Voices of the Diaspora: The Artisans Behind the Canvas

Kandy G. Lopez (born 1987, New Jersey, United States) is an Afro-Caribbean American artist whose multidisciplinary portrait practice explores cultural identity, visibility, power, and representation. Working across fiber, painting, glass, and mixed media, Lopez examines how race, class, gender, and self-fashioning shape the lives of marginalized communities through monumental portraiture, layered materials, and tactile surface. Lopez studied painting and marketing/management at the University of South Florida and later earned an MFA in painting from Florida Atlantic University in 2014. Her work often engages portraiture, community, swagger, resilience, and the politics of being seen, using hook mesh, yarn, acrylic, and hand-built surfaces to consider how identity is both constructed and defended in everyday life. Their work has been exhibited at ACA Galleries, Riverside Art Museum, the Houston Museum of African American Culture, the Orlando Museum of Art, and the Armory Art Center. She has received the 1858 Prize from the Gibbes Museum of Art and the People’s Choice Award from the Orlando Museum of Art. Kandy G. Lopez lives and works in South Florida.

Kapwani Kiwanga (born 1978, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) is a French-Canadian artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, video, sound, photography, and performance. Research-driven and conceptually rigorous, her work examines systems of power through the lens of suppressed histories, colonialism, institutional structures, and the everyday mechanisms through which authority is exercised and remembered.  Kiwanga studied anthropology and comparative religion at McGill University in Montreal before pursuing art studies at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris. That academic background remains central to her practice: her projects frequently move between fact and speculation, using the visual language of display, classification, architecture, and ceremony to unsettle dominant historical frameworks and create space for marginalized or obscured perspectives. Across bodies of work, she has investigated subjects such as decolonization, race, gender, social control, and diasporic memory, often through materials whose political meanings are subtle but deeply charged.  Her work has been presented widely in major international exhibitions and institutions. In 2024, Kiwanga represented Canada at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia with Trinket, a site-specific installation for the Canada Pavilion. Her first major mid-career retrospective, The Length of the Horizon, was presented at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 2023. She has also had solo presentations and exhibitions at institutions including the New Museum, New York; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto; Serralves Museum, Porto; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Kiwanga is the recipient of several major honors, including the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2020, the Sobey Art Award in 2018, the Frieze Artist Award in 2018, and the Zurich Art Prize in 2022. She lives and works between Paris and Berlin. 

Kara Walker (1969- ) is an American artist who explores gender, sexuality, violence, and history through silhouetted figures. She uses drawing, painting, text, shadow puppetry, film, and sculpture to examine the ongoing trauma of enslaved Africans.  Walker received her BFA in Painting/Printmaking at the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. 

Karimah Ashadu (born 1985 in London, United Kingdom) is a British-born Nigerian artist and film director whose multidisciplinary practice spans moving image, film, sculpture, photography, installation, painting, and experimental camera technologies. Raised in Nigeria and now working between Hamburg and Lagos, Ashadu focuses on labor, patriarchy, masculinity, economic precarity, migration, and the pursuit of personal independence within Nigeria and its diaspora. Her films frequently follow workers operating within informal or precarious economies, using sustained observation to consider how individuals negotiate social expectations, material limitations, and aspirations for autonomy.  In Machine Boys (2024), Ashadu follows Lagos okada motorcycle-taxi riders whose livelihoods were affected by a government ban on their informal transport economy. The film examines not only economic precarity and police harassment but also the self-fashioning, style, physicality, and masculine performance surrounding the riders. Presented with the brass sculpture Wreath, the work earned Ashadu the Silver Lion for a Promising Young Participant at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Her subsequent film MUSCLE (2025) turns to bodybuilders in Lagos, extending her examination of masculinity by considering the body as a site of labor, investment, discipline, aspiration, and economic value. Ashadu received a BA (Hons) in Fine Art and History of Art and Architecture from the University of Reading in 2007 and an MA in Spatial Design with a film specialization from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2011. She was subsequently a participant at De Ateliers in Amsterdam from 2014 to 2016. Her work has been shown at the Venice Biennale, Camden Art Centre, MoMA PS1, Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, Secession Vienna, Kunsthalle Bremen, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Canal Projects, and Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. In 2020, she founded Golddust by Ashadu, a production company specializing in artists’ films centered on Black culture and African discourses. Her honors include the ars viva Prize, Prize of the Böttcherstraße, Silver Lion at Venice, Lichtwark-Förderpreis, and a 2026 honorary doctorate from University of the Arts London.

