Purvis Young

Purvis Young was an American artist from the Overtown neighborhood of Miami, Florida. Young's work, often a blend of collage and painting, utilizes found objects and the experience of African Americans in the south. A self-taught artist, Young gained recognition as a cult contemporary self-taught artist, with a collectors' following including the likes of Jane Fonda, Damon Wayans, Jim Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, among others. In 2006 a feature documentary entitled Purvis of Overtown was produced about his life and work. His work is found in the collections of the American Folk Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the High Museum of Art, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. Visit Purvis Young Museum, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In 2018, he was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. Read more from Wikipedia →

John Woodrow Wilson

John Woodrow Wilson (1922–2015) was an American lithographer, sculptor, painter, muralist, and art teacher whose art was driven by the political climate of his time. Wilson was best known for his works portraying themes of social justice and equality. Read more from Wikipedia →

Fred Wilson

Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley is a New York City-based portrait painter who is known for his highly naturalistic paintings of African-Americans. The Columbus Museum of Art, which hosted an exhibition of his work in 2007, describes his work as follows: "Wiley has gained recent acclaim for his heroic portraits which address the image and status of young African-American men in contemporary culture." Read more from Wikipedia →

Charles W. White

Charles Wilbert White, Jr. was an American artist known for his chronicling of African American related subjects in paintings and murals. White's best known work is The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy, a mural at Hampton University. In 2018, the centenary year of his birth, the first major retrospective exhibition of his work was organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art. Read more from Wikipedia →

Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist who works with text, fabric, audio, digital images, and installation video, but is best known for her work in the field of photography. Her award-winning photographs, films, and videos have been displayed in over 50 exhibitions in the United States and abroad, and focus on serious issues that face African Americans today, such as racism, sexism, politics, and personal identity. Read more from Wikipedia →

Kara Walker

Kara Elizabeth Walker is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, print-maker, installation artist, and film-maker who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Walker lives in New York City and has taught extensively at Columbia University. She is serving a five-year term as Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018. Read more from Wikipedia →

James VanDerZee

James Van Der Zee was an African-American photographer best known for his portraits of black New Yorkers. He was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Aside from the artistic merits of his work, Van Der Zee produced the most comprehensive documentation of the period. Among his most famous subjects during this time were Marcus Garvey, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Countee Cullen. Read more from Wikipedia →

Jean Toomer

Jean Toomer was an African American poet and novelist commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance, though he actively resisted the association, and modernism. His reputation stems from his only book, the novel Cane (1923), which Toomer wrote during and after a stint as a school principal in Sparta, Georgia. The novel intertwines the stories of six women and includes an apparently autobiographical thread; sociologist Charles S. Johnson called it "the most astonishingly brilliant beginning of any Negro writer of his generation". Read more from Wikipedia →

Bob Thompson

Bob Thompson was an African-American figurative painter known for his bold and colorful canvases, whose compositions were appropriated from the Old Masters. His art has also been described as synthesizing Baroque and Renaissance masterpieces with the jazz-influenced Abstract Expressionist movement. Read more from Wikipedia →

Mickalene Thomas

Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary African-American visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender. Read more from Wikipedia →

Renée Stout

Renee Stout 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 strongly connected through her art to New Orleans, Stout has strong ties to multiple parts of the United States. Her art reflects this, with thematic 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. Read more from Wikipedia →

Mitchell Squire

Mitchell Squire is an American installation artist, sculptor, and performance artist. He was born in Natchez, Mississippi. He primarily focuses on exploring culture through acquired artifacts and the inability to express pain. Squire is currently a professor at Iowa State University and lives in Ames, Iowa. Squire's work is held in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Read more from Wikipedia →

Vincent D. Smith

born New York City 1929 See more from wikidata →

Shinique Smith

Shinique Smith is an American visual artist, known for her colorful installation art and paintings that incorporate found textiles and collage materials. She is based in Brooklyn, New York. Read more from Wikipedia →

visual artist See more from wikidata →

Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson is an African-American photographer and multimedia artist who made her name in the 1980s and 1990s with artworks such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal. Her works have been included in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally. She is best known for her photo-text installations, photocollages, and films. Read more from Wikipedia →

