Voices of the Diaspora: The Artisans Behind the Canvas

Anya Paintsil (1993- ) is a Welsh-Ghanaian artist working primarily with textiles. Combining traditional hand rug-making techniques with afro hair styling methods, Anya's practice is largely autobiographical, taking inspiration from her childhood in North Wales, family stories, and Welsh and Ghanaian mythologies. She also explores identity and gendered labor.  Paintstil received a BA in Fine Art from Manchester School of Art in 2020. 

April Bey (born 1987 in The Bahamas) is a Bahamian-American artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores Blackness, queerness, feminism, postcolonialism, popular culture, and speculative futures. Working across mixed-media painting, textiles, printmaking, photography, video, and installation, Bey examines American and Bahamian culture through vibrant materials, satirical language, and the imagined extraterrestrial world of Atlantica.  Bey received a BFA in drawing from Ball State University in 2009 and an MFA in painting from California State University, Northridge, in 2014. Her work often engages Afrofuturism, Afro-Surrealism, social media, generational theory, Blerd culture, and systems of racial and colonial power, using woven textiles, faux fur, glitter, vinyl, photography, collage, and hand-printed imagery to construct affirming representations of Black women and queer communities.  Her work has been exhibited at the California African American Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, Lancaster Museum of Art and History, National Gallery of Victoria, Getty Museum, National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Her work is held in collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California African American Museum, National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, and Center for Contemporary Printmaking. April Bey lives and works in Los Angeles, where she is also a tenured professor at Glendale College.

April Harrison is an American illustrator and mixed media artist. Harrison's work is a testament to the strength of faith, family, and friendship. Harrison's mixed media work features elongated forms against palettes of blues, greens, reds, and yellows. Her collage process uses found materials that add a physical dimension to her work and a quilt-like quality. This cements her practice within the tradition of African-American artistic traditions. 

Arcmanoro Niles (1989- ) is an American painter known for using bright, vibrant colors to illustrate different facets of everyday life. These mundane scenes point to a complicated interior that contemplates loneliness and life overall. Niles is incredibly interested in color. He layers oranges, pinks, purples, blues, and greens to create vibrant colors and rich undertones for his subjects. He references Italian and Dutch baroque, history painting, Color Field painting, and ancient Egyptian sculpture in his work.  Niles received a BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2013 and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2015.

Arlette Bashizi (born 1999, in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of the Congo) is a Congolese documentary photographer and photojournalist whose photographic practice explores conflict, survival, public health, environment, culture, and the everyday realities of life in eastern Congo. Working across documentary photography, photojournalism, and long-form visual storytelling, Bashizi examines injustice, resilience, and community through human-centered reportage that keeps women and young people at the center of her images.  Bashizi is based in Goma, where she has developed projects and reports since 2018. Her work often engages war and its aftermath, climate crisis, mining, displacement, and civic life, using documentary observation and narrative sequencing to consider how people live through violence and structural instability while maintaining dignity and connection. She has worked for international media including Reuters, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, and she has also served as an advisor for UN organizations.  Her work has been recognized by World Press Photo and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award shortlist, and in 2026 she was included among the artists in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Arlette Bashizi lives and works in Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Arthur Jafa (1960- ) is an American film artist and cinematographer. His work explores the realities, constructions, and influence of Blackness in contemporary culture in the United States and abroad. He debuted as a cinematographer with Daughters of the Dust along with director Julie Dash and production designer Kerry James Marshall.  Jafa studied film and architecture at Howard University in 1983 before relocating to Los Angeles, California. 