Katesi Jacqueline Kalange (1995- ) is a Ugandan multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, painting, and performance installation. She uses recycled and upcycled materials to create sustainable sculptures with a community.  Kalange received her Bachelor of Art and Industrial Design from Kyambogo University. 

Kehinde Wiley is a portraiture painter known for his large oil paintings of Black men as the center of reimagined works of the old Masters and other famous paintings. In a departure from his usual subjects, here are works depicting Black women with elaborate and detailed hairstyles. It is easy to see Black women wearing the crown they deserve and are not seen often wearing often enough

Keisha Scarville (born 1975, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American artist whose photographic practice explores loss, latency, diaspora, memory, and the elusive body. Working across photography, mixed media, and book-making, Scarville examines grief, transformation, family history, and belonging through portraiture, self-imaging, and materially resonant compositions that often blur the boundaries between presence and absence.  Scarville earned a B.S. from the Rochester Institute of Technology and studied at Parsons School of Design/The New School. Her work often engages family archive, migration, embodiment, and the emotional afterlives of personal loss, using photography, everyday objects, garments, and serial image-making to consider how identity is shaped through memory, inheritance, and the traces left by those no longer physically present. Her widely discussed series Mama’s Clothes is especially central to her practice, using her late mother’s clothing to create images that hold grief, intimacy, and diasporic belonging in tension.  Her work has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, the Studio Museum in Harlem, ICA Philadelphia, the Brooklyn Museum, and Higher Pictures, among other venues. Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, George Eastman Museum, the Denver Art Museum, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. She is the recipient of the 2026 Brooklyn Museum UOVO Prize, the 2024 Saltzman Prize in Photography, and the 2023 Creator Labs Photo Fund. Keisha Scarville lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. 

Keith Morrison (born May 20, 1942, in Linstead, Saint Catherine Parish, Jamaica) is a Jamaican-born American artist whose painting-based practice explores Black history, Caribbean identity, migration, memory, mythology, and the psychic afterlives of colonialism. Working across painting, printmaking, and drawing, Morrison examines diasporic experience, social history, and spiritual symbolism through richly layered compositions that move between abstraction, figuration, and surrealist visual language.  Morrison earned both his BFA in 1963 and MFA in 1965 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work often engages Caribbean heritage, folklore, ritual, politics, and historical violence, using painting and printmaking to consider the relationship between personal memory and collective struggle across the African diaspora. Sources note that he worked as an abstract painter from roughly 1965 to 1985 before shifting toward a more figurative and surrealist mode deeply informed by Caribbean history and symbolism. He has also had a significant career as an educator, curator, critic, and academic administrator, and is professor emeritus at Tyler School of Art at Temple University.  His work has been exhibited in major solo and institutional presentations including the Katzen Arts Center, the University of Delaware Museums, and the 49th Venice Biennale. He has received the Commander in the Order of Distinction from Jamaica, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Brandywine Workshop, and other honors for both his artistic and educational contributions. Keith Morrison lives and works in the United States. 

Keith Piper (1960- ) is a multimedia artist, curator, and researcher.  In the early 1980s, Piper was a founder member of the Blk Art Group a cohort of young artists of African Caribbean descent. They were inspired by the British Black Arts Movement and sought to answer what Black art was and the future for Black artists.  ⁠He established a research-driven approach to his practice prioritizing exploration over an attachment to any particular media. This means he moves from painting to photography to computer technology fairly easily.  Piper received his BA in Fine Art from Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham in 1983. He received his MA in Environmental Media from the Royal College of Art in 1986. He received two honorary doctorates from the University of Wolverhampton and Coventry University in 2002 and 2023 respectively.  ⁠

Kendrick Daye (1987- ) is an American multi-media artist and the creator of the Black Queer Tarot. Daye is interested in exploring Black, queer narratives through his work, most notably known for his collages in both digital and analog formats. Daye's work pulls heavily from Afrofuturusm, imagining a future where Black, queer people are free to express themselves free of fear and judgment. ⁠

Kennedi Carter (born Dec 31, 1998, Charlottesville, Virginia) is an American artist and photographer whose photographic practice explores Black life, intimacy, memory, beauty, and the sociopolitical dimensions of representation. Working across fine art and editorial photography, Carter examines skin, texture, softness, trauma, love, and community through richly composed portraits and images that center the emotional and aesthetic complexity of Black experience.  Carter studied African American Studies at Duke University. Her work often engages portraiture, archives, memory, and Black southern life, using intimate image-making, stylized composition, and an attention to everyday beauty to consider confidence, care, inheritance, and the visual language of Black self-representation. Her practice moves fluidly between editorial commissions and fine art projects, while maintaining a consistent investment in Black subjectivity and the power of the photographic image.  Her work has been exhibited at the RISD Museum, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Saatchi Gallery, the Harwood Museum of Art, and the Harvey B. Gantt Center. She has received recognition including British Journal of Photography’s Ones to Watch, The New York Times’ “next great image makers” recognition, and Adweek’s Creative 100. Carter is currently based in the American South.

