Voices of the Diaspora: The Artisans Behind the Canvas

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

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

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

Jacqueline Bishop (born Feb, 28 1971 in Kingston, Jamaica) is a Jamaican-American multidisciplinary artist, writer, poet, scholar, and educator whose practice spans ceramics, collage, textiles, painting, drawing, photography, video, installation, and creative writing. Her work is particularly concerned with recovering Black women’s histories that have been marginalized, silenced, or omitted from official archives. Drawing on Jamaican family memory, Caribbean visual culture, West African and Indigenous knowledge systems, colonial archives, botanical imagery, folk traditions, and women’s domestic craft, Bishop uses everyday objects and decorative surfaces to reconsider histories of enslavement, migration, labor, gender, sexuality, and cultural survival. She is currently a Clinical Full Professor at New York University.  Bishop’s recent ceramic work has brought particular attention to the Caribbean market woman and the histories embedded in British and European porcelain. Growing up in Jamaica, she remembers her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother treasuring decorated china in mahogany cabinets, even though the imagery on those plates rarely represented Black Caribbean lives.  In works such as History at the Dinner Table, The Market Woman’s Story, The Keeper of All The Secrets, The Narratives of Migration, Song of the Banana Man, and A Way Outa No Way – Charleston Ladies, Bishop reverses that visual order. She places enslaved women, market traders, agricultural workers, botanicals, abolitionist imagery, migration histories, and family archives onto porcelain surfaces associated historically with European wealth, empire, refinement, and colonial trade.  Bishop’s broader interdisciplinary practice also investigates migration, exile, home, sexuality, desire, family, landscape, and the instability of Caribbean identity. Earlier paintings, photography, textiles, and video addressed Jamaican political history, Rastafarian ideas of Babylon and Zion, female sexual desire, and the experience of being simultaneously an insider and outsider to one’s birthplace.  Her scholarly practice is similarly intertwined with her artwork: she is conducting doctoral research at the University of Leeds on Jamaican women’s decorative and ornamental textile traditions, examining connections among Indigenous, African, and Caribbean knowledge systems and positioning vernacular needlework within Caribbean art history.  Bishop’s work has been exhibited at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Queen’s House/Royal Museums Greenwich, British Ceramics Biennial, Gardiner Museum, National Gallery of Jamaica, National Museum Jamaica, Center for Craft, Museum of the African Diaspora, and other venues internationally.  Her work is held by institutions including the Fitzwilliam Museum, Williams College Museum of Art, The Harris, Royal Museums Greenwich, National Museum Jamaica, Gardiner Museum, and New York University. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Morocco, UNESCO/Fulbright Fellow in Paris, and Dora Maar/Brown Foundation Fellow in France, and she received the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for The Gymnast & Other Positions.

Jamele Wright Sr. (born 1970, Dayton, Ohio, United States) is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores the Black American vernacular experience, migration, family, and spiritual relationships between Africa and the American South. Working across mixed media, textile-based abstraction, sculpture, painting, and installation, Wright examines memory, material culture, and Black life through found materials, Georgia red clay, Dutch wax cloth, and sampling-based formal strategies.  Wright studied Art History at Georgia State University and later earned an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. His work often engages abstraction, Great Migration histories, Black material traditions, family, and the spiritual and physical resonance of land, using layered textiles, clay, found objects, and painterly construction to consider continuity, rupture, and the making of diasporic identity.  His work has been exhibited at Mindy Solomon Gallery, the Gibbes Museum of Art, the Albany Museum of Art, and in projects such as We Are All Kinda Floating in Athens, Georgia. He has completed a fellowship at Project for Empty Spaces and residencies at MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, Hambidge Art Center, and the Gibbes Museum of Art. Jamele Wright Sr. lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.

