Voices of the Diaspora: The Artisans Behind the Canvas

Nick Cave (born February 4, 1959, Fulton, Missouri) is an American artist, educator, and designer whose multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, performance, installation, and fashion. He is best known for his iconic Soundsuits—elaborate, wearable sculptural forms made from found objects, textiles, beads, and other materials—that conceal the wearer’s identity while amplifying movement, sound, and presence. Cave began developing Soundsuits in the early 1990s in response to the beating of Rodney King, creating works that function as both armor and instrument. These suits transform the body into a site of protection, resistance, and celebration, obscuring markers of race, gender, and class while producing sound through motion. Activated through performance, they blur boundaries between sculpture, dance, and ritual. Across his broader practice, Cave addresses issues of race, violence, identity, and social justice, often using exuberant color, pattern, and material excess to confront difficult histories. His installations frequently incorporate immersive environments and community participation, creating spaces that balance critique with joy, spectacle, and collective experience. In addition to his studio work, Cave has had a significant impact as an educator, serving as a professor and former chair of the Fashion Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited widely at major institutions internationally and is held in leading museum collections. He lives and works in Chicago.

Nina Chanel Abney (1982- ) is an American visual artist. During her career, Abney's style continued to evolve. She incorporated more complex compositions and began experimenting with larger-scale works and mixed-media installations. Her pieces explore themes such as identity, social justice, and societal power dynamics. Much of her work comprises of bright, graphic elements composed with an angular composition. Abney attended Augustana College in where she received a BFA with a dual major in studio art and computer science in 2004. She also attended the Chicago Art Institute and the Parsons School of Design where she received an MFA in 2007. A

Njideka Akunyili Crosby (born 1983, Enugu, Nigeria) is a Nigerian-American artist known for her richly layered figurative paintings that explore identity, migration, and the complexities of diasporic life. Raised in Nigeria before relocating to the United States as a teenager, her work reflects the interplay between Nigerian and American cultural contexts, often merging personal memory with broader histories of postcolonial identity. She earned a BA from Swarthmore College in 2004, completed a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2006, and received her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2011.  Working primarily in painting and mixed media, Akunyili Crosby constructs intimate domestic scenes that center Black subjects within richly patterned interiors. Her surfaces are composed through a distinctive process that combines acrylic painting, drawing, and photo-transfer techniques using images sourced from Nigerian popular culture, family photographs, and archival materials. These layered compositions create visual environments where past and present, personal and collective histories coexist. Her work frequently examines themes of hybridity, belonging, and cultural translation, depicting moments of everyday life that carry the weight of migration and adaptation. By embedding photographic fragments within painted space, she creates textured narratives that reflect the multiplicity of diasporic identity and the ways memory is mediated through image and material. Akunyili Crosby’s work has received significant international recognition, including the MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, and has been presented in major exhibitions such as The Beautyful Ones at Victoria Miro, Venice (2019), MOCA Mural: Njideka Akunyili Crosby at MOCA Los Angeles (2018), The Hilton Als Series: Njideka Akunyili Crosby at the Yale Center for British Art (2022), and presentations at the Blanton Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Nneka Jones (1997- ) is an American multidisciplinary artist interested in painting, drawing, sculpting, and embroidering. Her work responds to social and environmental issues. Her artwork advocates for the protection of women of color and is most known for realistic embroidered portraits. Jones’ ongoing “Target” series confronts the trafficking of girls and women in the Caribbean.  Jones received a BFA from the University of Tampa in 2020. 

Noah Davis (1983-2015) was an American painter. He sought to depict Black life outside of negative stereotypes. Inspirations for his work include everyday life, family histories, ancient Egyptian cosmologies, the racism of American media, art history, and architecture. Rich and varied color palettes are employed to create work that sits between the surreal and real. In 2012, Davis founded the Underground Museum alongside his wife, Karon Davis, as not only an exhibition and community programming space.  Davis studied painting at the Cooper Union School of Art from 2001 to 2004. 

Nona Faustine (1977-2025) was an American photographer. Early in her career, she focused on documentary photography. She eventually pivoted towards conceptual work focused on the Black female experience and American history.  Faustine received a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1997, and an MFA from the International Center of Photography at Bard College in 2013. 