Kennedy Yanko (born 1988, St. Louis, Missouri) is an American sculptor known for her hybrid works that combine salvaged metal with paint skin to create dynamic, materially complex sculptures. Her practice investigates the relationship between strength and vulnerability, permanence and fluidity, often using industrial scrap metal alongside thin sheets of dried acrylic paint that she refers to as “paint skins.” These elements are folded, draped, and suspended to create forms that blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Yanko’s work explores the emotional and symbolic possibilities embedded in materials, particularly those that carry histories of labor, industry, and transformation. The heavy steel structures she employs suggest endurance and rigidity, while the delicate, malleable paint skins evoke softness, movement, and fragility. Through this interplay, her sculptures examine the tension between control and release, inviting viewers to consider how physical materials can embody psychological and emotional states. Her approach to abstraction is deeply informed by process. Yanko allows chance, gravity, and the physical behavior of materials to guide the development of each piece, producing sculptural forms that feel both intentional and organic. The resulting works often resemble draped fabric, geological formations, or bodily gestures, creating a sense of movement and presence within static objects. Yanko’s work has been widely exhibited in galleries and institutions internationally, and she has become recognized for expanding the language of contemporary abstraction through sculpture. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Kermit Miller (1973- ) is a Bahamian painter whose works focus on everyday life. His vibrant portraits depict scenes of joy and beauty in daily happenings. 

Kerry James Marshall (1955- ) is an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor. Marshall utilizes a historical approach to his work, engaging with six centuries of Western painting. His figurative works assert Black people into a Western art historical canon. His works often feature subjects with extremely dark skin, an intervention with negative associations with dark skin.  Marshall received his BFA from the Otis Art Institute  in 1978 and later was awarded an honorary doctorate, from the above in 1999. 

Kevin Beasley (1985- ) is an American artist working across performance, sound, and installation. Beasley uses found materials to work through issues of race and power in the United States. He uses found objects such as shirts, colorful house dresses, and durags to create his sculptures. Sound is an important aspect of his work. Sonic elements and live performances connect his work to the physicality of the body and production.  Beasley received his BFA from the College for Creative Studies, Detroit, in 2007 and his MFA from Yale University in 2012. 

Khadija Saye (1992-2017), also known as Ya-Haddy Sisi Sayve, was a Gambian-British photographer and activist. Her photography explores aspects of her Gambian-British identity and mixed-faith background (her mother was Christian, and her father is Muslim). Her photographs situate her between two planes, her Gambian heritage and upbringing in the United Kingdom. Saye’s series, Dwellings: in this Space we Breathe, was shown at the 57th Venice Biennale's Diaspora Pavilion. It was a continuation of Saye’s exploration of her identity and heritage, specifically focused on the migration of Gambian spiritual practices.  Saye received her degree in photography University for the Creative Arts at Farnham and obtained a photography degree in 2013.  

Khari Turner (born April 26, 1991, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is an American painter and multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores Black identity, ancestry, memory, spirituality, environmental history, and the relationship between Black people and water. Combining figuration and abstraction, Turner constructs images in which fragments of Black bodies—particularly faces, mouths, noses, hands, and silhouettes—emerge from and dissolve into fluid fields of color. Central to his practice is his use of water collected from oceans, rivers, lakes, and other sites carrying personal or historical connections to Black life, which he mixes directly into ink and paint or pours across his surfaces.  Growing up in Milwaukee near Lake Michigan and the Milwaukee River strongly shaped Turner’s relationship to water. He has described water as both material and historical archive: a substance shared by living people, ancestors, and future generations. He has collected water from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Senegalese coast, Lake Michigan, the Milwaukee River, New York Harbor, and other locations associated with Black history and migration. Through these materials, Turner addresses the transatlantic slave trade and Middle Passage without centering Black suffering alone, instead emphasizing survival, joy, beauty, vulnerability, transformation, and spiritual continuity.  Turner’s recent practice has expanded beyond conventional canvas painting into sculpture, concrete, sand, shells, coral, stained glass, wood, and other materials. His developing mythology Magava imagines an embodied drop of water whose journey through oceans, clouds, rain, rivers, and human bodies becomes a metaphor for migration, transformation, return, and the possibility that water itself might possess memory or spirit. The name Magava refers in the project to “I shall return,” and the narrative allows Turner to extend his investigation of water from historical material into speculative world-building. Turner earned a BFA in Studio Art from Austin Peay State University in 2019 and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2021. His work has been presented at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, Texas State Galleries, European Cultural Centre in Venice, CFHILL in Stockholm, Ross-Sutton Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, Red Arrow Gallery, Voss Gallery, Iris Project, Superposition Gallery, Christie’s, and other venues internationally. He was a 2023 AIRIE Fellow in Everglades National Park, where the ecology and history of South Florida expanded his thinking about water, Black migration, and landscape. Turner lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. 