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

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

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

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

Janiva Ellis (born 1987 in Oakland, California) is an American painter whose psychologically charged compositions combine figuration, abstraction, landscape, caricature, and appropriated imagery to examine Blackness, race, violence, desire, fantasy, and the ideological structures embedded within Western visual culture. Working primarily in oil on canvas and linen, Ellis constructs densely layered scenes in which recognizable bodies, cartoon figures, art-historical references, fragmented landscapes, and abstract passages collide, producing images that resist straightforward narrative or resolution.  Born in Oakland and raised partly in Hawaiʻi, including Kauaʻi and Oʻahu, Ellis has discussed the complexity of growing up Black and biracial within environments where Black communities were relatively small. These experiences inform a practice concerned with the psychic and social effects of racial difference, belonging, isolation, and representation. Her paintings frequently center Black figures while examining the broader visual systems that have historically distorted, excluded, sentimentalized, or mythologized Black life.  Ellis draws extensively from Western painting, Romantic landscape, religious imagery, film, television, animation, cartoons, popular culture, and contemporary events. Rather than simply quoting these sources, she disrupts their familiar meanings, exposing what she identifies as the erasures and violence underlying cultural canonization. Humor, distortion, speed, visual interruption, and moments of apparent incompletion allow her to move between critique and imaginative release. Her recent paintings increasingly investigate ruins, collapsing cultural myths, aspiration, failure, and the possibility of making new images from inherited structures that no longer hold.  Ellis earned a BFA from California College of the Arts in 2012. Her work has been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum, Hammer Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Kunsthalle Basel, Dallas Museum of Art, and MoMA PS1. In 2026, Kunsthalle Basel presented Geneva, her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe, while MoMA PS1 included her work in Greater New York 2026. Ellis lives and works in New York.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Mack-Watkins is a contemporary visual artist and illustrator whose artistic aesthetic draws from a confluence of reference points, most of which include her Japanese Mokuhanga printmaking techniques and her culturally rich southern roots. Mack-Watkins’ work investigates societal conformities that isolate individuals to be confined to fit into a space. This space includes the complexities of being a woman, beauty images, relationships, body image, power, and gender roles. 

Jennifer Packer (born 1984, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American painter whose work centers intimacy, vulnerability, and the emotional textures of Black life through portraiture and still life. Working primarily in oil on canvas, Packer creates atmospheric compositions in which figures and floral arrangements emerge from and dissolve into luminous, often spare grounds. Her paintings are marked by gestural brushwork, subdued yet radiant color palettes, and an intentional refusal of hyper-definition. Rather than rendering subjects with photographic clarity, Packer allows forms to blur and bleed, foregrounding feeling over precision. Across her practice, Packer explores themes of grief, tenderness, friendship, queerness, and the politics of representation. Her portraits frequently depict friends, family members, and members of her broader community, positioning painting as an act of care and relational witnessing. The body in her work is neither monumentalized nor sensationalized; instead, it is treated with quiet dignity, occupying space through presence rather than spectacle. Her floral paintings—often associated historically with memorial and decorative traditions—extend these inquiries, becoming meditations on loss, fragility, and the persistence of beauty amid vulnerability. Packer’s work also engages art historical lineages, drawing from traditions of European portraiture, still life, and abstraction while reorienting them through a contemporary Black feminist lens. By destabilizing the boundary between figure and ground, abstraction and representation, she creates a visual language that resists fixed interpretation. In doing so, her paintings challenge dominant narratives about visibility and legibility, insisting that Black interiority need not be fully disclosed to be fully present. Packer received her BFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University and her MFA from Yale School of Art. She has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, and her work is held in major institutional collections. She lives and works in New York.

Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste (1984-) is a composer and visual artist who employs the use of multiple media including performance, conceptual art, and architecture. His work is informed by human interactions and a discovery of the world. Grounded by the senses and the concept of universal experience, Toussaint-Baptiste is known for creating large-scale narratives that align with a variety of media. 