Asser Saint-Val (born 1974, in Port-de-Paix, Haiti) is a Haitian-American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores identity, spirituality, neuromelanin, and the subconscious through immersive, sensorial forms. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, design, and occasionally music, Saint-Val examines the psychic and symbolic dimensions of Blackness through surreal visual language, interactive environments, and materially layered compositions.  Saint-Val earned BFAs in painting and graphic design from the New World School of the Arts and the University of Florida in 2004. His work often engages spirituality, magic, bodily presence, and self-construction, using painting, sculptural form, installation, and public art to consider how identity is experienced beyond the visible surface. Institutional and artist sources consistently describe his practice as rooted in experiential and interactive structures that invite viewers into psychological and symbolic space.  His work has been exhibited throughout South Florida, New York, Washington, D.C., and across the Caribbean, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Grenada, and Aruba. He has also developed public art projects in Miami-Dade County and is represented in collections including the Rubell Family Collection and Art in Public Places. Asser Saint-Val lives and works in Miami, Florida. 

Atong Atem is a photographer whose colorful self-portraits reappropriate the camera and reflect ways it has been used and has done harm. She is a past recipient of the inaugural La Prairie art award used to fund an international residency in Zurich and to attend the Art Basel international art fair.

Augusta Savage (1892-1962) was an American sculptor. She was active during the Harlem Renaissance, following her relocation from Florida to New York. She created small figurative portraits, some modeled on friends and family. In the late 1930s, she became the director of the Harlem Community Arts Center, a community artist organization that offered art classes for all ages. She struggled to raise money to cast her works in bronze, so many of her remaining works are plaster, painted to look like bronze busts.  Savage received her degree from Cooper Union in 1923. 

Autumn Knight (born January 5, 1980 in Houston, Texas) is an American interdisciplinary artist whose practice moves across performance, installation, video, sound, text, drawing, and participatory social exchange. Drawing from training in theater, drama therapy, improvisation, and the psychology of group dynamics, Knight creates performances that unsettle conventional relationships between performer and audience. Humor, discomfort, intimacy, confrontation, and unpredictability become tools for examining how authority is constructed and how people negotiate power within shared spaces.  Knight’s performances frequently begin with a prompt, structure, character, or social proposition that remains open to intervention by the audience. Works such as Sanity TV, M _ _ _ ER, WALL, and the ongoing NOTHING series investigate race, gender, behavioral expectations, familial intimacy, psychological states, social contracts, disappointment, complaint, and the potential of doing nothing. Rather than treating viewers as passive observers, Knight invites them to become participants whose reactions, silences, conflicts, and decisions alter the direction of the work.  Knight earned a Bachelor of Arts in Theater Arts from Dillard University and a Master of Arts in Drama Therapy from New York University. Knight also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2016. The artist’s work has been presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Walker Art Center, Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Kitchen, Performance Space New York, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Akademie der Künste, Museum Ostwall, REDCAT, and numerous other institutions.  Knight received a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film-Video, the 2021–2022 Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize in Visual Arts, a 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, a 2021 Anonymous Was A Woman Award, and a 2024 Trellis Art Fund Milestone Grant. Knight’s WALL became the first live performance work acquired for the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Autumn Knight lives and works in New York City.

Awol Erizku (1988- ) is an Ethiopian-born American contemporary multidisplinary artist working across painting, photography, sculpture, and film. Much of his work references spirituality, art history, and hip-hop. He works from a self-developed, "Afro-esoteric” that seeks to bridge the gap between African and African American visual lexicons.  Erizku received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2010 and his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2014. 

Ayo Akingbade (b. 1994, London, UK) is a British-Nigerian filmmaker and artist whose work explores power, place, memory, and the politics of everyday life across Black British and diasporic communities. Working primarily in film, installation, and photography, she is known for a bold, observational style that blends fiction and documentary. Her films examine housing, gentrification, labor, lineage, and the intimate architecture of social life—from East London estates to family homelands in Nigeria. Akingbade’s practice is grounded in research and community engagement, producing visually striking narratives that center agency, nuance, and emotional truth.

Barbara Chase-Riboud (1939- ) is a French-American sculptor and artist working on paper. Born in Philadelphia, she traveled to Egypt and Greece, and her experiences with ancient sculptural forms left a large impact on her practice. Her distinct style involves bronze forms cast in the lost wax method with flowing tendrils and tresses of silk and other fabrics.  Chase-Riboud received a BFA from the Tyler School at Temple University in 1956 and was awarded a John Hay Whitney Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 1957.  In 1960, she received her MFA at Yale University School of Design and Architecture.

