AFRICAN AND AMERICAN ARTISTS
BLACK HISTORY INSPIRATION
Culture Type
Art For the Creative Soul
Ten Incredible Black Female Artists You Need to Know
Documentary Connects Black Art’s Rich History and Vibrant Present
Art Class Curator: Black History Month
INSPIRING MUSIC WHILE CREATING ART:
FEMALE BLACK ARTISTS BELOW:
Bisa Butler is an American fiber artist known for her quilted portraits and designs celebrating black life. She tells the story — this African American side — of the American life. History is the story of men and women, but the narrative is controlled by those who hold the pen.
|
Amy Sherald is one of the world’s most important Black female painters. She specialises in portraits addressing problems with injustice in Black culture, and deliberately paints skin tones in greyscale, taking a stand against identifying people by their skin colour. As she has explained: “I’m painting the paintings that I want to see in museums. And I’m hopefully presenting them in a way that’s universal enough that they become representative of something different than just a black body on a canvas.”
|
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.
Art Curator Lesson - Betye Saar |
Alma Woodsey Thomas was an African-American artist and teacher who lived and worked in Washington, D.C., and is now recognized as a major American painter of the 20th century. Her career is as unlikely as any in 20th-century America, and at the same time utterly reasonable. Unlikely: after working as a junior high school art teacher for 35 years, she began a career as a painter at nearly 70, and in the course of her remaining two decades made extraordinary work that won widespread acclaim despite its maker being not male, not white, and not in New York.
VIDEO/BIO: Alma Woodsey |
Elizabeth Catlett, An African American and Mexican female descendant of slaves, Catlett created works of art that honored her ancestors and merged her past into her present. Much of her work related to race, daily struggles of being black and feminism. "Catlett kind of came of age as an artist when African-Americans and women were not part of the mainstream. They were not part of the center. They were relegated to the margins and excluded." - curator, Isolde Brielmaier
ART LESSON LINK |
Tamara Natalie Madden was a Jamaican-born painter and mixed-media artist working and living in the United States. Madden's paintings are allegories whose subjects are the people of the African diaspora. "My work deals with the social, spiritual and cultural identity of people of African Ancestry."
ART LESSON LINK |
Loïs Mailou Jones was an influential artist and teacher during her seven-decade career. Jones was one of the most notable figures to attain fame 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.
ART LESSON LINK |
Faith Ringgold is a former public school teacher, American painter, author, mixed media sculptor and performance artist, best known for her narrative quilts that communicate her political beliefs.
Art Curator Lesson - Faith Ringgold |
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
|
Alison Saar is a Los Angeles, California based sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist. Her artwork focuses on the African diaspora and black female identity and is influenced by African, Caribbean, and Latin American folk art and spirituality.
|
Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-American visual artist known primarily for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work. Born in Kenya, she has lived and established her career in New York for more than twenty years.
Wengechi Muto Collage Collection |
Sokuri Douglas Camp's sculptures are instantly recognisable. They are often welded in steel and crafted in contorting shapes, frequently depicting elements of the human experience. Camp was exposed her to art in her youth. "I had an interest in art because of my guardian who was English, and I was introduced to western culture by a westerner in Nigeria,' she says.
|
Kesha Bruce's work explores the complex connections between history, personal
mythology, and magical-spiritual belief in the African diaspora. Her latest work is concerned primarily with exploring the ways vibrant color and abstract symbols can not only trigger powerful emotion but begin to conjure narratives. |
Mickalene Thomas, a Brooklyn-based artist is known for her elaborate, tactile paintings adorned with rhinestones, enamel and colorful acrylics. Her glamorized representations of African American women highlight stereotypes and ideals of celebrity and identity while simultaneously romanticizing ideas of femininity and power.
|
Synthia St James is a self-taught artist and popular speaker, credits the creator and her ancestry (which includes African American, Native American, Haitian and German Jew) for her artistic gifts
|
MALE BLACK ARTISTS BELOW:
Demont Peekaso Pinder: A curator of culture, constructs large artworks using pieces of clothing to create beautiful portrait compositions of people that have influenced his life. Many of his portraits represent his culture and heritage and pay tribute to both the past and present.