Kiluanji Kia Henda (born July 16, 1979, in Luanda, Angola) is an Angolan multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, video, film, installation, sculpture, performance, sound, and experimental theater. Working with humor, irony, fiction, and the manipulation of public space, Kia Henda investigates colonial history, post-independence Angola, political power, collective memory, migration, urban development, race, and the unstable construction of national identity. His work frequently takes architecture, monuments, landscapes, and abandoned or repurposed structures as points of departure for examining how political histories remain embedded within physical environments.  Born four years after Angola gained independence from Portugal, Kia Henda grew up during the country’s long civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 2002. This history profoundly informs his work, but rather than producing straightforward documentary accounts, he often uses speculative fiction and satire to destabilize official narratives. In projects such as Homem Novo, Redefining the Power, and A City Called Mirage, colonial monuments, empty plinths, desert landscapes, and imagined cities become stages on which historical authority can be removed, replaced, parodied, or reinvented. His work asks who is allowed to produce history and how architecture, photography, museums, monuments, and public space participate in shaping collective memory. Kia Henda is a self-taught artist whose visual education developed through growing up around photography enthusiasts and through his engagement with music, avant-garde theater, and collaborative artistic communities in Luanda. Photography remains foundational to his practice, but his projects increasingly move between media. Works such as The Geometric Ballad of Fear, A Espiral do Medo, This Is My Blood, and A Healing Path for Phantom Pain use architectural barriers, landscapes, sculpture, film, and performance to examine segregation, migration, inequality, colonial violence, war, and the psychological afterlives of political conflict.  His work has been presented internationally at the Venice Biennale, São Paulo Biennale, Dakar Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, Sharjah Biennial, Manifesta, New Museum, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Guggenheim Bilbao, M Leuven, and other institutions. He received Angola’s National Prize for Culture and Arts in 2012 and the Frieze Artist Award in 2017. Recent presentations include Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica at MACBA and the Barbican, Recursions: a cartography of unfinished grounds at Galeria Municipal do Porto, and the 60th Venice Biennale. Kia Henda currently works between Luanda and Lisbon. 

Kip Omolade (1969- ) is an American painter was born in Harlem, New York.  and began his art career as a graffiti artist while interning at Marvel Comics and The Center for African Art. He continued his studies at The Art Students League of New York and earned a BFA at the School of Visual Arts. His work has been exhibited in galleries around the world and on Good Morning America, Juxtapoz, Huffington Post and Hi-Fructose. Special projects and partnerships include collaborations with Sony Music, Red Bull and Nike. His work was also featured on the album cover of R&B recording artist Fantasia’s latest release “Definition of…Fantasia”. 

Kiyan Williams (born March 6, 1991, Newark, New Jersey, United States) is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores dispossession, diasporic subjectivity, landscape, and the built environment. Working across sculpture, installation, performance, video, and interventions in public space, Williams examines history, land, and power through earthen materials, monument reworking, and process-based forms that draw out what lies beneath official narratives.  Williams studied at Stanford University and later earned an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University. Their work often engages architecture, archaeology, ecology, public memory, and national symbolism, using soil, weather, unconventional materials, and sculptural fragmentation to consider how histories of subjugation, American identity, and environmental violence remain embedded in place.  Their work has been exhibited at the Hammer Museum, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Art Omi, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Public Art Fund, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, ICA Boston, the Baltimore Museum of Art, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the Brooklyn Museum. They have received the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and the Graham Foundation Grant. Kiyan Williams lives and works in New York City.