Reginald Sanders

Reginald Algernon "Reggie" Anderson, who exhibited under the name Reginald Sanders, was an American visual artist who created collages and pencil drawings. He was a museum guard at the Minneapolis Institute of Art for over 25 years and only began to exhibit his art in the 1990s. Read more from Wikipedia →

Betye Saar

Betye Irene Saar is an African American artist known for her work in the medium of assemblage. Saar has been called "a legend" in the "world of contemporary art". She is a visual storyteller and an accomplished printmaker. Saar was a part of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, which engaged myths and stereotypes about race and femininity. Her work is considered highly political, as she challenged negative ideas about African-Americans throughout her career. Read more from Wikipedia →

Martin Puryear

Martin L. Puryear is an American artist known for his devotion to traditional craft. Working in wood and bronze, among other media, his reductive technique and meditative approach challenge the physical and poetic boundaries of his materials. The artist has been selected to represent the United States at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Read more from Wikipedia →

Carl Robert Pope, Jr.

Gordon Parks

Lorraine O'Grady is an American artist and critic. She works in conceptual art and performance art that integrates photo and video installation. Her work explores the cultural construction of identity - particularly that of black female subjectivity - as shaped by the experience of diaspora and hybridity. Read more from Wikipedia →

Clarence Morgan

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John Moore

Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu is a contemporary visual artist, best known for her densely layered abstract paintings and prints. She is best known for her large-scale paintings that take the abstract energy, topography, and sensibility of global urban landscapes as a source of inspiration. Read more from Wikipedia →

Fred McDarrah

Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall is an American artist born in Birmingham, Alabama. He grew up in South Central Los Angeles and now lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he previously taught at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a 1978 graduate of Otis College of Art and Design. An exhibition of his work, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, was assembled by the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2016. Read more from Wikipedia →

Jules Lion was born in Paris and exhibited at the Paris Salon before emigrating to the United States in 1837. He eventually opened a daguerrotype studio in New Orleans in 1840 one year after the invention of the process. On March 14, 1840, the New Orleans Bee published a notice about an exhibition of Lion's daguerreotypes at the St. Charles Museum, the first documented photography exhibition in Louisiana. Read more from Wikipedia →

Glenn Ligon

Glenn Ligon is an American conceptual artist whose work explores race, language, desire, sexuality, and identity. Based in New York City, Ligon engages in intertextuality with other works from the visual arts, literature, and history, as well as his own life. He is noted as one of the originators of the term Post-Blackness. Read more from Wikipedia →

David Levinthal

David Lawrence Levinthal is a photographer who lives and works in New York City. Read more from Wikipedia →

Jacob Lawrence

Jacob Lawrence was an African-American painter known for his portrayal of African-American life. As well as a painter, storyteller, and interpreter, he was an educator. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism", though by his own account the primary influence was not so much French art as the shapes and colors of Harlem. He brought the African-American experience to life using blacks and browns juxtaposed with vivid colors. He also taught and spent 15 years as a professor at the University of Washington. Read more from Wikipedia →

Gwendolyn Knight

Gwendolyn Clarine Knight was an American artist who was born in Bridgetown, Barbados, in the West Indies. Read more from Wikipedia →

Lois Mailou Jones

Loïs Mailou Jones was an influential artist and teacher during her seven-decade career. Jones was one of the most notable figures to attain notoriety for her art while living as a black expatriate in Paris during the 1930s and 1940s. Her career began in textile design before she decided to focus on fine arts. Jones looked towards Africa and the Caribbean and her experiences in life when painting. As a result, her subjects were some of the first paintings by an African-American artist to extend beyond the realm of portraiture. Jones was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance movement and her countless international trips. Lois Mailou Jones' career was enduring and complex. Her work in designs, paintings, illustrations, and academia made her an exceptional artist that continues to receive national attention and research. Read more from Wikipedia →