ART LESSON LINK |
Ben Jones: For nearly five decades, Jones' multimedia installations have reflected his travel and research in Africa, Europe, South America, United States and the Caribbean
ART LESSON LINK |
Romare Bearden's life and art are marked by exceptional talent, encompassing a broad range of intellectual and scholarly interests, including music, performing arts, history, literature and world art. Bearden was also a celebrated humanist, as demonstrated by his lifelong support of young, emerging artists.
Art Curator Lesson - Romare Bearden |
Jacob Armstead Lawrence was an American painter known for his portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism", although by his own account the primary influence was not so much French art as the shapes and colors of Harlem
|
Nick Cave is an American fabric sculptor, dancer, and performance artist. Cave's family was large in size and always supportive of his artistic interests. He claims his upbringing gave him an artistic attentiveness to found objects and assemblages.
|
Hank Willis Thomas: A conceptual artist and arts educator whose work deals with themes related to identity, history and popular culture. The construction and use of race is a major element of Hank’s art. He has observed: “I could be a black artist, but I’m also many other things. All of us inhabit multiple identities at once. The craziest thing about blackness is that black people didn’t create it. Europeans with a commercial interest in dehumanizing us created it. Five hundred years ago in Africa there weren’t black people. There were just people.
|
Kehinde Wiley is an American portrait painter based in New York City, who is known for his highly naturalistic paintings of African Americans, frequently referencing the work of Old Master paintings.
KEHINDE ARTICLE & IMAGES YOUTUBE-ONLINE LESSON Art Curator Lesson: Kehinde Wiley |
Jean Michael Basquiat: A poet, musician, and graffiti prodigy in late-1970s New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat had honed his signature painting style of obsessive scribbling, elusive symbols and diagrams, and mask-and-skull imagery by the time he was 20. “I don’t think about art while I work,” he once said. “I think about life.” Basquiat drew his subjects from his own Caribbean heritage—his father was Haitian and his mother of Puerto Rican descent—and a convergence of African-American, African, and Aztec cultural histories with Classical themes and contemporary heroes like athletes and musicians.
ART LESSON LINK VIDEO: The Chaotic Brilliance of Artist Jean Michel Basquiat VIDEO: Who was Basquiat? PBS/VIDEO: Artists Flight ONLINE YOUTUBE LESSON |
Prince Duncan Williams: Creates works of art that impart distinct sensations of dynamic movement to their viewers, and I believe I have achieved this sensation in each of my creations. Above all, I love seeing viewers smile when they connect with the vitality of my silk mosaic art. My silk mosaics are best known for their strong and unique use of color, the latter of which I have always had a strong relationship with. Color has energized and intrigued me for as long as I can remember.
|
Aaron Douglas was an American painter, illustrator and visual arts educator. He was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He developed his art career painting murals and creating illustrations that addressed social issues around race and segregation in the United States by utilizing African-centric imagery.
|
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
|
Johnny Tarajosu is a Multimedia creative producing illustration, portraiture, murals, and social media content for brands and publications. His diverse upbringing has led to his appreciation of the diversity and cultures of the world. Love, unity, and community create opportunities. That is the "WHY" behind his work. A majority of his inspiration comes from the indigenous people of the world. "I do it for Love, Unity, & Community and because I value people + their time + energy.
An interview with Johnny Tarajosu |
Barkley L. Hendricks was a contemporary American painter who made pioneering contributions to black portraiture and conceptualism. While he worked in a variety of media and genres throughout his career, Hendricks' best known work took the form of life-sized painted oil portraits of Black Americans.
|
Kerry James Marshall uses painting, sculptural installations, collage, video, and photography to comment on the history of black identity both in the United States and in Western art. He is well known for paintings that focus on black subjects historically excluded from the artistic canon, and has explored issues of race and history through imagery ranging from abstraction to comics.
|
Charly "Carlos" Palmer is an American fine artist. Palmer was born in Fayette, Alabama and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and receiving a degree from the American Academy of Art. He is currently based in Atlanta, Georgia.
"Art should change the temperature in the room." |