmental systems impact movement, visibility, and autonomy. Dyson’s visual language is rooted in abstraction, often employing geometric forms, architectural diagrams, and minimal color palettes to evoke structures such as walls, corridors, and enclosures. These forms reference both physical and conceptual spaces, including carceral systems, migratory routes, and ecological environments. Through this approach, she creates works that function as both visual propositions and spatial experiments, inviting viewers to consider alternative modes of inhabiting space. Her work also engages environmental justice, climate change, and the politics of land and water, particularly as they affect Black and marginalized communities. Dyson’s installations often transform exhibition spaces into immersive environments that foreground movement, orientation, and bodily awareness. By merging abstraction with critical spatial theory, she expands the possibilities of contemporary art as a tool for imagining new forms of freedom and relation. Dyson has exhibited widely at major institutions and biennials, and her work is held in significant public collections. She lives and works in New York.

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. 

Tschabalala Self (born 1990 in Harlem, New York) is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting, printmaking, textile collage, sewing, sculpture, installation, performance, and public art. Best known for her vibrant figurative compositions, Self combines painted, printed, found, recycled, and hand-sewn materials to construct Black figures who possess authority over their bodies, environments, and self-presentation.  Self’s work is deeply invested in Black life, embodiment, selfhood, and human flourishing. Her figures are not intended as portraits of specific individuals but as invented characters or avatars through which she considers desire, intimacy, gender, sexuality, domesticity, community, and the psychological effects of fantasy and projection. Exaggerated proportions, assertive poses, layered surfaces, and vivid patterns allow her subjects to resist restrictive representations of Black bodies and claim space on their own terms.  Sewing is central to Self’s visual language. She uses thread and the sewing machine much as a painter might use line and brushwork, assembling fragments of fabric, discarded paintings, printed matter, and hand-colored canvas into highly tactile compositions. Her work traverses distinctions between fine art and craft while drawing from collage, quilting, printmaking, fashion, popular culture, storefronts, domestic interiors, and the social environments of Harlem. Projects such as Bodega Run examine the neighborhood bodega as a site of commerce, encounter, cultural exchange, and Black urban experience. Self earned a BA in Studio Arts from Bard College in 2012 and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2015. Her work has been presented at the New Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Baltimore Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, Frye Art Museum, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Le Consortium, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, and numerous international institutions. She received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant and was selected to create Lady in Blue for London’s Fourth Plinth. Self lives and works in New York’s Hudson Valley.