Barbara Jones-Hogu (born April 17, 1938, in Chicago, Illinois – died November 14, 2017) was an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explored Black pride, political self-determination, community, liberation, and the visual language of the Black Arts Movement. Working across printmaking, painting, drawing, film, and design, Jones-Hogu examined collective identity, cultural affirmation, and social change through bold color, text, figuration, and graphic strategies intended to communicate directly with Black audiences. She was a founding member of AfriCOBRA, the Chicago-based collective established in 1968 to develop a Black aesthetic rooted in accessibility, beauty, and political relevance.  Jones-Hogu studied at Howard University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Institute of Design in Chicago; additional biographical sources also note graduate study in printing at the Illinois Institute of Technology and later MFA study in Independent Film and Digital Imaging at Governors State University. Her work often engages social history, print culture, activism, and popular visual language, using screenprint, woodcut, text, and image to consider Black consciousness, solidarity, beauty, and the political force of representation. Before co-founding AfriCOBRA, she was active in the Organization of Black American Culture and contributed to Chicago’s landmark Wall of Respect mural in 1967.  Her work has been exhibited through major museum and scholarly presentations on Black art and AfriCOBRA, and her work is held by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She is recognized as a foundational figure in the Black Arts Movement and in the development of politically engaged Black printmaking in the United States. Barbara Jones-Hogu lived and worked in Chicago. 

Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) was an American painter and photographer. He began his career as a painter before taking up photography. These early paintings include landscapes and still lifes. He is known for unflinching, direct, large oil portraits of Black people. Overall, his work is known for the attitude and style that comes off the subjects.  Hendricks graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1967. He received both his BFA and MFA from Yale University. 

Barthélémy Toguo (1967- ) is a Cameroonian painter and a visual and performing artist. He works across various mediums including photographs, prints, sculptures, videos, and installations. Toguo's works explore migration and travel. He is interested in concepts around language, documentation, and borders. Much of his work connects humans with the natural world through a hopeful lens.   Between 1989 and 1993 he studied art, at the École des Beaux-Arts in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Grenoble, France, and at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, Germany. 

Basil Kincaid (1986- ) is an American multidisciplinary artist who incorporates quilting, collaging, photography, installation, and performance into his expansive practice. His large quilt works reflect his interest in African-American quilting traditions and West African textiles. His works forwards what's most important to him: family, imagination, rest, and experience.  Kincaid received his BA in Studio Art from Colorado College in 2010. Rooted in themes of ancestry, spirituality, and community, Kincaid's practice elevates quilting as a contemporary art form while honoring its historical role as a vessel for memory and cultural preservation. Using reclaimed textiles, layered imagery, and hand-stitched techniques, he creates immersive works that celebrate Black life, encourage rest and reflection, and explore the interconnectedness of people, place, and history. His work has been exhibited internationally and is recognized for bridging traditional craft with contemporary visual language.

Basil Watson, OJ CD (1958- ) is a Jamaican sculptor. His work captures the dynamic and energic of historic people and the spirit of freedom and spontaneity and strength. 

Bayeté Ross Smith (born 1976) is a contemporary African American multi-media artist, film maker and educator, working at the intersection of photography, film & video, visual journalism, 3D objects and new media. He currently lives and works in Harlem.

Bayunga Kialeuka (1974-) is a painter and curator. His works address themes such as cultural identity and the economy through the style of social realism. Kialeuka’s art takes inspiration from his personal background and aims to represent contemporary Pan-Africanism. 

Beauford Delaney (1901-1979) was an artist inspired by the Harlem Renaissance. He became a household name in New York, befriending and painting famous figures, including W.E.B DuBois, and creating colorful, vibrant, abstract contemporary art. His artworks were expressive with inspiration, drawing from the world around him and touching on topics of race and the economic climate that plagued him throughout life.