Kofi Ansah (1951-2014) was a Ghanaian fashion designer. He was considered a pioneer in promoting modern African styles and design on the international stage. He founded Artdress, a design and creative concept company. His designs blend Western contemporary design and traditional West African art.  Anash received first-class honours degree in fashion design and distinction in design technology from the Chelsea School of Art in 1979. 

Kristen Woollery is an Afro-Trinidadian painter whose vibrant, bright palette is inspired by her Caribbean heritage. The stylized and geometric form of her subjects is informed by African masks, body paints, and textiles. Woollery's work seeks to honor the strength and perseverance of Black women.  

Kudzanai Chiurai (1981- ) is a Zimbabwean artist. He works across drawings, paintings, and video. His work is a commentary of social and political and social cycles and corruption. He draws from his understanding of history and personal experiences to inform his work. Chiurai was born one year after Zimbabwe gained independence from British rule, therefore his practice largely focuses on cycles of political, economic, and social conflict present in postcolonial societies. Chiurai received his BFA from the University of Pretoria in 2006. 

Kwaku Yaro (1995- ) is a Ghanian artist. His work is multidisciplinary, primarily taking the form of painting and textile-based mixed media. He uses upcycled carrier bags, wax prints and jute sacks in his paintings. This varied material reflects the diverse youth in Ghana. Yaro aims to represent the individuals around him, as well as beauty and fashion through his textile portraiture.  Yaro is a member of the Artemartis collective.

Kwamé Azure Gomez (b. 1999 Akron, OH) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, installation, performance, and community-engaged work. His work explores Black identity, ritual, masculinity, spirituality, and ancestral memory, often drawing from Afro-diasporic traditions and personal lineage. Through symbolic imagery and immersive environments, Gomez creates spaces of reflection that honor Black presence, healing, and transformation while challenging inherited narratives around power and visibility.

Kwame Brathwaite (January 1, 1938 – April 1, 2023) was an American photographer, cultural activist, and key visual architect of the Black Is Beautiful movement. Born in Brooklyn to Barbadian immigrant parents and raised in the Bronx, Brathwaite used photography as a tool for Black self-definition, political consciousness, and cultural pride. Over the course of his career, he created an expansive visual archive of Black life, style, music, and activism in Harlem, across New York, and throughout the African diaspora.  Brathwaite is especially recognized for helping popularize the phrase “Black Is Beautiful” through his photographs and his collaborations with his brother Elombe Brath, the African Jazz-Art Society and Studios (AJASS), and the Grandassa Models. His images celebrated natural Black beauty, African heritage, and the political power of representation at a time when dominant media largely excluded or distorted Black identity. Through portraits, fashion photographs, and documentation of performances and community events, he helped shape a new visual language of pride and self-possession.  Working across photography, photojournalism, and cultural documentation, Brathwaite photographed musicians, activists, models, and everyday people with an eye toward dignity, elegance, and historical presence. His work chronicled pivotal cultural shifts of the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond, connecting art, politics, and Black internationalism. Today, his photographs are widely recognized for their aesthetic force and historical importance, standing as enduring records of Black style, resistance, and beauty.

Ladi Kwali (c. 1925 – 12 August 1984) was a Nigerian potter, ceramicist, and educator celebrated for blending traditional Gwari pottery techniques with Western studio practices. Her work, distinguished by hand-coiled forms, incised and sgraffito decoration, and masterful glazing, elevated everyday vessels into artistic embodiments of heritage, symbolism, and innovation.

Lakela Brown (born 1982, Detroit, MI) is a contemporary sculptor and mixed-media artist whose work celebrates Black culture through bold, tactile forms. Known for her signature plaster reliefs featuring bamboo earrings, rope chains, hair beads, and other iconic symbols of Black style, Brown transforms objects of everyday adornment into monuments of cultural memory. Her work bridges sculpture, printmaking, and collage, often foregrounding motifs linked to 1980s and 1990s hip-hop aesthetics and Black girlhood. Brown’s practice is rooted in honoring the visual language, textures, and materials of the communities that shaped her, translating them into elegant, graphic compositions. She has exhibited at galleries and institutions across the U.S. and internationally, including solo and group exhibitions at ICA San Francisco, Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), Reyes | Finn, and Lisa Yuskavage Studio Projects. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Lance Minto Strouse is a Miami-based multidisciplinary artist whose work explores legacy, memory, and the spiritual presence embedded within everyday materials. Rooted in Caribbean and African American cultural histories, Strouse constructs paintings, objects, and mixed-media assemblages that reflect on personal and ancestral narratives. His practice often considers how identity is shaped across generations, how memory is held in the body, and how the unseen—ritual, spirit, intuition—moves through material form. Strouse is emerging as a distinctive voice within Miami’s contemporary art landscape, contributing to dialogues around Black futurity, community, and cultural renewal.