Jesús Hilario-Reyes (born October 28, 1996 in San Juan, Puerto Rico) is an anti-disciplinary artist and DJ whose practice moves across sculpture, sound, performance, expanded cinema, video, installation, digital media, metalwork, and land-based interventions. Born in Puerto Rico to parents who emigrated from the Dominican Republic, Hilario-Reyes earned a BFA in Fine Arts Studio from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2025. They currently live and work in Brooklyn, New York. Hilario-Reyes situates their work at the intersections of sonic performance, land installation, expanded cinema, Black diasporic culture, queer nightlife, and Caribbean ecology. Central to the practice is the concept of destierro, a Spanish term they use to evoke being “torn from the land.” Through this framework, Hilario-Reyes considers exile, migration, displacement, Black and queer fugitivity, unstable geography, and the ways bodies construct forms of belonging when home cannot be understood as fixed territory.  Caribbean shorelines and mangrove ecosystems frequently appear alongside nightclubs, dance floors, raves, Carnival, hurricanes, and sound systems. Hilario-Reyes treats these environments as related structures: both mangroves and Black queer dance spaces exist through networks of interdependence, movement, adaptation, refuge, and transformation. Their work often records the physical residue of gatherings—the marks left by dancers, scans of club floors, sound, heat, touch, or temporary architectures to reconsider the dance floor as an archive of collective experience.  Hilario-Reyes’s institutional profile expanded considerably in 2025–26. They completed their Yale MFA in 2025, presented on atmospherics at Project for Empty Space, participated in Fade at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2026, received a 2026 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Craft/Sculpture, and became Performance Space New York’s 2026–27 OPEN ROOM resident. Their year-long installation Cavernous Shoal transforms the institution’s lobby into a listening room featuring a bespoke sound system and mangrove-root sculpture, treating Black diasporic dance culture and coastal ecology as models for creating belonging through relation rather than fixed geography. 

Joana Choumali (born 1974, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire) is an Ivorian visual artist whose multidisciplinary photographic practice explores memory, migration, identity, and the diversity of African cultures. Working across conceptual photography, mixed media, documentary photography, and hand embroidery, Choumali examines portraiture, daily life, and emotional recovery through staged imagery, meditative stitching, and narrative observation.  Choumali studied graphic arts in Casablanca, Morocco, and worked as an art director in advertising before committing fully to her photography practice. Her work often engages portraiture, marketplaces, mental health, oral culture, and contemporary African experience, using conceptual portraits, documentary photography, textile intervention, and embroidery directly on photographs to consider memory, healing, and social transformation.  Her work has been exhibited at Harvard Art Museums, Gallery 1957, the Venice Biennale, Sperone Westwater, and Beurs van Berlage. She has received the Prix Pictet, the CAP Prize, the LensCulture Emerging Photographer Award, the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund, and the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography. Joana Choumali lives and works in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. 

Jodi Minnis is a Bahamian multidisciplinary artist working across photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and performance. Her practice explores and unpacks tropes of Black, specifically Bahamian, women in culture.  Minnis received her BFA from the University of Tampa in 2019.

John Abe (1956-2024) was a Nigerian photographer. He ran Abi Morocco Photo, a photography studio in Lagos up until 2006 when he retired. 

John Rhoden (1916-2001) was an American sculptor. He created works in bronze, wood, and stone. He created figurative and abstract sculptures. His practice was influenced by his extensive international travel and naturalistic forms.  Rhoden attended Talladega College, Alabama,  New York School of Art, and Columbia University.

John West Tjupurrula (born c. 1982, Western Desert, Australia) is a Pintupi artist whose paintings are grounded in ancestral narratives, Country, and the visual languages of Western Desert art. Working primarily in acrylic on canvas, Tjupurrula translates Dreaming stories associated with his Country into dynamic compositions of dots, lines, and layered color fields. His works map sacred sites, waterholes, and travel routes, communicating cultural knowledge through abstraction while maintaining deep ties to Indigenous law and custodianship. Tjupurrula’s practice reflects the continuity of Pintupi culture and the living presence of land, memory, and ceremony.

Joiri Minaya (1990- ) is a multidisciplinary Dominican artist. Minaya's interest in the body and the colonial gaze manifests through prints, collage, performance, and installation work. decolonization and her personal experiences inform the lens of her work. Further, she aims to destabilize the notion of an imagined tropical identity through her work. Her prints feature women and tropical, floral designs reinforcing the relationship to the female body and "places of paradise".  Minaya received her Associate’s Degrees from La Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales in Santo Domingo in 2009 and Altos de Chavón School of Design in 2011. She received her BFA from Parsons New School for Design in 2013. 

