Adji Dieye
Magic Cube, Matiere Premiere
2019
The stock cube, the most commonly found dehydrated broth (or bouillon, as the French would have it), is a small conglomerate of about half an inch in size and made from dehydrated vegetables, meat stock, fat, and seasonings. Debatably invented in 18th century England as a dry alternative to meat stock, or in 19th century France by a group of patent-obsessed cooks, it made its way to West African markets and has since become ubiquitous in local recipes, be it Cameroonian ndolè, Ivorian sauce graine, or Senegalese thiéboudiène. This tiny cube’s history however condenses issues emanating from a much larger, geometrical construct: the Scramble for Africa. There were 14 powers who, in 1884-85, during what history now calls the Berlin Conference, agreed on how to split an entire continent into arbitrary morsels. The conversations would lead to an economic, global treaty, which dictated trade norms and defined the manner in which their products would be sold throughout the African continent.
Angèle Etoundi Essamba
Tisser une nouvelle histoire 4
2019
Born in Cameroon and educated in France, Angele Etoundi Essamba is a graduate of the Dutch Photography School in Amsterdam where she lives and holds a Bachelor’s degree in History of Art. Since her first exhibition in 1985, her work has been frequently exhibited in museums, institutions, Biennales, fairs and galleries in Europe, Africa, the United States, Latin America and Asia.
The Black woman is at the heart of my artistic expression. She remains an inexhaustible source of inspiration, she is the bearer, the guardian and the transmitter and I celebrate her naturally.
My work challenges and breaks with stereotypical representations of Black women who are often depicted by western media as submissive, passive, dependent, exotic, and confined to certain roles.
Instead, I use the camera to reappropriate the Black body and to deconstruct and break these stereotypes by showing active, proud, and determined women who take up daily challenges, show their place and their role in society, take charge of their own narrative and rewrite history.
Bonnie Hopper
Dredie, 2023
My work tends to be tactile. I’ve always been drawn to the idea of creating art that people can experience through touch as well as sight. My subjects are a series of observations pulled from the onrush of the everyday life.
For example a visual snapshot of something completely mundane will strike a chord and lead me on a journey. If I’m blessed, at the end of that journey they’ll be an extraordinary work of art.
Since I seldom know what a piece will look like until it’s finished, I can only plan so far and that’s part of the excitement. For me painting is about pleasure, mystery and sensuality, a safe port of call for my Muse to land and shed her inhibitions on the way to self-discovery. Finally, art is taking a giant leap of faith over the threshold into the unknown where judgment is suspended, and beauty is truly in the eyes of the beholder.
Aramis O. Hamer
Utopia, 2023
Aramis O. Hamer is a visual artist and muralist living in Seattle. Her subject matter is inspired by spirituality, music, nature, divine femininity, and the complexities throughout the Black culture. From a very young age she loved to create, and at the age of fifteen she discovered her love for acrylic paints. With a supportive art community in the Pacific Northwest, Aramis has been able to exhibit her colorful creations at many different exhibitions in the greater Seattle area — including the Paramount Theater, Martyr Sauce Gallery and Climate Pledge Arena. In 2019, she won the Cornish College of Arts Neddy Award in the painting category. As a self-taught artist, Aramis lets the pull of her imagination be her guide. Her adventure is just beginning, and she invites others to join her on this journey.
Chelsea Odufu
Moved by Spirit
Chelsea Odufu is a first-generation Nigerian and Guyanese American Filmmaker and multi-disciplinary artist from Newark, New Jersey, who works across narrative, experimental film, video art, installation, and photography. She was also one of twelve artists selected in 2021 for Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Senegal Residency in Dakar. She has exhibited her work at the Dakar Biennale, Alabama Contemporary Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporic Art, and the IA&A Hillyer Gallery in DC. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and Huffington Post, to name a few.
Chelsea Odufu is deeply concerned with how traditional aspects of African and Caribbean culture are being preserved in the face of urbanization and globalization. Her work also examines how culture, religion, and geographic location influence the way different ethnic identities are formed and evolve. Chelsea’s work incorporates the mystic, allowing time to collapse in her work where the future, past and present coincide in her pieces. Chelsea’s work juxtaposes afro-futuristic imagery, archival footage, and journalistic aesthetics to demystify the stigmas typically connected to BIPOC identities. Her work is visually striking and thought-provoking; it is clear her process comes to her very intuitively.
Chidinma Nnoli
Wanderlust, 2021
Chidinma Nnoli (b. 1998, Nigeria) is a visual artist with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Benin. In 2020, she was selected for the Rele Arts Foundation Young Contemporaries exhibition. Select group exhibitions include: The Invincible Hands (2021), Shyllon Museum, Lagos, Orita Meta (2021), Rele Gallery, Los Angeles, and In Situ (2021), Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. Nnoli held her debut solo exhibition To Wander Untamed in 2020 at Rele Gallery, Lagos and had a solo presentation at the Armory Show in 2021. Her works have been featured in Vogue, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, and Colossal. She currently lives and works in Lagos.