Belkis Ayón (1967-1999) was a Cuban artist known for her prints and engravings whose works explored beliefs, rituals, and myths of the Afro-Cuban all-male fraternal Abakuá secret society. She is well known for her use of the collagraphy technique. Much of her work is black and white featuring. Princess Sikan, appears often in her work, as she is the only female figure in the religion. Ayón received her Bachelor of Art in Printmaking from Art Superior Institute in 1991 in Havanna, Cuba

Ben Enwonwu (Odinigwe Benedict Chukwukadibia Enwonwu MBE, b.  14 July 1917, d. 5 February 1994) was a pioneering Nigerian painter and sculptor whose career spanned colonial, independence-era and post-colonial Nigeria. Born into an Igbo artistic family, he fused indigenous Nigerian aesthetic traditions with Western modernist techniques, and played a foundational role in shaping modern African art. 

Benny Andrews (1930–2006) was an American painter, printmaker, and activist whose work explored the lives, struggles, and dignity of ordinary people. Born in rural Georgia to a family of sharecroppers, Andrews drew deeply from his upbringing in the segregated American South, developing a visual language that combined expressive figuration with collage and textured surfaces. After serving in the U.S. Air Force, he moved to New York in the late 1950s, where he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before establishing himself as a significant voice in postwar American art. Throughout his career, Andrews used painting as a tool for social commentary, addressing themes of poverty, race, labor, incarceration, and civil rights. His compositions often depict workers, prisoners, families, and rural communities, rendered with emotional intensity and psychological depth. Andrews frequently incorporated fabric, paper, and other materials into his canvases, creating sculptural surfaces that emphasized the physical presence and humanity of his subjects. In addition to his studio practice, Andrews was a tireless advocate for artists and cultural equity. In 1969, he co-founded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), an organization that challenged major museums in New York for their lack of representation of Black artists. He later directed the Visual Arts Program for the National Endowment for the Arts and established influential arts education initiatives, including programs bringing art instruction to incarcerated individuals. Andrews’s work has been exhibited widely and is held in major museum collections across the United States. Today he is recognized as a crucial figure in American figurative painting whose practice merged artistic innovation with sustained political and community engagement.

Betye Saar (July 30, 1926–July 26, 2026) is an American printmaker and assemblage artist. Her practice seeks to dismantle and interrogate stereotypes around race and femininity. History, mysticism, and memory, are central tenants of her practice.  Saar earned a B.A. in design in 1947 from the University of California, Los Angeles. She took graduate study courses from the California State University, Long Beach, University of Southern California, California State University, Northridge, and the American Film Institute. Betye Saar died on July 26, 2026, at her home in Los Angeles. She was 99 years old and only days away from her 100th birthday. Across more than six decades of artmaking, she became one of the most consequential figures in American art and a foundational voice within the Black Arts Movement.

Beverly McIver (1962- ) is an American painter. She is known for her self-portraits, where she casts herself as various characters.  Much of her subject matter deals with depression, poverty, illness, death, and the life of her disabled older sister and McIver's role as her caretaker.  McIver received her BA in Painting and Drawing from North Carolina Central University in 1987 and her MFA in Painting and Drawing from Pennsylvania State University in 1992. She received an Honorary Doctorate from North Carolina Central University in 2007. 

Billie Zangewa (1973- ) is a Malawian artist currently based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She creates silk tapestries. Her work considers personal narratives, feminism, and modern life. Using textiles, she pays close attention to the interiority of Black women's lives. Following the birth of her child, her work shifted to Black life broadly homelife and domesticity.  Zangewa received a degree in Fine Arts from Rhodes University, South Africa. 