Wadsworth Jarrell

Wadsworth Aikens Jarrell is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker. He was born in Albany, Georgia, and moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he attended the Art Institute of Chicago. After graduation, he became heavily involved in the local art scene and through his early work he explored the working life of blacks in Chicago and found influence in the sights and sounds of jazz music. In the late 1960s he opened WJ Studio and Gallery, where he, along with his wife, Jae, hosted regional artists and musicians. Read more from Wikipedia →

Clementine Hunter

Clementine Hunter was a self-taught black folk artist from the Cane River region of the U.S. state of Louisiana, who lived and worked on Melrose Plantation. She is the first African-American artist to have a solo exhibition at the present-day New Orleans Museum of Art. Read more from Wikipedia →

Richard Hunt

Richard Howard Hunt is an American sculptor with over 125 sculptures for public display in the United States. Hunt has served on the Smithsonian Institution's National Board of Directors. Hunt’s abstract, contemporary sculpture work is notable for its presence in public displays as early as the 1960s, despite social pressures for the obstruction of African-American art at the time. Read more from Wikipedia →

Sedrick Huckaby

Sedrick Ervin Huckaby (1975) is an American artist who is known for his use of thick, impasto paint to create murals that evoke traditional quilts and to produce large portraits that represent his personal history through images of family members and neighbors. Huckaby has worked with images from quilts for many years, moving them from background components of portraits into the subject of his work. He was interviewed about his quilt-influenced abstract work in a podcast for Painters Table. His work is on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine arts in Boston, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Read more from Wikipedia →

William Howard

Lonnie Bradley Holley, sometimes known as The Sand Man, is an American artist, art educator, and musician. He is best known for his assemblages and immersive environments made of found materials. He was born the 7th of 27 children during the Jim Crow era and claims to have been traded for a bottle of whiskey when he was four. Read more from Wikipedia →

Leslie Hewitt is an American contemporary visual artist. Read more from Wikipedia →

Todd Gray works in photography, performance and sculpture as a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California and Akwidaa, Ghana. Read more from Wikipedia →

Russell T. Gordon

Russell T. Gordon was an American painter and printmaker. He moved to Montreal in 1973 where he was a visiting professor then faculty member at Concordia University until he retired in 1998. Read more from Wikipedia →

Sam Gilliam

Sam Gilliam is a color field painter and lyrical abstractionist artist. Gilliam, an African American, is associated with the Washington Color School, a group of Washington, D.C. artists that developed a form of abstract art from color field painting in the 1950s and 1960s. His works have also been described as belonging to abstract expressionism and lyrical abstraction. He works on stretched, draped and wrapped canvas, and adds sculptural 3D elements. He is recognized as the first artist to introduce the idea of a draped, painted canvas hanging without stretcher bars around 1965. This was a major contribution to the Color Field School. Read more from Wikipedia →

Sam Gilliam is a color field painter and lyrical abstractionist artist. Gilliam, an African American, is associated with the Washington Color School, a group of Washington, D.C. artists that developed a form of abstract art from color field painting in the 1950s and 1960s. His works have also been described as belonging to abstract expressionism and lyrical abstraction. He works on stretched, draped and wrapped canvas, and adds sculptural 3D elements. He is recognized as the first artist to introduce the idea of a draped, painted canvas hanging without stretcher bars around 1965. This was a major contribution to the Color Field School. Read more from Wikipedia →

Rico Gatson

Charles Gaines

Minnie Eva Evans was an African American artist who worked in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s. Evans used different media in her work, but started with using wax and crayon. She was inspired to start drawing due to visions and dreams that she had when she was a young girl. She is known as a southern folk artist and as a surrealist and visionary artist as well. Read more from Wikipedia →

Alfred Eisenstaedt

Alfred Eisenstaedt was a German-born American photographer and photojournalist. He began his career in pre-World War II Germany and after moving to the U.S. achieved prominence as a staff photographer for Life Magazine, which featured more than 90 of his pictures on its covers with over 2,500 photo stories published. Read more from Wikipedia →