Ebony G. Patterson
I AM A PROMISE TOO...14...when they grow up… 2020
Ebony G. Patterson (b. 1981, Kingston, Jamaica) received an MFA degree in Printmaking and Drawing from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University St. Louis (2006). Ebony's multilayered practice in painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and video uses beauty as a tool to address global social and political injustices. Her immersive gardens grow out of a complex entanglement of race, gender, class, and violence. Patterson seduces the viewer into acknowledging a darker truth lurking ominously beneath the surface. Upon closer inspection, the figures in these embellished paper works are disembodied, un-whole. While the bright, effusive visual cues on the surface of her work suggest vivifying celebration, these signifiers point to the opposite. Their ghostly forms hover amidst a tangle of flora and fauna, plants which themselves might harbor a secret poison. Patterson’s gardens are never far from notions of violence, of memorial, of blood and tears.
Esiri Erheriene-Essi
'The Secret Ingredient' (2022)
Esiri Erheriene-Essi (1982) is a UK-born and Amsterdam-based Nigerian artist from Lewisham, South London. In 2000 she attended Camberwell College of Art for a foundation year. From 2001-2004 she studied Media Studies at University of East London and attained a Masters of Fine Art from the same university in 2006. In 2007 Erheriene-Essi attended the international residency programme De Ateliers in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and in 2009 she won the prestigious Dutch Royal Award for Modern Painting prize. In 2011 she was a nominee for the Volkskrant Visual Arts Prize, and in 2014 Erheriene-Essi had her first museum solo exhibition at Museum Arnhem, the Netherlands. In 2019 she was shortlisted for the Prix de Rome, the oldest and most generous prize for talented artists and architects in the Netherlands.
C. Davida Ingram
Jane with Raccoon Skin, 2017
C. Davida Ingram is an award-winning artist and civic leader based in Seattle, Washington. Through her creative work she has produced world class experiences in contemporary arts, online projects, exhibit design, installations, pop up experiences, community surveying, live streamed and in–person events, and storytelling.
In 2014, Ingram received the 2014 Stranger Genius Award in Visual Arts. In 2016, she became a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow and a finalist for the Neddy award in Visual Arts. In 2018, she was awarded the Jacob Lawrence Legacy Residency at the University of Washington. Seattle Magazine has voted Ingram both one of the 20 most talented people in Seattle (2016) and one of Seattle’s most influential people (2017). She was a Neddy Award finalist again in 2022.
Eva Diallo
Paulèl, 2020
Bolol is above all a family story. This term means in Fulani, the journey or the road in other contexts. To get from Senegal to the south of Italy, two of my cousins travelled through Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Libya. Those who made the crossing successfully sell dreams to their relatives back home. Calls are expected on one side of the Mediterranean while they are apprehended on the other.
The five chapters produced so far all have their own identity. The story of this journey can be understood as a whole, yet each city is told in a different way. Between family pictures, city reports, aerial images and portraits, Bolol is told according to the rhythm in which the adventures took place. Between 2019 and 2023, these Sahelian countries underwent a number of upheavals, so it was hard to predict what I might come across and, above all, the energy in which the towns and villages would evolve.
So Bolol is a family story, and at the same time a story told and lived by thousands of refugees and migrants. It was thanks to the stories my cousins told me that I was able to approach the subject in this way. The gentleness, the poetry of certain moments, but also the despair.
Marita Dingus
Feeling Blue, 2020
Born in Seattle in 1956, Dingus attended Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia (BFA, 1980) and San Jose State University (MFA, 1985). She has received a Visual Art Fellowship from Artist Trust (1994), a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship (1999), and the Morrie and Joan Alhadeff PONCHO Artist of the Year Award (2005).
“I consider myself an African-American Feminist and environmental artist. My approach to producing art is environmentally and politically infused: neither waste humanity nor the gifts of nature. I am primarily a mixed media sculptor who uses discarded materials. My art draws upon relics from the African Diaspora. The discarded materials represent how people of African descent were used during the institution of slavery and colonialism then discarded, but who found ways to repurpose themselves and thrive in a hostile world. I seek to use recovered materials, reconfiguring and incorporating them into pieces of art where possible and appropriate, and to mitigate waste and pollution in all my work. This is a creative challenge, but a commitment I incorporate into my professional and personal activities.”