Billie Zangewa (born 1973, in Blantyre, Malawi) is a Malawian artist whose textile-based practice explores Black femininity, domestic life, motherhood, intimacy, and the politics of everyday experience. Working across hand-stitched silk collage, tapestry, and drawing, Zangewa examines self-representation, care, vulnerability, and empowerment through luminous fabric compositions that elevate ordinary moments into scenes of quiet significance. Her work often centers women’s lives and domestic environments, framing acts of nurturing, rest, and self-possession as sites of agency and what she has described as “daily feminism.”  Zangewa received her B.F.A. from Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, in 1995, where she studied printmaking. Over time, she moved away from painting and printmaking toward hand-sewn silk collage, developing a distinctive practice rooted in fabric, fragmentation, and personal narrative. Her work often engages autobiography, motherhood, fashion, labor, and home-making, using raw silk, appliqué, and meticulous stitching to consider the emotional and symbolic dimensions of women’s lives, especially within African and diasporic contexts.  Her work has been exhibited at SITE Santa Fe, Brighton CCA, John Hansard Gallery, the Harvey B. Gantt Center, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, the Centre Pompidou, MASS MoCA, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. She lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. 

Bill Traylor (born April 1, 1854, in Dallas County, Alabama – died October 23, 1949) was an American artist whose drawing practice explored memory, movement, labor, race, and everyday life in the rural and urban South. Working primarily across drawing, painting, and mixed-media works on cardboard, Traylor examined animals, human figures, street life, and remembered scenes through distilled silhouettes, rhythmic line, and bold, economical compositions. Born into slavery, he began making art late in life, producing a remarkable body of work that has become central to the history of self-taught and American art.  Traylor was self-taught. After emancipation, he spent most of his life as a farm laborer and sharecropper before moving to Montgomery, Alabama, in the late 1920s. Around 1939, no longer able to do heavy physical labor, he began drawing on discarded cardboard while sitting on Monroe Street. His work often engages memory, social history, animal imagery, Black southern life, and the changing cityscape of Montgomery, using simplified forms, serial variation, and improvised materials to consider survival, observation, humor, and the visual experience of a racially stratified world.  His work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While he did not receive major awards during his lifetime, he is now widely recognized as one of the most important self-taught artists in American history. Bill Traylor lived and worked in Alabama, especially Montgomery. 

Binta Ayofemi is an American visual artist. Her work primarily takes the form of architecture and sculpture. She is informed by Afrofuturism and groups such as the Black Panthers and the Black Shakers to reimagine both public and private spaces. One of her goals is to transform otherwise abandoned spaces into meccas for Black culture and art. Ayofemi's work explores the political dimesons of space and occupancy.  

Bisa Butler (1973- ) is an American textile artist, originally trained as a painter.  ⁠Her quilts are vibrant, colorful portraits of historic and contemporary figures. Despite textiles being her medium, her approach is multidisciplinary. The composition of her quilts is informed by photographs and she draws with her thread, adding patterns to the finished quilt top. She uses a mix of Ghanaian fabrics, Nigerian batiks, and South African fabrics. Butler was a high school art teacher for 10 years in the Newark Public Schools and three years at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey. Butler received her BFA from Howard University in 1995. She received her MA from Montclair State University in 2005. 

Bisila Noha Pascual (b. 1988, Zaragoza, Spain) is a Spanish-Equatoguinean ceramic, mixed-materials artist, writer, and activist. Based in London, her work explores craft, heritage, identity, and feminist and anti-capitalist perspectives, challenging dominant Western views of art, value, and worth. 

Bob Thompson (1937-1966) was a figurative artist who in his short artistic career created vibrant, exaggerated masterpieces that exuded spontaneity in the midst of the silhouettes and natural aspects of his portraits. Taking inspiration from his love of various cultures, more specifically European culture, Thompson created pieces still appreciated today with his work being exhibited more recently in New York.

Bonito Thompson, also known as Don Dada, is a digital artist who creates augmented reality experiences that blend art, technology, and his Jamaican culture. His work is influenced by Dancehall and represents aspects of Jamaican pop culture. Thompson has exhibited his work at shows in the Caribbean, and the United States, including Miami Art Basel. He has also collaborated with Grammy-winning artists, including Common, Damian Marley, Sean Paul, and Spice, as well as brands like Red Stripe, Genxs Carnival, and the Port Authority of Jamaica.