Latoya M. Hobbs, printmaker and painter, makes large-scale portraits of Black women. Hobbs’ work explores ideas of beauty, cultural identity, and womanhood as they relate to women of the African Diaspora.  Hobbs received her B.A. in Painting from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and her M.F.A. in Printmaking from Purdue University.

LaToya Ruby Frazier (1982- ) is an American artist working across photography, video, performance, and installation. The camera is a tool towards social justice and change. Frazier creates her work in collaboration with the communities she works with. Her work documents experiences of postindustrialization, communal history, and workers' rights.  Frazier received her BFA in Photography and Graphic Design from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in 2004. She received her MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Performing Arts at Syracuse University in 2007. 

Laura Wheeler Waring (1887-1948) was an American painter active during the Harlem Renaissance. She painted mostly portraits, but also created some still-life works. Many of her portraits include prominent figures of the first half of the 20th century, including W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Marian Anderson, and Alma Thomas.  Waring studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, completing her studies in 1914. 

Laurena Finéus is a Haitian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers painting while also incorporating textile installation, performance, education, and socially engaged art. Through densely layered, imagined landscapes, she examines Black geographies, maroon thought, migration, statelessness, land, and what she describes as emotional fugitivity. Her compositions frequently move between figuration and abstraction, bringing human bodies, tropical vegetation, mountains, waterways, architectural fragments, and historical references together within spaces shaped by memory, displacement, and transformation.  Finéus’s work is grounded in Haitian history and the wider political conditions of the Caribbean and Black Atlantic. Drawing upon family narratives, migratory histories, and the writing of Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot, she considers how histories are produced, silenced, fictionalized, and recovered Finéus earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a minor in communication from the University of Ottawa in 2020 and a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University in 2024. Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, The Shed, Hudson River Museum, Wallach Art Gallery, Ottawa Art Gallery, Jenkins Johnson, Art Mûr, and Fridman Gallery. In 2026, Fridman Gallery presented Cautionary Tales: A Symphony of Anger/Kòlè, her first New York solo exhibition, in which layered paintings addressed anger, environmental instability, rebellion, faith, and the Maroon spirit.  Her work is held in public and corporate collections including the Canada Council Art Bank, the City of Ottawa Art Collection, Google, and Manulife Global. Finéus has received the Saunderson Prize, the Helen Frankenthaler Fund award, an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant, and the Ottawa Arts Council’s IBPOC Emerging Artist Award. She is based in Brooklyn, New York. 

Lauren Halsey (1987- ) is an American artist whose work is grounded in the locality of her Southern California home, Los Angeles. Halsey creates site-specific and standalone installations that are inspired by the people in the immediate environment, paying close attention to the experiences of queer, Black, and working-class people. She critiques gentrification while suggesting creative solution.  Halsey received her MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT in 2014. She received her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA in 2012. 

Lavar Munroe (1982- ) is a Bahamian-American artist who works mostly in mixed media painting, cardboard sculpture, and drawing. He is interested in fables and folklore, particularly parallels between stories of the Bahamas and his travels in Africa. He incorporates glass, newspapers, crocheted and synthetic flowers, feathers, and jewelry into his paintings and sculptures. Munroe's work includes personal, historical, and mythological references and sits between a desire to leave home and the longing that accompanies the journey. Munroe received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2013. In 2007 he received his BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design. 

Lawrence Lemaoana (1982- ) is a South African textile artist. He creates embroidered text with political and social texts on kangas. His work explores the intersection of the mass media and people in South African society. He is also interested in deconstructing myths of masculinity. Lemaoana received a BFA from the University of Johannesburg in 2004. 

Le'Andra LeSeur (1989- ) is an American artist working across video, installation, photography, painting, and performance.  LeSeur is interested in Black femininity and feelings of invisibility. She creates work that honors and centers the trauma experienced by Black women. Taking the audience with her she seeks to revel in the pain and joy that exist simultaneously. LeSeur also seeks to highlight Black queer experiences. 

Leasho Johnson (1984- ) is a Jamaican contemporary artist known for his provocative and thought-provoking works that explore themes of gender, sexuality, and Jamaican culture. Johnson's diverse body of work encompasses painting, sculpture, and mixed media, often incorporating elements of popular culture and Jamaican iconography. His bold and innovative approach to art has earned him recognition both locally and internationally, establishing him as a significant voice in the Caribbean art scene. Johnson received his BFA at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in 2009 and his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020. 