Melvin "Mel" Edwards is an American contemporary artist, teacher, and abstract steel metal sculptor. Additionally he has worked in drawing and printmaking. His artwork has political content often referencing African-American history, as well as the exploration of themes within slavery. Visually his works are characterized by the use of straight-edged triangular and rectilinear forms in metal. He lives between Upstate New York and in Plainfield, New Jersey. Read more from Wikipedia →

William Edmondson

Robert Seldon Duncanson was a 19th-century American landscapist of European and African ancestry. Inspired by famous American landscape artists like Thomas Cole, Duncanson created renowned landscape paintings and is considered a second generation Hudson River School artist. Duncanson spent the majority of his career in Cincinnati, Ohio and helped develop the Ohio River Valley landscape tradition. As a free black man in antebellum America, Duncanson engaged the abolitionist community in America and England to support and promote his work. Duncanson is considered the first African-American artist to be internationally known. He operated in the cultural circles of Cincinnati, Detroit, Montreal, and London. The primary art historical debate centered on Duncanson concerns the role that contemporary racial issues played in his work. Some art historians, like Joseph D. Ketner, believe that Duncanson used racial metaphors in his artwork, while others, like Margaret Rose Vendryes, discourage viewers from approaching his art with a racialized perspective. Read more from Wikipedia →

John Dowell

Thornton Dial was a pioneering African-American artist who came to prominence in the late 1980s. Dial's body of work exhibits formal variety through expressive, densely composed assemblages of found materials, often executed on a monumental scale. His range of subjects embraces a broad sweep of history, from human rights to natural disasters and current events. Dial's works are widely held in American museums; ten of Dial's works were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014. Read more from Wikipedia →

Beauford Delaney

Beauford Delaney was an American modernist painter. He is remembered for his work with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as his later works in abstract expressionism following his move to Paris in the 1950s. Beauford's younger brother, Joseph, was also a noted painter. Read more from Wikipedia →

Roy DeCarava

Roy DeCarava was an African American artist. DeCarava received early critical acclaim for his photography, initially engaging and imaging the lives of African Americans and jazz musicians in the communities where he lived and worked. Over a career that spanned nearly six decades, DeCarava came to be known as a founder in the field of black and white fine art photography, advocating for an approach to the medium based on the core value of an individual, subjective creative sensibility, which was separate and distinct from the "social documentary" style of his predecessors. Read more from Wikipedia →

Frank E. Cummings III

Frank E. Cummings III is an artist and professor of fine arts at California State University, Fullerton. Cummings makes wood vessels and furniture using precious materials, inspired by spiritual meanings of objects in Africa. Read more from Wikipedia →

Willie Cole

Willie Cole is a noted contemporary American sculptor, printer, and conceptual and visual artist. His work uses contexts of postmodern eclecticism, and combines references and appropriation from African and African-American imagery. He also has used Dada’s readymades and Surrealism’s transformed objects, as well as icons of American pop culture or African and Asian masks. Read more from Wikipedia →

Henry Ray Clark

Henry Ray Clark was a folk artist born in Bartlett, Texas, and moved to Houston, where he became a criminal with the street name of "The Magnificent Pretty Boy". After a series of drug-dealing convictions he was found guilty of an assault, his third strike in the Texas Three Strikes Law, which sentenced him to 25 years in Huntsville State Prison. While in prison he developed a characteristic drawing style involving detailed patterning and line work, and was discovered at a prison art show by William Steen, who sold Clark's work to national and international buyers. Clark died on July 29, 2006, the victim of a robbery and murder in his home. Read more from Wikipedia →

Nick Cave

Elizabeth Catlett

Elizabeth Catlett was an African-American graphic artist and sculptor best known for her depictions of the African-American experience in the 20th century, which often focused on the female experience. She was born and raised in Washington, D.C. to parents working in education, and was the grandchild of freed slaves. It was difficult for a black woman in this time to pursue a career as a working artist. Catlett devoted much of her career to teaching. However, a fellowship awarded to her in 1946 allowed her to travel to Mexico City, where she worked with the Taller de Gráfica Popular for twenty years and became head of the sculpture department for the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. In the 1950s, her main means of artistic expression shifted from print to sculpture, though she never gave up the former. Read more from Wikipedia →