Jonathan Lydon Chase (1989- ) is an American interdisciplinary artist who works in painting, video, works on paper, sound, and sculpture. Chase's work centers on Black queer subjectivity. Their expressionist works reflect the interior and exterior realities of the individuals populating the canvas.  MFA, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA 2013 BFA, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA 

Jordan Casteel (1989- ) is an American figurative painter. Casteel paints portraits of friends, family members, neighbors, and strangers in the Harlem neighborhood and New York more broadly. Her subjects gaze directly at the viewer asserting their vulnerability and humanity.  Casteel received her Bachelor of Arts from Agnes Scott College, Decatur, GA in 2011 and her Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT in 2014. 

Jota Mombaça (1991- ) is a Brazilian interdisciplinary artist who describes their practice as “non-disciplinary”.  Their practice is influenced by poetry, critical theory, and performance. Gender exploration and anti-colonial framing underpin all of her work. Through installation and performance, she explores the relation between opacity and self-preservation in the experience of racialized trans artists in the Global Art World. Mombaça received her Bachelor of Social Sciences from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil in 2013. They received their Master’s in Social Sciences from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in 2017. 

Joyce J. Scott (born September 25, 1948, Baltimore, MD) is an American multidisciplinary artist whose work confronts race, gender, sexuality, violence, and power through sculpture, performance, installation, and craft-based practices. Best known for her virtuosic use of beadwork, Scott transforms traditionally feminized and decorative materials into politically charged forms—figures, garments, and objects that are simultaneously seductive and confrontational. Drawing from African diasporic traditions, humor, satire, and personal narrative, her practice challenges social taboos and exposes systemic injustice while insisting on pleasure, resilience, and agency. Scott’s work has been exhibited internationally and is held in major museum collections.

Joy Gregory (b. 1959, Bicester, England) is a British visual artist whose multifaceted practice spans photography, video, textiles, and experimental print techniques. Born to Jamaican parents and based in London, Gregory investigates issues of race, beauty, identity, memory, and cultural difference through both historical and contemporary lenses.  As a photographer she makes full use of the media from video, digital and analogue photography to Victorian print processes. In 2002, Gregory received the NESTA Fellowship, which enabled her the time and the freedom to research for a major piece around language endangerment. The first of this series was the video piece Gomera, which premiered at the Sydney Biennale in May 2010. She is the recipient of numerous awards and has exhibited all over the world showing in many festivals and biennales. Her work included in many collections including the UK Arts Council Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, and Yale British Art Collection. She currently lives and works in London.

Joy Labinjo (born Dec 4, 1994) is a British-Nigerian artist whose painting practice explores family, race, memory, migration, and the social textures of Black life in Britain. Working across large-scale figurative painting, Labinjo examines identity, community, and belonging through vivid color, flattened perspective, patterned interiors, and compositions drawn from family photographs, found images, and historical archives.  Labinjo earned a BFA from Newcastle University in 2017 and an MFA from the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford in 2022; she also spent a semester at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Her work often engages Black British history, domestic life, portraiture, and archival reconstruction, using collage-based preparatory processes and bold painterly form to consider how personal and collective histories shape the present.  Her work has been exhibited at Southwark Park Galleries, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Tiwani Contemporary, and through Art on the Underground in Brixton station. She won the Woon Art Prize in 2017, and her work is held in collections including the Toledo Museum of Art, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Government Art Collection, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and MACAAL in Marrakech. Joy Labinjo lives and works in London.