Leilah Babirye (born 1985, Kampala, Uganda) is a Ugandan artist whose multidisciplinary sculptural practice explores identity, sexuality, human rights, and queer community. Working across ceramic, wood, metal, and found materials, Babirye examines LGBTQ+ experience and cultural belonging through carving, burning, welding, assemblage, and the transformation of discarded objects into portraits and totemic forms. Babirye studied Fine Art, Sculpture, and Art History at Makerere University in Kampala. Her work often engages portraiture, African masking traditions, exile, memory, and activism, using hand-built ceramics, hand-carved wood, vivid glazes, and salvaged urban debris to consider gender fluidity, resilience, and the violence of anti-LGBTQ+ repression in Uganda and across Africa. Her work has been exhibited at the de Young Museum, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Stephen Friedman Gallery, and Gordon Robichaux. Babirye lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Leonardo Benzant (1972- ) is a Dominican-American artist with Haitian heritage. He studies Yoruba and Kongo initiation rites to inform his work. Benzant is a multidisciplinary artist using various materials to connect to his African and Caribbean heritage.  Benzant received his BFA from Pratt Institute in 2010.

Leonardo Drew (1961- ) is an American artist who took inspiration for many of his creations from the landfill adjacent to his home in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Drew uses everyday objects and various materials such as wood, mud, paper, iron, and cotton and puts and transforms them. Through burning, oxidation, decay, and weathering, the materials bear little resemblance to where they started. This results in sculptures that strike a delicate balance between chaos and order.  Drew was born in Tallahassee, Florida.  He attended Parsons School of Design in New York and received his BFA from Cooper Union in 1985.  😆😆😆

Léonard Pongo (born 1988, in Liège, Belgium) is a Belgian-Congolese artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores Congolese identity, landscape, memory, spirituality, and the layered realities of life in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Working across photography, film, textile design, experimental printing techniques, and mixed-media installation, Pongo examines how Congo is perceived and represented through immersive visual strategies that move between documentary observation, abstraction, and material experimentation.  Pongo studied Political and Social Sciences at Maastricht University, graduating in 2009, and later earned a BA in Visual Arts: Photography from Bussel’s Art School in 2012. His work often engages landscape, social history, craft, and diasporic belonging, using snapshot, diary-based photography, abstraction, moving image, and installation to consider the complexity, contradiction, and polysemy of Congolese experience beyond reductive frameworks of conflict or spectacle.  His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale in 2026, and has been shown in exhibitions across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States. He was named one of PDN’s 30 New and Emerging Photographers to Watch in 2016 and received a Getty Grant in 2018. Léonard Pongo lives and works between Brussels and Kinshasa. 

Leroy Campbell (born July 21, 1956, in Moncks Corner, South Carolina) is an American artist whose mixed-media practice explores African American history, Gullah-Geechee heritage, family, resilience, spirituality, and collective uplift. Working across painting, collage, acrylic, paper, tapestry, and organic materials, Campbell examines memory, ancestry, and cultural pride through silhouetted figures, elongated forms, and narrative compositions that connect the past to the present.  Campbell is self-taught. His work often engages Sankofa, Gullah-Geechee history, Harlem and Brooklyn cultural memory, and the idea of humanity as a shared garden, using mixed media and storytelling to consider interdependence, healing, and Black self-determination. His visual language is shaped by his South Carolina roots, New York experience, and a sustained commitment to teaching through art.  His work has been shown through Richard Beavers Gallery, Overdue Recognition Art Gallery, the Harlem Fine Arts Show, and other community-based and gallery exhibitions, including Historical Backbone: The Resilience and Determination of a People in Harlem. Leroy Campbell is based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Lina Iris Viktor (1987-) is a British-Liberian conceptual artist. Her work includes photography, sculpture, painting, and film. She incorporates gilding into her practice to explore the connection between art, prophecy, and spirituality.  Viktor received her BA in film at Sarah Lawrence College and studied photography as continuing education at The School of Visual Arts, in New York. 