Nontsikelelo Mutiti (1982- ) is a Zimbabwean visual artist and educator. She takes a conceptual view of publishing, archiving practices, and institution building. She approaches books as a time-based medium that physically engages the viewer. As her educator, she is interested in systems of communication and learning that pre-date colonial frameworks of the written word in Zimbabwe.  Mutiti holds a diploma in Multimedia from the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts (ZIVA) and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, with a concentration in Graphic Design. 

Norman Lewis (1909-1979) was an American painter and printmaker. He was a prominent member of the Harlem Renaissance movement in New York. Early in his career, he created figurative work in the social realist school. He felt later that social realism was unable to invoke the social changes he wanted so he shifted his style towards abstract expressionism. Despite, this stylistic shift he remained committed to social change. 

Nthabiseng Boledi Kekana is a South African painter whose figurative works explore the interior and social realities of Black womanhood within contemporary South Africa. Working primarily in painting, Kekana constructs intimate scenes that center domestic space, personal memory, and the psychological landscapes of her subjects. Her compositions often highlight gesture, posture, and subtle emotional cues, foregrounding vulnerability, resilience, and quiet strength. Through a careful balance of narrative and atmosphere, Kekana interrogates themes of identity, belonging, and the evolving roles of women in post-apartheid society. Her work has been exhibited with David Krut Projects and other contemporary art platforms in South Africa.

Nyancho NwaNri is a Gambian-Nigerian photographer. NwaNri's work focuses on the environment, social issues, languages, and history.

O Bastardo (b. 1997) is a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, engaging themes of power, violence, masculinity, colonial legacy, and social control. His work often employs raw, confrontational imagery and symbolic figures to examine how systems of domination—political, religious, and cultural—shape bodies and behavior. Drawing from Brazilian history, street culture, and contemporary global politics, O Bastardo creates works that oscillate between satire and brutality, exposing the psychological and structural forces underlying oppression. His practice is marked by an aggressive visual language that challenges viewers to confront discomfort, complicity, and resistance within contemporary society.

Odili Donald Odita (born 1966, Enugu, Nigeria) is a Nigerian-American painter known for his vibrant, geometric abstractions that engage color, architecture, and spatial perception as tools for exploring identity and history. Raised in Nigeria before relocating to the United States during the Biafran War, Odita’s work is shaped by experiences of migration, displacement, and cultural hybridity. Working across painting, mural installation, and site-specific environments, Odita creates dynamic compositions of angular forms and bold color fields that extend beyond the canvas into architectural space. His wall paintings often transform entire rooms, activating corners, edges, and surfaces to produce immersive environments that shift with the viewer’s movement. Through this expansion of painting into space, Odita examines how color can function both visually and conceptually—as a language for emotion, memory, and social experience. Odita’s practice also engages art historical traditions, particularly modernist abstraction and color theory, while reinterpreting these frameworks through a diasporic lens. By situating abstraction within narratives of migration, colonial history, and Black identity, he challenges assumptions about the neutrality of geometric form and color. His work proposes abstraction as a site of cultural meaning and lived experience rather than purely formal exploration. In addition to his studio practice, Odita is a writer and educator, contributing essays and critical texts on contemporary art and culture. He has exhibited widely at major institutions and biennials, and his work is held in significant museum collections. He lives and works in Philadelphia.

Olyseye works across sculpture and photography. He is deeply interested in the Black experience. Oluseye coined the term "diasporic debris", to describe the artifacts, discarded materials and found objects he collects during his travels. He believes that Blackness is something unfixed and ever-changing and so much must his practice, blending the contemporary and historical.  Oluseye received a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and a Masters of Science in Entrepreneurship from Bayes Business School, University of London, UK. 

Omar Victor Diop (1980-) is a Senegalese photographer. Diop is both a fashion and fine arts photographer. At one point in time, he produced seventy percent of Dakar's commercial advertising. His fine art photographs meld photography with other art forms, including textile design, fashion design, and creative writing. Serving as subject, his portraits explore historical events or model him after African leaders. Additionally, environmentally is explore through his work.  graduated from the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris in France. 