Bony Ramirez (1996- ) is a Dominican artist whose vibrant figures of varying proportions, shades, and composition show insight into his Caribbean roots. Bony’s practice has expanded to include using various objects and materials to create. Ramirez creates “mixed medium portraits” that portray contemporary Caribbean life and the underlying European colonialist history that remains in the psyche of individuals. Ramirez pulls from many inspirations such as Italian mannerism, Renaissance portraiture, and children’s illustrations. 

Brandon Clarke works aims to spark awareness and surprise to his viewer in order to encounter a fundamental question: “Who are you, really?” The main concept of Clarke’s art explores all the dimensions of the traditional canvas structure itself, with the intent to expose many hidden messages. Clarke currently lives and works in Miami, Florida as a second-generation artist. Clarke’s artistic background with his grandmothers’ painters’-hand, has given him a unique way to express his work.

Bronwyn Katz (born 1993, in Kimberley, South Africa) is a South African artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores land, memory, trauma, language, and the lived experience of place. Working across sculpture, installation, video, and performance, Katz examines how territory holds histories of occupation, erasure, and survival through found materials, abstract form, and systems of notation that connect materiality to cultural memory.  Katz earned a BFA from the Michaelis School of Art at the University of Cape Town in 2015 and received the Simon Gerson Prize. Their work often engages mapping, Indigenous and creolized language, ancestry, and the social construction of boundaries, using salvaged objects, metal, stone, wire, and installation to consider how histories of land and belonging remain embedded in material form. Katz is also a founding member of iQhiya, the women artists’ collective that has performed internationally, including at Documenta 14.  Their work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions including at Palais de Tokyo, White Cube, Andrew Kreps Gallery, the Biennale of Sydney, the New Museum Triennial, and the Venice Biennale. Katz received the First National Bank Art Prize in 2019, was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize in 2021, and in 2022 was selected as a protégé in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative with El Anatsui. Bronwyn Katz lives and works between Cape Town and Johannesburg.

Buhlebezwe Siwani (1987- ) is a South African performance and installation artist. Siwani is interested in the Black female experience in South Africa. Incorporating everyday objects, many of her works highlight the racism and sexism that Black women experience. She titles her works in isiXhosa and isiZulu communicating to the viewer that she is decentering Anglo-centric languages.  Siwani received her BAFA at the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg in 2011 and her MFA at the  Michaelis School of Fine Arts in 2015. 

Buqaqawuli Nobakada (b. 2000, Western Cape, South Africa) is a contemporary mixed-media artist whose sculptural paintings explore black femininity, luxury, and identity through intricate craft and material innovations. Raised between the Philippi township (Cape Town) and a village in Lady Frere (Eastern Cape), Nobakada draws from her architectural training and lived experience to create layered works that centre Black women in moments of self-fashioning, dignity and generational legacy. Her signature medium—acrylic paint applied to hand-prepared lace paper, often embellished with gold jewellery or clay accents—evokes opulence and softness while making a powerful statement about visibility, self-assertion, and craft as liberation. 

Caitlin Cherry (1987- ) is an American artist who works in painting, sculpture, and mixed media. Her work centers the Black female experience through technological inquiry and digital manipulation. Interested in how digital interfaces influence present female identity she draws from art history, race, gender, and economic studies. Cherry's resulting portraits and landscapes are iridescent canvases.    Cherry received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010 and her MFA from Columbia University in 2012. 

Calida Rawles (1976- ) is an American painter. She creates large paintings of Black individuals floating and swimming in water. These scenes gift Black people joy and ease that often is not present. Her work also evokes a sense of mourning, granting the viewers and her subjects a vessel for heavy emotions.  Rawles received a B.A. from Spelman College, Atlanta in 1998 and an M.A. from New York University in 2000. 