Loïs Mailou Jones (November 3, 1905 – June 9, 1998, born in Boston, Massachusetts) was an American painter, designer, educator, and one of the major Black modernist artists of the twentieth century. Working across painting, watercolor, collage, textile design, and drawing, Jones developed a seven-decade practice shaped by African American cultural history as well as sustained encounters with France, Haiti, and the African continent. She trained at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, graduating with honors in design in 1927, and began her professional career designing textiles for firms in Boston and New York before turning increasingly toward painting. n 1930, Jones joined the art faculty at Howard University, where she taught design and watercolor until 1977 and mentored generations of artists, including Elizabeth Catlett, David Driskell, and Sylvia Snowden. Her career developed amid the artistic and intellectual networks associated with the late Harlem Renaissance and Washington, D.C.’s Black cultural community. In 1937–38, she took a sabbatical in Paris and studied at the Académie Julian. The relative freedom she experienced as a Black woman in France and her encounters with European modernism profoundly influenced paintings from this period, including landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and the important African-inspired work Les Fétiches (1938). Jones’s visual language continued to shift through travel and engagement with the African diaspora. Her 1953 marriage to Haitian graphic designer Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noël led to regular visits to Haiti, where its landscapes, markets, spiritual traditions, architecture, colors, and patterns became recurring subjects in her paintings. In 1970, Jones served as a cultural ambassador to Africa for the United States Information Agency, traveling to 11 countries, interviewing artists, visiting museums and studios, and documenting contemporary African art. Her subsequent work increasingly combined African-derived symbols, masks, textile patterns, geometric forms, and collage with modernist abstraction. Across her career, Jones resisted narrow expectations of what African American artists should depict or how Black art should look. Her work moves between European-influenced landscape and still-life traditions, figurative representations of Black life, Haitian subject matter, and increasingly abstract compositions grounded in African and diasporic visual cultures. Works such as The Ascent of Ethiopia (1932), Les Fétiches (1938), Self Portrait (1940), Ubi Girl from Tai Region (1972), and Ode to Kinshasa (1972) demonstrate how she repeatedly reconsidered Black identity, modernism, cultural heritage, and internationalism. Her legacy is equally significant as an educator who helped establish space for subsequent generations of Black artists within American art institutions.

Lonnie Holley (born February 10, 1950, in Birmingham, Alabama) is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores memory, survival, spirituality, Black southern life, environmental transformation, and the poetics of found materials. Working across sculpture, assemblage, drawing, painting, installation, film, and music, Holley examines personal history, collective trauma, and improvisational creativity through salvaged objects, carved sandstone, and immersive environments that transform discarded matter into vessels of testimony and imagination.  Holley is a self-taught artist. He began making art in 1979 after carving sandstone memorials for two of his niece’s children who died in a house fire, and he soon developed a broader practice rooted in found-object assemblage and site-responsive installation. His work often engages memory, social history, mourning, ecology, and Black vernacular experience, using improvisation, accumulation, and material transformation to consider endurance, healing, and the afterlives of lived struggle.  His work has been exhibited at the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Royal Academy of Arts. He received a United States Artists Fellowship in 2022, and his work is closely associated with the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Lonnie Holley lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Lorna Simpson (1960-) is an American multidisciplinary artist working across photography, collage, and video installations. Her work explores questions about the nature of representation, identity, gender, race, and history. Simpson's work pushes the boundaries of conceptual photography. Simpson received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 1982 and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 1985.

Lorna Ward Napanangka (born 1960, Yuendumu, Northern Territory, Australia) is a Warlpiri artist whose paintings are grounded in ancestral knowledge, Country, and women’s ceremonial narratives. Working within the tradition of Central Desert painting, she translates Dreaming stories—particularly those associated with her mother’s Country—into rhythmic compositions of dots, lines, and layered fields of color. Her work communicates systems of kinship, land stewardship, and spiritual continuity, functioning as both cultural transmission and contemporary abstraction. Napanangka is a senior custodian of Warlpiri knowledge, and her paintings reflect the enduring vitality of Indigenous law, memory, and connection to place.

Lorraine O'Grady (1934-2024) was an American conceptual and performance artist.  In O’Grady’s works across mediums including text, photo-installation, video, and performance, multiple emotions and ideas coexist. She explored cultural constructions - namely race and gender- from a Black woman's viewpoint. Her work rejected binaries in any form.  O'Grady received her BA in economics from Wellesley College in 1956. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa in 1967 from the Iowa Writers Workshop. 

Louisiane Saint Fleurant (1924-2005) was a Haitian painter and sculptor. She was one of the founding members of the celebrated Saint-Soleil community of artists in Soisson-la-Montagne. Her paintings centered on motherhood featuring women and children surrounded by plants and animals, together with the figures she sculpted in vibrantly hued clay.