Onajide Shabaka (born 1948) is a South Florida–based interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose work explores the intersections of ecology, memory, African diaspora histories, and material culture. Working across drawing, photography, film, sculpture, land-based practice, and archival research, Shabaka investigates how geography, botany, and migration shape cultural identity and ancestral narratives. His practice often involves walking, field research, and studying plant life as a way of tracing historical paths of the African diaspora and uncovering overlooked or erased histories. Through poetic, conceptual works grounded in natural materials, archival fragments, and field studies, Shabaka creates visual languages that connect environmental histories with personal and communal stories of displacement, survival, and belonging. He lives and works in Miami, FL.

Osaji Chinedu George is a Nigerian multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the fragility of memory, truth, and identity through surreal, dreamlike visual languages. Working across new media, drawing, installation, and conceptual frameworks, George examines mythology, existential tension, and the relationship between the individual and the state. His work is informed by archival research and layered storytelling, creating immersive spaces that interrogate how memory is constructed, preserved, and destabilized. George invites contemplation on the ephemerality of being and the forms memory takes within personal and communal contexts. His work has been featured in exhibitions including SKETCH (Alliance Française de Lagos), Between Fragments (Yenwa Gallery), Africa Foto Fair (Côte d’Ivoire), At Once, Then Again (Rele Gallery), ATO Connects (Art Twenty One Gallery), Impart Art Fair (Lasmara), and Everything Good Will Come (Latitudes Online), and his project Gently Open The World was broadcast on Oroko Radio (Ghana) and Refuge Worldwide (Berlin). 

Oscar Murillo (born 1986, La Paila, Colombia) is a contemporary artist whose expansive, multidisciplinary practice examines labor, migration, globalization, and collective identity. Raised in Colombia before relocating to London at a young age, Murillo’s work is deeply informed by transnational movement and the social conditions of working-class communities. His paintings, installations, performances, and participatory projects frequently incorporate raw canvas, industrial debris, stitched fabric, dirt, and text, reflecting both material histories and lived experience. Murillo first gained international attention for his large-scale abstract canvases, which often evoke factory floors, protest banners, or architectural remnants. These works combine gestural abstraction with fragments of language and layered surfaces, emphasizing process, labor, and the politics of production. Over time, his practice has expanded to include immersive installations and socially engaged projects, most notably Frequencies, an ongoing global initiative that distributes canvases to schoolchildren worldwide, inviting collective mark-making as a record of shared experience across cultures. His work consistently blurs distinctions between abstraction and social documentation, studio production and collective authorship. Murillo’s installations often transform gallery spaces into sites of communal gathering or industrial tension, foregrounding questions of belonging, precarity, and economic systems. In 2019, he was one of four artists awarded the Turner Prize collectively, reflecting his commitment to collaboration and shared authorship. Murillo has exhibited widely at major international institutions and biennials, and his work is held in prominent museum collections. He lives and works between London and La Paila, Colombia.

Oumar Ka (born 1930, Kel, Senegal; died 2020, Touba, Senegal) was a Senegalese photographer whose work documented rural life, portraiture, and self-fashioning in postcolonial Senegal. Based in Touba and active across the Senegalese interior, Ka worked primarily in photography, creating carefully composed portraits that situated his subjects within domestic, agricultural, and village settings. His work is characterized by formal clarity, attention to environment, and an emphasis on how people represented themselves through pose, dress, and place.  Ka apprenticed under the Senegalese photographer Cheikh Kane before beginning his own career in 1959 as an itinerant photographer, traveling to villages in the Baol region and beyond. Unlike many better-known West African studio photographers of the period, Ka often photographed his clients in their lived surroundings, allowing landscape, architecture, and personal belongings to become part of the portrait. His many self-portraits further reflect this approach, presenting the self through environment, gesture, and objects.  In recent years, Ka’s work has gained major international recognition through exhibitions including Oumar Ka: Voltaic and Rural Portraits at Axis Gallery and presentations at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, where his photographs are held in the collection. His work has also entered major institutional collections and is now recognized as an important contribution to the history of African photography and portraiture. 

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, (b.1980-) an artist whose work encompasses drawing, painting, installation, and animation. Her work alludes to mythology, geology and theories on the nature of the universe. Sunstrum’s works include narrative landscapes that appear simultaneously futuristic and ancient.