Iona Rozeal Brown is a contemporary American painter best known for her narrative canvases commenting on cultural identity. She pulls her inspiration from ukiyo-e printmaking and contemporary hip-hop. She touches upon African-American culture and Japanese ganguro culture, which appropriates black culture. Read more from Wikipedia →

Frank J. Brown

Frank J. Brown is an African-American visual artist active in Minnesota. His sculptures have entered several public collections. Read more from Wikipedia →

Mark Bradford is an American artist living and working in Los Angeles. Read more from Wikipedia →

McArthur Binion is an American artist based in Chicago, Illinois. Binion was born in Macon, Mississippi. He holds a BFA from Wayne State University (1971) in Detroit, Michigan and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He was a Professor of Art at Columbia College in Chicago from 1993-2015. Read more from Wikipedia →

Sanford Biggers is a Harlem-based interdisciplinary artist who works in film/video, installation, sculpture, music, and performance. An L.A. native, he has lived and worked in New York City since 1999. Read more from Wikipedia →

John Biggers

John Thomas Biggers was an African-American muralist who came to prominence after the Harlem Renaissance and toward the end of World War II. Biggers has worked on creating works critical of racial and economic injustice. He served as the founding chairman of the art department at Houston's Texas State University for Negroes. Read more from Wikipedia →

Mary Lee Bendolph

Mary Lee Bendolph is an American quilt maker of the Gee's Bend Collective from Gee's Bend (Boykin), Alabama. Her work has been influential on subsequent quilters and artists and her quilts have been exhibited in museums and galleries around the country. Mary Lee uses fabric from used clothing for quilting in appreciation of the "love and spirit" with old cloth. Mary has spent her life in Gee's Bend and has had work featured in the Philadelphia Museum of Art as well as the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minnesota. Read more from Wikipedia →

Romare Howard Bearden

Romare Bearden was an African-American artist and author of a history of his people's art. He worked with many types of media including cartoons, oils and collages. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Bearden lived as a child in New York City. He was educated in high school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and then returned to New York City. He graduated from NYU in 1935. Read more from Wikipedia →

Henry Bannarn

Henry Wilmer "Mike" Bannarn was an African-American artist, best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance period. He is known for his work in sculpture and as a character artist in the various paint mediums, Conté crayon, pastel, and free-form sketch. Read more from Wikipedia →

Benny Andrews

Benny Andrews was an African-American painter, printmaker, and creator of collages. During the 1950s, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he began to take an interest in painting. In 1958, he moved to New York City to pursue artistic and activist work. Among other successes, he created art education programs to serve underprivileged students at Queens College and participated actively in the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (1969). His advocacy of artists of color Howardena Pindell, Sam Gilliam, Roy DeCarava, and others contributed to their increasing visibility and reputation in museums and the historical canon. He received many awards, including the John Hay Whitney Fellowship (1965–66), the New York Council on the Arts fellowships (1971–81), and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1974–81). Read more from Wikipedia →

Emma Amos was a postmodern African-American painter and printmaker. Read more from Wikipedia →

Charles Alston

Charles Henry Alston was an African-American painter, sculptor, illustrator, muralist and teacher who lived and worked in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem. Alston was active in the Harlem Renaissance; Alston was the first African-American supervisor for the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. Alston designed and painted murals at the Harlem Hospital and the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Building. In 1990 Alston's bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. became the first image of an African American displayed at the White House. Read more from Wikipedia →

Laylah Ali

Laylah Ali (born 1968, Buffalo, New York) is a contemporary visual artist known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format. Read more from Wikipedia →

Mequitta Ahuja

Mequitta Ahuja is a contemporary American feminist painter of African American and South Asian descent who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Ahuja creates works of self-portraiture that combine themes of myth and legend with personal identity. Read more from Wikipedia →