Calida Rawles (born 1976, Los Angeles, CA) is an American painter whose work centers Black bodies within aquatic environments to examine race, access, visibility, and belonging. Best known for her hyperrealistic depictions of figures submerged in water, Rawles uses the pool as both a literal and symbolic site—referencing histories of segregation, leisure, vulnerability, and survival. Through luminous surfaces and careful attention to light and reflection, her paintings position water as a space of suspension and possibility, where Black subjects exist outside dominant narratives of trauma and spectacle. Her work reclaims presence, stillness, and interiority as forms of power and resistance.

Cameron Clayborn (born 1992 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas) is an American multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores vulnerability, power, embodiment, intimacy, and Black queer experience. Working across sculpture, drawing, installation, performance, and design, Clayborn examines the physical and emotional body through biomorphic forms, suspended structures, bodily fragments, and materially experimental objects.  Clayborn received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2018. Their work often engages family history, trauma, sexuality, care, domestic architecture, and Black queer and femme identity, using insulation, paper, plaster, fabric, wax, bronze, vinyl, and found materials to consider the relationships between fragility and strength, closeness and distance, and private memory and collective experience.  Their work has been exhibited at Hamburger Bahnhof, Morán Morán, Simone Subal Gallery, Gallery 400, Emalin, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and Art Basel. Clayborn received the Baloise Art Prize in 2021, and their work is held in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Hamburger Bahnhof, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Cameron Clayborn lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut. 

Candace Hill-Montgomery (born February 9, 1945, in Queens, New York) is an African American multidisciplinary artist, poet, writer, curator, and educator whose practice has moved across installation, environmental sculpture, photography, painting, collage, textiles, weaving, performance, poetry, artists’ books, and public intervention for more than five decades. Emerging within New York’s alternative art scene in the late 1970s, Hill-Montgomery developed a politically engaged practice that confronts racism, poverty, feminism, state violence, urban displacement, labor, environmental crisis, and the structures governing public space. Her work is equally shaped by humor, wordplay, personal observation, family history, and a persistent resistance to conventional boundaries between artistic disciplines.  Hill-Montgomery’s early practice was closely tied to the streets and social conditions of New York. During her 1979–80 residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, she expanded beyond studio painting into what she termed “environmental sculpture,” incorporating abandoned buildings, sidewalks, found materials, and public sites into works about housing, vacancy, racism, and social inequality. Reflections on Vacancy used reflective material to intervene in an abandoned Harlem building, while 92 Morningside Ave—Remember Fred Hampton addressed the 1969 police killing of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton. She also participated in the landmark Times Square Show organized by Colab in 1980 and created public projects including Food for Thought, which responded to federal cuts by distributing food as part of the artwork.  Her practice has always extended beyond the gallery. Hill-Montgomery produced poetry, artists’ books, photography, performances, clothing, and collaborative projects, and worked with artists and writers including Ntozake Shange and feminist critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard. With Lippard, she co-organized Working Women/Working Artists/Working Together, an exhibition concerned with women’s creative and wage labor. Her publications include Historic Extinction, Fire Escape Scrolls, Muss Sill, Short Leash Kept On, and, in 2026, Abstractive, produced with poet David Grundy. Following her retirement from a decades-long career teaching art and journalism in 2011, Hill-Montgomery moved full-time to Long Island and increasingly concentrated on weaving and sculptural textiles. Her recent works combine hand-spun and hand-dyed wool, linen, silk, cashmere, mohair, horsehair, beads, feathers, found objects, vintage implements, and other materials into irregular woven assemblages whose titles often function like fragments of poetry. These works use allegory, satire, political commentary, and autobiography to address racism, feminism, poverty, migration, environmental crisis, popular culture, and contemporary politics. A renewed institutional interest in her work has led to major recent presentations at Blank Forms, Kettle’s Yard, the Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA PS1, and Hollybush Gardens. She currently lives and works in Bridgehampton, New York. 