Juana Valdés (born 1963 in Cabañas, Pinar del Río, Cuba) is a Cuban American multidisciplinary artist whose research-based practice spans sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, video, installation, performance, and public art. Valdés migrated to the United States in 1971 and grew up in Miami. She received a BFA in Sculpture from Parsons School of Design in 1991 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1993 before attending the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 1995. She currently lives and works between Miami and Amherst, Massachusetts, where she is an Associate Professor of Printmaking in the Department of Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Valdés’s practice examines race, migration, transnationalism, gender, labor, class, and colonial histories, particularly through the experiences of the Afro-Latinx and Caribbean diaspora. Working at the intersection of conceptual art, social practice, and historical research, she investigates how everyday materials and objects contain histories of colonialism, displacement, global trade, and cultural exchange. Her work often functions as a kind of archive, using material culture to uncover histories that have been obscured or separated from the commodities and images through which they continue to circulate. Materiality plays a central role in Valdés’s work. She has worked extensively with bone china, ceramics, maps, textiles, photographs, found domestic objects, and maritime imagery, connecting the physical movement of materials to the forced and voluntary movement of people across oceans and national borders. In projects such as An Inherent View of the World, she brings together mass-produced porcelain objects to trace relationships among colonial expansion, Asian-European trade, Western consumer culture, labor, and racial hierarchies. Her Colored Bone China works similarly use the historically prized whiteness of bone china as a means of interrogating race, pigmentocracy, and the social construction of whiteness. Migration and the ocean recur throughout Valdés’s practice as both personal and historical frameworks. Drawing from her own experience of Cuban migration and her African and Caribbean ancestry, she examines exile, displacement, diaspora, and the ways identity is continually reconstructed across places. Her first museum solo exhibition, Juana Valdés: Embodied Memories, Ancestral Histories, presented at Sarasota Art Museum in 2023–24, brought together three decades of work addressing migration, race, gender, material culture, and the representation of the female body. In 2026, Valdés received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, recognizing her sustained contributions to contemporary art and her continuing research into diasporic memory and material histories.

Juan Carlos Alom (born 1964 in Havana, Cuba) is a Cuban photographer and filmmaker whose multidisciplinary practice explores identity, survival, spirituality, landscape, and the communities that comprise Cuba and its diaspora. Working across documentary and experimental photography, film, and video, Alom examines the social and emotional realities of Cuban life through spontaneous image-making, symbolic composition, and an approach shaped by the economic and political upheavals of the country’s Special Period.  Alom studied photographic restoration and conservation at the Fototeca de Cuba and later graduated from the Semiotic Studio of Urban Environment at Havana’s International Institute of Journalism. His work often engages Afro-Cuban religion, ritual, race, migration, sexuality, the body, and human relationships with the natural environment, using black-and-white film, experimental processing, cinematic sequencing, and intimate documentary observation to consider resilience, vulnerability, and collective memory.  His work has been exhibited at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, the San Francisco Art Institute, El Apartamento, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Havana Biennial, and institutions throughout the Americas, Europe, and South Africa. He was selected by Time as one of Latin America’s most relevant photographers of the millennium and served as a Mellon Artist in Residence at New York University’s Hemispheric Institute. Recent gallery information places Juan Carlos Alom in New York, while his practice and exhibition history remain deeply connected to Havana. 

Juan Ford (1973-) is an Australian artist who primarily works with painting. His work takes inspiration from nature and aims to create connections between the human relationship with the natural world. 

Juan Roberto Diago (1971- ) is a Cuban mixed media artist, incorporating painting, printmaking, and wood into his work. Racial dynamics in Cuba are a large influence in his work. His work highlights topics that are not given much attention in Cuba, with a large emphasis on the transatlantic slave trade. Many of his works feature a singular expressionless silhouette in his retelling of Cuban history from an expansive perspective. He is a leading member of the new Afro-Cuban cultural movement. Diago studied art at San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havanna, Cuba in 1990. 