Pamina Sebastião (1988- ) is an Angolan multidisciplinary artist working with video, drawing, collage, and photography. One of their activist avenues is their art, interrogating coloniality and centering queer experiences.  Sebastião received a Master's in International Law and Relations with a focus on African Human Rights System from Lisbon University, Portugal in 2015 and a Law degree from Catholic University, Angola in 2011. 

Papa Ibra Tall (1935-2015) was a weaver, painter, and illustrator. Known for his role in the Ecole de Dakar, an art school/movement based in Senegal, his works feature bright colors and abstracted shapes. Taking the form of large scale installations, much of his art was created with the intention of transforming space.

Patricia Encarnación (1991- ) is a Dominican multimedia artist based in New York. She works with video, photography, and sculpture. Her work investigates the tourist and consumerist gaze that is often directed at the Caribbean. Ultimately she explores the lasting effects colonialism on the Caribbean and Latin America through everyday objects and the myth of the “tropical”. Encarnación received an AAS degree in Illustration and Fine Arts from Altos de Chavon, the School of Design. She then was awarded a full-tuition scholarship to complete her BFA at Parsons, The New School of Design, New York, in 2014. She then received a full-tuition scholarship for the graduate program in the Caribbean Studies concentration in Museum Studies at NYU, where she graduated in 2022.

Patrick Bongoy (1980- ) is a Congolese sculptural artist. He works mostly with waste materials such as tires, inner tubes, industrial packaging, jute sacking, textiles, and ropes. His figurative and abstract works reference traditional Congolese basket-weaving while referencing the immense labor that goes into the objects. Bongoy urgently highlights the high cost of human life at the expense of natural resources for technology. Important to him is the forced migration, homelessness, and displacement due to larger social and political elements at machinations.  He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa. 

Paula Wilson (1975- ) is an American interdisciplinary artist who works across printmaking, film, and installation. She has a deep interest in femininity and the environment. Her entry point into her work is through a naturalist, educator, and ecosexual lens. Her practice seeks to find space between art and life, creating an accessible space.  Wilson received her BFA from Washington University, Saint Louis, MO in 1998 and her MFA from Columbia University, New York, NY in 2005. 1998    

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982) is a Californian photographer who integrates his professional and personal life into his work to create raw images of the human form. Sepuya's photos include friends, lovers, and models and showcase intimate depictions of humans in "creative, desirous exchanges. His photos have been exhibited in solo shows and museums nationwide.

Paulo Nazareth (1977- ) is a Brazilian performance, video, and photography artist. Nazareth's practice brings awareness to the experiences of marginalized identities, colonialism, and racism. Through simple gestures, he foregrounds his relationships with the people around him. 

Philemona Williamson (born 1951, New York, NY) is an American painter known for her psychologically rich figurative works that explore memory, girlhood, identity, and the complexities of coming-of-age. Her paintings feature ambiguous narratives that center young people—often girls and adolescents—caught in moments of emotional transition. With vibrant color, symbolic objects, and fluid dreamlike compositions, Williamson examines interpersonal relationships, cultural heritage, and the inner worlds of youth. Her work has been exhibited nationally at the Montclair Art Museum, Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Newark Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the June Kelly Gallery. Williamson received her BA from Bennington College and her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). She lives and works in New York.

Philippe Walter Marie Dodard (1954- ) is a Haitian illustrationist painter, and sculptor. Expressionist and vibrant, Dodard's work oscillates between figurative and abstraction scenes applied with thick brushstrokess. Reoccuring themes in his work include animals, landscapes, and women and children. 

Philomé Obin (1892-1986) was a Haitian painter. He depicted daily life as well as Haiti's complex history. His flat style is insight into public space in Haiti. He is one of the founders of the  Cap-Haitien school of painting (named for the community in the north of the country). 

Phoebe Beasley (1943- ) is an American painter, collagist, printmaker, and mixed media artist. Her colorful work focuses on scenes from everyday life. She is the only artist whose work has been awarded the Presidential Seal under two different U.S. Presidents, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Beasley received her BFA in art education from Ohio University in 1965. She received her MFA from Kent State University. Additionally, she received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Ohio University in 2005. 