Candace Hunter is an American multidisciplinary artist, curator, writer, and water-rights activist whose practice explores race, memory, environmental justice, and historical reconstruction. Working across collage, installation, performance, archival research, and social practice, Hunter examines how histories of Black migration, climate crisis, and systemic inequality intersect. Her work frequently engages the Great Migration, speculative futures, and the lived realities of environmental displacement, positioning art as both a research tool and a site of civic engagement. Hunter is also a cultural worker deeply invested in community-building and advocacy, particularly around water access and ecological justice. She has been recognized as a 3Arts Awardee and has exhibited widely in Chicago and nationally.

Carita Letitia Huckaby (née Jenkins, born 1972) is an American photographer who creates multimedia artwork combining photography and textiles to depict both family narratives and African American history. She mixes materials to reveal historical topics is exemplified by her 2015 Bayou Baroque exhibit honoring the nuns [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nun] at the Sisters of the Holy Family Mother House in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is married to painter Sedrick Huckaby.

Carl Juste born in Haiti and based in Miami, is an award-winning photojournalist for The Miami Herald @miamiherald [https://www.instagram.com/miamiherald/] . His striking and provocative black and white photographs have appeared in stories domestically and abroad. He cofounded Iris Photo Collective, a collaboration to create new ways to document the relationship of people of color to the world.

Carlos Bunga (1976- ) is a Portuguese sculptor known for his installations out of mass-produced materials, like cardboard, duct tape, and home paint. Bunga is interested in the relationship between the body and space. He investigates architecture and its connection to power structures. His works on paper are closely related to his sculptures and installations. Relationality is an important aspect of his work--doing and undoing, unmaking and remaking micro and macro, investigation and conclusion--are conceptual frameworks he thinks utilize.   Bunga received a BA in Fine Arts from Escola Superior de Arte e Design in 2000.

Carlos Idun-Tawiah (born May 18, 1997, in Takoradi, Ghana) is a Ghanaian photographer and filmmaker based in Accra whose practice transforms personal and collective memory into cinematic visual narratives about contemporary African life. Drawing extensively from family albums, vernacular photography, African photographic archives, fashion imagery, and lived experience, Idun-Tawiah moves between documentary and fiction, reconstructing scenes that feel simultaneously remembered and imagined. His photographs center the intimate rhythms of Black life—family, friendship, faith, childhood, youth, community, love, and everyday ritual—while approaching joy and hope as forms of cultural preservation and resistance.  Questions of family, grief, masculinity, and inherited memory became particularly prominent in Hero, Father, Friend. Prompted by the death of his father and the realization that very few photographs existed of them together, Idun-Tawiah constructs an imagined photographic biography of the relationship he remembers—and the experiences he wishes had been preserved. Through staged scenes of fathers and sons eating, traveling, playing, praying, grooming, embracing, and simply spending time together, the series considers Black fatherhood through tenderness, vulnerability, care, and ordinary intimacy rather than stereotype. Memories Between Earth and Sky, developed collaboratively with his mother, extends this approach by imaginatively reconstructing the largely unphotographed love story between his parents.  Idun-Tawiah’s work has been presented internationally through Les Rencontres d’Arles, Triennale Milano, Paris Photo, AIPAD—The Photography Show, Getxophoto, Fotofestiwal Łódź, LagosPhoto, Belfast Photo Festival, CONTACT Photography Festival, The Armory Show, and Art Basel Miami Beach. In 2025, he won the Deloitte Photo Grant’s Segnalazioni/Nomination section for Hero, Father, Friend, leading to a museum presentation at Triennale Milano. In 2026, his work entered the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and he began a three-month residency at Studio Voltaire in London focused on expanding photography into sculptural objects, installations, and historical photographic processes. 

Carlos Martiel (1989- ) is a Cuban installation and performance artist. He explores racism, immigration, gender, and the legacies of colonialism. With his body as the starting place, he visualizes the ongoing violence that Black people face.  Martiel graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts in 2009.