Julia Valdés Borrero (born February 26, 1952, in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba) is a Cuban visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores memory, landscape, architecture, time, and the physical traces left upon built environments. Working across painting, drawing, engraving, ceramics, monotype, collage, and mixed media, Valdés Borrero examines interior spaces, walls, doors, thresholds, and urban surfaces through abstract compositions and materially layered imagery.  Valdés Borrero studied at the José Joaquín Tejada School and Workshop of Visual Arts in Santiago de Cuba from 1962 to 1966 and at the National School of Art in Havana from 1967 to 1972. She later earned a degree in Art History from the University of Oriente in 1989. Her work often engages nostalgia, erosion, cultural memory, landscape, domestic architecture, and the passage of time, using oil, acrylic, jute, fabric collage, paper, glass, and monotype processes to transform weathered surfaces and architectural fragments into psychological and historical spaces.  Her work has been exhibited at the Havana Biennial, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Cuba, Galerie Wuensch in Austria, Galería Servando Cabrera Moreno, and galleries and cultural institutions throughout Cuba, Europe, Latin America, and the United States. She has received numerous national painting prizes, the Distinction for National Culture, and the Painting Prize at Arte No Morrazo in Galicia. Julia Valdés Borrero lives and works in Cuba, maintaining strong artistic connections to both Santiago de Cuba and Havana. 

Julie Ethel Dash (b. October 22, 1952, New York City, USA) is an American filmmaker, writer, and visual artist whose pioneering work reshaped representations of Black women, memory, and diaspora on screen. She emerged from the L.A. Rebellion cinema movement and became widely celebrated for her landmark feature film Daughters of the Dust (1991), the first full-length film by an African-American woman released theatrically and now preserved by the U.S. Library of Congress for its cultural, historical and aesthetic significance. 

Julie Mehretu (1970- ) is an Ethiopian American painter and printmaker who creates large abstract, layered landscapes. Her work explores themes such as colonialism, capitalism, war, global uprising, diaspora, and displacement. Taking inspiration from architecture, music, and, literature her drawings are highly gestural. Recently, she has been interested in the idea that drawing can be an extension of an activist impulse.  Mehretu studied at the University Cheik Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal from 1990-1991. She received her BA from in 1992 and her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. 

June Edmonds (1959-) is an artist from Los Angeles, California. Primarily employing the medium of painting, her work is colorful and vibrant. She is informed by the African American experience, as well as by abstraction.

Kachelle Knowles (1990- ) is a Bahamian artist working on paper that explores gender identity, cultural preservation, and its production, and social relations within the Black community. Black men are typically the subjects in her works.  Knowles received her bachelor’s degree in Illustration at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2017.  

Kadir Nelson (1974-) is a visual artist from California. Mainly employing the use of mediums such as painting and illustration, his work considers African American history and culture. He is known for touching on the emotional aspect of art and creative production. 

Kalup Linzy (born July 23, 1977, in Clermont, Florida) is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores gender, sexuality, class, family, religion, and the social textures of Black life in the rural American South. Working across video, performance, music, drawing, photography, and painting, Linzy examines identity, desire, and cultural stereotype through satire, melodrama, drag performance, and a deliberately lo-fi aesthetic shaped by soap operas, television, and popular culture.  Linzy received both a BFA and an MFA from the University of South Florida and also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work often engages performance, language, community, religion, and media culture, using recurring characters, scripted narrative, singing, costume, and role-play to consider how race, gender performance, queerness, and aspiration are shaped through social expectation and entertainment forms. Across his videos and performances, he frequently appears in drag and inhabits multiple roles, blurring the boundaries between critique, comedy, vulnerability, and fantasy.  His work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and other major institutions, and he has received honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Kalup Linzy lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (b. 1939-) is a Sudanese painter and art teacher known as one of the founders of The Crystalist conceptual art group in Khartoum. The goal of Khartoum was to allow the all-female artists of the group to distinguish themselves from the traditional male center outlook prevalent in the 1970s Sudanese art scene. Ishag's work uses the concepts of earthliness and the spiritual to discuss humans' connection to the natural world #Sudan #Sudaneseartist #painter #Khartoum #blackart  

Kamal Sinclair is the director of Sundance Institute's New Frontier Lab Programs, a consultant to the Ford Foundation's JustFilms program, and an artist and producer on the transmedia art project Question Bridge: Black Males.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985, East Palo Alto, CA, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator whose expansive practice investigates language, text, knowledge production, and Black epistemologies. Working across installations, publications, performance-lectures, print, collage, public text works and digital media, Rasheed examines how reading, writing and interpretation function as acts of remembering, forgetting and transformation.