Jordan Casteel
Marisa, Isabel and Sage (2022)
Jordan Casteel (b. 1989, Denver, CO) received her BA from Agnes Scott College, Decatur, GA for Studio Art (2011) and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (2014). In 2020, Casteel presented a solo exhibition titled Within Reach at the New Museum, New York, in conjunction with a fully illustrated catalogue published by the institution. Other recent museum solo exhibitions include Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze, presented at both the Denver Art Museum, CO (2019), and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, CA (2019–20). In recent years, Casteel has participated in group and permanent collection exhibitions at institutional venues such as Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2021 and 2022); Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2022); The Modern, Fort Worth, TX (2022); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2022); Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL (2022); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA (2021); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2021); Art Institute of Chicago, IL (2021); Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, AR (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2020); Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands (2020); Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2019); MoCA Los Angeles, CA (2018); Studio Museum in Harlem, NY (2017 and 2016); and MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2017). Most recently, Casteel presented a solo exhibition entitled In bloom at Casey Kaplan, New York. Casteel is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2021).
M. Florine Démosthène
Beings Of Time, 2020
M. Florine Démosthène was born in the United States and raised between Port-au-Prince, Haiti and New York. Démosthène earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons School for Design in New York and her Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College-City University of New York.
She has exhibited extensively through group and solo exhibitions in the USA, Caribbean, UK, Europe and Africa, with recent solo shows including, In the Realm of Love at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery Paris, a solo booth exhibition with Mariane Ibrahim Gallery at the The New York Armory Fair and The Stories I Tell Myself with Gallery 1957 Accra, Ghana.
She is the recipient of a Wachtmeister Award, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Arts Moves Africa Grant and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. She has participated in residencies in the USA, Caribbean, UK, Slovakia, Ghana and Tanzania.
Rachel Marsil
C'est à table qu’un parle du passé (It’s at the table that we talk about the past), 2022
Rachel Marsil was born in Lille, France in 1995. She is originally from Senegal and currently lives in Paris.
She graduated from the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs de Paris and developed an artistic language at the crossroads of textile design and painting. Her multidisciplinary work deals with questions of identity and the representations that can be linked to it. Through her research, Rachel Marsil attempts to understand the different dynamics of memory and identity conveyed by the cultural circulation of images, both personal and archival, in a postcolonial, multicultural and globalized world.
As a feeling of deja-vu, the scene « C'est a table qu’on parle du passé » (It’s at the table that we talk about the past) is a painting that represents family for me.
In this colorful interior, the family just finished eating, plates are empty and the table has been cleared. The only things left are the fruits, the bottles and the conversations ... We talk about the past.
How could time go so fast ?
The silence reigns as we make this moment last. We try to say the untold memories.
We try to remember.
Rugiyatou Jallow
Lekfull, 2022
Rugiyatou Ylva Jallow (b. 1990 in Stockholm, Sweden), currently residing in Los Angeles, is a Swedish- Gambian visual artist known primarily for her work with acrylic and oil paint.
Her bold self-portraits ensnare emotivity as each layer resonates the artist's internal and outward struggle with feeling distanced from the world around her as she tries to reconcile the dichotomies of bridging multiple cultures as a mixed woman.
Rugiyatou was raised by her Gambian father and step mother who imparted West African values and culture while residing her whole life in Sweden. The artist credits her Swedish mother and grandmother as being early artistic influences in her life, inspiring her to start painting at an early age. Her upbringing became her inspiration to portray black subjectivity and explore her half-Swedish and half-Gambian identity.
Jallow’s use of color to portray black, white, and mixed skin with the thread, is acting as a visual representation of equality and connection across races. The bright colors specifically are a further representation of the artist’s connection to nature and feeling of belonging on this Earth.
Lisa Jarrett
Migrations Studies, Beauty Supply, 2023
Lisa Jarrett (she/her) is an artist working in social and visual forms. Her intersectional practice considers the politics of difference within a variety of settings including: schools, landscapes, fictions, racial imaginaries, studios, communities, museums, galleries, walls, mountains, mirrors, floors, rivers, and prisms. She recently discovered that her primary medium is questions; the most urgent of which is: What will set you free?
She is co-founder/director of projects like KSMoCA (Dr MLK Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art); the Harriet Tubman Middle School Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice in NE Portland, OR; and Art 25: Art in the 25th Century.
Lisa exists and makes work within the African Diaspora. She lives in Portland, Oregon where she co-authors social practice projects and continues her 14+ year investigation into Black hair and its care in various forms. She is Associate Professor of Community and Context Arts at Portland State University's School of Art + Design where she teaches classes in Art + Social Practice.
Sheila Pree Bright
Rebirth of Us, 2020
Sheila Pree Bright is an International Photographic Artist and author of #1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protests. She portrays large-scale works that combine a broad range of knowledge of contemporary culture and is known for her series #1960Now, Invisible Empire, Suburbia, Young Americans, and Plastic Bodies.