Phyllis Stephens (born 1955, in Atlanta, Georgia) is an American artist whose textile-based practice explores African American history, Black family life, movement, legacy, and the emotional force of everyday experience. Working across story quilts, tapestry, and hand-sewn textile compositions, Stephens examines memory, ancestry, celebration, and cultural continuity through richly patterned surfaces, painterly color, and narrative figuration.  Stephens is a fifth-generation quilt maker and has quilted professionally for more than thirty years. Her work often engages African American cultural history, family, beauty, spirituality, and community, using fabric, appliqué, stitching, and layered textile construction to consider how Black life is carried through gesture, dress, movement, and intergenerational remembrance. Recent writing on her work also notes the role of prayer and research in shaping each new body of work.  Her work has been exhibited at Almine Rech, Richard Beavers Gallery, Oglethorpe University Museum of Art, and in the traveling exhibition Water Is Life, which opened in Geneva and traveled internationally. Stephens lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Pogus Caesar (born 1953, in St. Kitts, West Indies) is a British artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores Black British life, migration, protest, social history, and self-representation. Working across photography, conceptual art, film, archiving, curating, and publishing, Caesar examines community, visibility, and historical memory through documentary photographs, portraiture, moving image, and long-term archival work rooted in Birmingham and the wider Black British experience.  Caesar grew up in Birmingham and began as a pointillist painter before turning to photography in the 1980s. His work often engages Black British history, everyday life, musicians, political unrest, and urban communities, using photography and archival practice to consider both the ordinary and the historic. His images of the 1985 Handsworth uprisings are especially well known, and in 2004 he established the OOM Gallery Archive in Birmingham to represent and preserve his photographic archive.  His work has been shown widely, including at the National Portrait Gallery and in major exhibition contexts such as Life Between Islands. His photographs are held by institutions including the National Gallery of Art, National Portrait Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. In 2018, Birmingham City University awarded him an Honorary Doctorate, and he is also listed as a Visiting Professor there.

Portia Zvavahera (born March 22, 1985, in Harare, Zimbabwe) is a Zimbabwean artist whose painting practice explores dreams, spirituality, womanhood, vulnerability, and emotional transformation. Working across painting and print-based processes, Zvavahera examines interior life, faith, fear, and protection through layered surfaces, repeated motifs, and dense compositions that merge figuration with pattern and abstraction. Her paintings often draw from dreams, everyday rituals, Pentecostal belief, and Shona visual culture to create psychologically charged scenes that move between intimacy and the uncanny.  Zvavahera studied at the BAT Visual Arts Studio under the National Gallery of Zimbabwe from 2003 to 2004 and received a diploma in visual arts from Harare Polytechnic in 2006. Her work often engages memory, dream states, spirituality, and cultural inheritance, using painting, printmaking processes, and textile-like patterning to consider care, anxiety, embodiment, and the porous boundary between the seen and unseen. She has described dreams as a key source for her imagery, and institutions frequently note the way her work bridges Indigenous Shona references with Christian and personal symbolism.  Her work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, David Zwirner, Fruitmarket, and Zeitz MOCAA, among other international venues. She has received the FNB Art Prize and the Tollman Award for the Visual Arts. Portia Zvavahera lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Precious Okoyomon (born 1993, London, United Kingdom) is a Nigerian-American artist and poet whose multidisciplinary practice explores ecology, colonial histories, migration, and the entanglements between human and nonhuman life. Working across installation, sculpture, poetry, and performance, Okoyomon creates immersive environments that incorporate living materials such as plants, soil, insects, and organic matter, foregrounding processes of growth, decay, and transformation. Their work often centers invasive plant species—such as kudzu—as metaphors for colonial expansion, displacement, and resilience, examining how landscapes are shaped by histories of violence and survival. By cultivating these materials within gallery spaces, Okoyomon constructs ecosystems that challenge distinctions between nature and culture, control and wildness. Their installations frequently evolve over time, allowing unpredictability and ecological processes to shape the work’s form and meaning. Alongside their visual practice, Okoyomon is an acclaimed poet, and language plays a central role in their work. Their texts and installations engage themes of love, grief, spirituality, and belonging, often drawing from diasporic experience and queer identity. By combining literary, ecological, and sculptural approaches, Okoyomon expands contemporary art discourse to include care, relationality, and interdependence across species. Okoyomon has exhibited widely at major international institutions and biennials and was included in the 59th Venice Biennale. Their work is held in significant public and private collections. They live and work in New York.

Préfète Duffaut (1 January 1923 – 6 October 2012) was a Haitian painter. Born in Cyvadier, Sud-Est, near the seaport of Jacmel, where he lived and worked. Duffaut was one of the painters, alongside important Haitian artists such as Gesner Abelard and Rigaud Benoit, at the Centre d'Art in the Haitian capital. In the early 1950s Duffaut was one of several artists invited to paint murals in the interior of the Cathedral of Sainte Trinité (largely destroyed in the January 2010 earthquake) in Port-au-Prince; his works there were titled "The Temptation of Christ" and "The Processional Road" (also referred to as the "Procession of the Crossing Guard"). Duffaut paints in the vernacular style and his oeuvre typically consists of fantastical "imaginary cities" (villes imaginaires), that often contain coastal elements with boats. The cityscapes are strongly influenced by the coastal city of Jacmel. Another recurrent theme, especially in earlier works, is imagery associated with Vodou.

Prince Gyasi Nyantakyi (1995- ) is a Ghanaian photographer. He is co-founder of Boxedkids, a non-profit organization helping kids from Accra get an education. Prince Gyasi's hallmark style includes colorful and emotional photographs depicting life in Accra, Ghana—all taken with his iPhone. His choice of bold, bright backgrounds highlights the beauty of Black skin. 

Purvis Young (1943-2010) was a Bahamian-American artist. A self-taught artist, Young had an interest in art as a child and revisited it as a young adult. A voracious reader, he was inspired by artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, El Greco, Honoré Daumier, and Pablo Picasso. Young painted on wooden panels frequently. His work is characterized by its expressionist syle, works guided by his "inner eyes". He often explored race and the human condition in his work. 

Qualesha Wood (b. 1996) is a contemporary multidisciplinary artist whose work explores Black womanhood, memory, and the emotional landscapes carried within the body. Working across photography, video, performance, and mixed media, Wood uses gesture, storytelling, and intimate portraiture to examine themes of vulnerability, healing, and visibility. Her practice often engages familial histories and the quiet rituals of daily life, creating images that are tender, atmospheric, and rooted in lived experience. Through her visual language, Wood reframes Black interiority as a site of power, softness, and complexity, inviting viewers to witness narratives that are often overlooked or unspoken.

Queen Nwaneri is a painter born in Italy, raised in Nigeria, and currently based in Australia. These global experiences inform her work and convey the human condition's universality beyond borders. 

Rachel Jones (1991- ) is a British artist who uses sound, performance, painting, and installation to explore psychological truths through abstraction. Jones grapples with the challenges of finding visual means to convey existential concepts. She replicates symbols to create associative relationships as part of her ongoing investigation of identity and abstract representation of the internal structures of Black life. Jones' work relates the various ways the Black body has been depicted through history and pushes past modes of figurative representation.

Radcliffe Bailey (1968-2023) was an American multidisciplinary artist who worked across painting, sculpting, and mixed media. A deep interest in African American and Southern histories informs his work.  Using religion, music, baseball, slavery, and Atlanta’s rich history pertaining to both the American Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s Bailey created installations that probed African diasporic histories. He often used old family photos and piano keys in works that were personal yet accessible.  Bailey received his BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991. 

Rahim Fortune (born 1994, in Austin, Texas) is an American artist whose photographic practice explores American identity, migration, family history, landscape, and the intertwined experiences of Black and Indigenous communities in the American South. Working across photography, portraiture, landscape, and photobook-making, Fortune examines memory, resettlement, grief, and cultural continuity through intimate documentary observation, poetic sequencing, and images that move between personal history and broader social narrative.  Fortune is a self-taught photographer. His work often engages family archive, social history, regional landscape, and community memory, using black-and-white and color photography, serial image-making, and the photobook form to consider loss, care, belonging, and the ways history is carried through people and place. His projects frequently focus on Texas, Oklahoma, and the wider American South, foregrounding the emotional and historical textures of everyday life rather than spectacle.  His work has been exhibited at the California African American Museum, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and the University of Texas, and it is held in collections including the High Museum of Art, LUMA Arles, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He received the Rencontres d’Arles Louis Roederer Discovery Award in 2022, and his book I Can’t Stand to See You Cry was nominated for the Paris Photo–Aperture Photobook of the Year award. Rahim Fortune lives and works between Austin, Texas, and Brooklyn, New York.