Bright’s work is included in the book and exhibition Posing Beauty in African American Culture. She appeared in the 2014 feature-length documentary Through the Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People. She also appeared in the 2016 feature-length documentary film Election Day: Lens Across America. Her series has been exhibited at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Smithsonian National Museum of African American Museum, Washington, DC; Saatchi Gallery, London; Turner Contemporary, London; The Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada; The Lecia Gallery, NY; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; International Center of Photography, NY; Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, FL; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Arts, Bentonville, AR. Her work is featured in the Washington Post and The New York Times.
Through her photography, Sheila Pree Bright challenges us to confront our assumptions and biases about race and identity and to engage with the complex and often difficult realities of contemporary American life. As an artist, she uses photography to explore the complexities of identity, race, and representation in contemporary American society. Her work is informed by her own experiences as a Black woman.
Thandiwe Muriu
In Full Bloom, 2022
Born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, Thandiwe Muriu discovered photography at 14 thanks to her father. Kenya did not have any formal art schools so she trained herself using books and the internet. Pushing her way through the industry, she started working as a professional photographer at 17 years old. At 21 she was introduced to advertising photography after meeting a local photographer and two years later shot her first advertising campaign. Until 2019, when she transitioned into fine art photography, she worked her way to the top of the industry in Kenya, becoming a photographer of note and the first female to operate in that space. Her career saw her photograph advertisements for some of the biggest companies in East Africa.
Material Culture is a photographic series inspired by the elaborate, rich headwraps that the Artist’s mother wears as a fabric crown whenever she adorns herself for a special event and her weekly church attendance. No two headwraps are ever the same- they are draped for a transient moment and then gone as soon as they are taken off at the end of the day; and even if the same fabric, pins and method are repeated there will always be something new in the final drape.
zakkiyyah najeebah dumas - o'neal
to render the infinite, 2021
zakkiyyah has been included in numerous group exhibitions and has had several solo exhibitions at Mana Contemporary, Blanc Gallery, and South Bend Museum of Art. She has curated exhibitions at spaces such as Chicago Art Department and Washington Park Arts Incubator. She is a recent recipient of Chicago Artist Coalition’s SPARK Grant and Artist Run Chicago Fund Grant. She has been an Artist in Residence at Hyde Park Art Center (2019), Artist in Residence at University of Chicago’s Arts and Public Life (2021), and most recently a Visiting Artist in Residence at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN (2021) and 3Arts Gary and Denise Gardner fund Awardee (2022). She is currently a FACE Foundation Laureate Awardee, in collaboration with Villa Albertine (2023).
zakkiyyah is also a Co-founder of CBIM (Concerned Black Image Makers): a collective of Black artists, thinkers, and curators that prioritize shared experiences and concerns by lens based artists of the Black diaspora.
Zandile Tshabalala
Things around my neck, 2023
Zandile Tshabalala is a Soweto born fine art painter who has recently graduated her BA(FINA) degree at the University of the Witwatersrand, 2022. In her work she uses acrylic to depict narratives around the inclusion of black women within the art canon and was primarily influenced by the lack of or displacement of black women within 19th century western art. Tshabalala is concerned with this placement has she believes that the imagery that we consume has an effect on how one views and thinks of oneself as well as how one is seen by others. She believes that images depictIng black women as confident, rested and self-aware and so forth can contribute to the subversion of stereotypes such as of those of the mammy, or the idea that black women are not to be seen or heard. Some of Tshabalala’s influences include painters Kerry James Marshall, Njideka Akunyilli-Crosby, Mickalene Thomas and Henri Rousseau.
Kiki Turner
Aisha, 2022
My work is an extension of me, literally. In my past works, I would solicit my friends for nude photos and direct them on how to pose. Now I use myself as a reference. I set up a tripod in my bathroom and played with different seated and standing poses. Once I’m ready to paint, I change a few things to give my girls their identity. I then refer to my collection of photos and screenshots that I’ve taken that I find inspiring. It could be something as simple as a leaf or a wedding gown I saw on Pinterest.
I work by first building layers of texture on the canvas. I like the polarity of the soft feminine form with the rugged textured canvas. It gives another aspect to my work that makes you want to look at it and touch it. My painting process is rapid, as if I’m sketching an idea, using a thick black holding line, and painting in bold colors like I’m using a crayon in a coloring book. I don’t want to take it too seriously; it’s essential that I’m painting for myself and that I’m painting for fun. My fashion illustration teacher Mr. Broadway used to scold me for using thick holding lines because it would smear. Now I love that the holding line bleeds a little or that my lines aren’t smooth. I celebrate my mistakes, and l allow myself to be free and almost childlike when painting, which is nearly the opposite of how I worked as a clothing designer.
I often use dark skin tones on my girls because, in a way, I want to put the dark-skinned woman on a pedestal. Dark-skinned women are often ignored, so this is my way of celebrating them/her. When people see my work, I want them to see femininity, a different approach to fashion design and nudity, and exoticism in the black woman.