Rashid Johnson (1977- ) is an American artist from Chicago. His work often depicts a range of mediums, such as sculpture, painting, drawing, filmmaking, and installation. They showcase historical occurrences, philosophy, cultural viewpoints, and his narrative. Much of his work explores themes of race and class pulled from autobiographical and broader Black American life.  Johnson received a BFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2000 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. 

Ravelle Pillay (b.1993, Durban, South Africa) is a Johannesburg-based painter whose practice mines the haunting reverberations of history, extracted from archival photography and inherited memories. As a starting point, the artist collects family photographs stretching back generations alongside a broader archive of portrait and landscape photography as imperfect portals into the past. The process of meeting the canvas with unstable imagery is underpinned by an inevitable grappling with the legacies of colonialism and migration. 

Raymond Saunders (born 1934, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is an American painter whose work blends abstraction, figuration, and assemblage to explore race, representation, and the expansive possibilities of painting. Based in California, Saunders works across painting, drawing, and mixed media, creating layered compositions that incorporate found materials, text, and imagery drawn from both everyday life and art history. His practice resists categorization, embracing complexity and contradiction as central to its form and meaning. Saunders first gained prominence in the 1960s and is widely known for his influential 1967 pamphlet Black Is a Color, in which he challenged the expectation that Black artists should be confined to explicitly political or representational modes. Instead, he argued for artistic freedom and the right to engage abstraction, conceptualism, and personal expression without limitation. This philosophy continues to inform his work, which moves fluidly between visual languages and references. His paintings often feature chalkboard-like surfaces, gestural marks, photographic images, and handwritten text, creating dense visual fields that invite close looking and interpretation. By layering cultural references, symbols, and fragments of language, Saunders constructs works that function as both visual and intellectual spaces, where meaning is continuously negotiated rather than fixed. Saunders has exhibited widely throughout his career and is recognized as a key figure in postwar American art. His work is held in major institutional collections, and he continues to live and work in California.

Reginald O’Neal (L.E.O.) (1992- ) is an American painter. O'Neal typically utilizes a dark, muted palette in his portraits. Much of his work features his family, community, and experiences. They are his personal experiences but lend themselves to a broader Black experience. O'Neal sometimes mediates on themes of death and decay as an unfortunate point of life. Currently, his work focuses on his community and beliefs. 

Renee Cox (b. 1960 ) is a Jamaican-American artist, photographer, lecturer, political activist, and curator. Specializing in digital portraiture and film, well known for artwork, where she is dressed in the colorful costume of a black superhero named Raje. "These slick, color-laden images, their large format, and Cox's own powerfully beautiful figure heighten the visual impact of the work, making Cox's politics clear and engaging."

Renée Green (b. 1959, Cleveland, Ohio, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and filmmaker whose work spans sculpture, architecture, photography, video, sound, and installation. Her practice draws on cultural anthropology, historical archives, literary and philosophical sources, and is often research-intensive—creating layered installations that examine memory, exchange, language, and the circulation of ideas. 

Renee Stout (born 1958) is an American sculptor and contemporary artist known for assemblage artworks dealing with her personal history and African-American heritage. Born in Kansas, raised in Pittsburgh, living in Washington, D.C., and connected through her art to New Orleans, her art reflects this interest in African diasporic culture throughout the United States. Stout was the first American artist to exhibit in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art.

Renell Medrano (1992- ) is a Dominican-American commercial and artistic photographer and director. Medrano seeks to get to the "truth" of her subjects. Past subjects include Kendell Jenner, Kylie Jenner, Kendrick Lamar, and the Venus sisters. She has been creating images since she was a teenager. In addition to her work with musical artists, she creates work exploring her Dominican heritage. Medrano received her BFA in Photography at Parsons The New York School for Design.