The Caribbean’s premier art program celebrating the excellence of emerging artists of diverse backgrounds from around the globe.

The Collection

Gisela McDaniel

Swipe to view Collection

The Collection

Sungi Mlengeya

The Collection

David "mr star city" white

The Collection

David "mr star city" white

The Collection

Hiejin Yoo

The Collection

Asif hoque

The Collection

Nathaniel Mary Quinn

The Collection

Amoako boafo

The Collection

Amoako boafo

The Collection

Rashid johnson

The Collection

Ewa juszkiewicz

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 2015

The Collection

Deborah Roberts

The Collection

STANLEY WHITNEY

Untitled, 2006

The Collection

STANLEY WHITNEY

Untitled, 2017

The Collection

STANLEY WHITNEY

The Collection

STANLEY WHITNEY

The Collection

Jeff Sonhouse

The Collection

Ferrari Sheppard

Waves (2020)

The Collection

Ferrari Sheppard

Lilacs in Spring, 2021

The Collection

Glenn ligon

Miserable Life #18, 2008

The Collection

Brittney Leeanne Williams

The Collection

Brittney Leeanne Williams

The Collection

Brittney Leeanne Williams

The Collection

Sophie von hellermann

The Collection

Ludovic Nkoth

The Collection

Ivy Haldeman

The Collection

OS GEMEOS

Vincente Mais Ou Menos, 2012

The Collection

KWESI BOTCHWAY

Survivor, 2019

The Collection

KWESI BOTCHWAY

James Town Boy, 2018

The Collection

Hugo Mccloud

Untitled, 2019

The Collection

Hugo Mccloud

May 23rd, 2020

The Collection

YoYo Lander

Bloodlines 2, 2020

The Collection

YoYo Lander

The Collection

despina stokou

Swipe to view Collection

The Collection

Afia prempeh

Swipe to view Collection

The Collection

February James

Swipe to view Collection

The Collection

Monica ikegwu

Swipe to view Collection

The Collection

bony ramirez

Swipe to view Collection

The Collection

bony ramirez

Swipe to view Collection

The Collection

Collins obijiaku

Swipe to view Collection

The Collection

Collins obijiaku

Swipe to view Collection

The Collection

Oluwole Omofemi

The Collection

TIFFANY ALFONSECA

Girl Talk, 2020

The Collection

Conrad Egyir

Lisa, write I you., 2021

The Collection

Conrad Egyir

The Collection

Conrad Egyir

The Collection

Lauren Pearce

The Collection

Lauren Pearce

The Collection

Lauren Pearce

The Collection

Lauren Pearce

The Collection

Cydne Jasmin Coleby

Swipe to view Collection

The Collection

Salah El Mur

The Collection

Salah El Mur

The Collection

Patrick Eugene

The Collection

Patrick Eugene

The Collection

Eric Adjei Tawiah

The Collection

Eric Adjei Tawiah

The Collection

Johnson Eziefula

The Collection

Katherine Bradford

The Collection

Katherine Bradford

The Collection

Katherine Bradford

The Collection

BIANCA NEMELC

Came to Collect My Fruit, 2020

The Collection

Betye Saar

Black Doll w/ Critters, 2021

The Collection

Brenna Youngblood

The Collection

Adegboyega Adesina

The Collection

Adegboyega Adesina

The Collection

Lord Ohene

The Collection

Victor Ubah

The Collection

Juwon Aderemi

The Collection

Juwon Aderemi

The Collection

Raelis Vasquez

The Collection

Raelis Vasquez

The Collection

José Bedia

“A pais en premonicion”.  2019

The Collection

Penda Diakite

The Collection

Laure Prouvost

The Collection

Option Nyahunzvi

The Collection

Monica Kim Garza

Mah Gah Ree Tah, 2021

The Collection

John Madu

The Collection

Celeste Dupuy-spencer

Untitled, 2016

The Collection

Debra Cartwright

Derica’s LA Loft, 2020

The Collection

Barry Yusufu

Lady for Gold, 2021

The Collection

Barry Yusufu

Olasunkanmi

The Collection

Barry Yusufu

The Collection

Barry Yusufu

The Collection

foster sakyiamah

The Collection

Ekene Stanley Emecheta

The Collection

Ekene Stanley Emecheta

The Collection

Ekene Stanley Emecheta

The Collection

Ekene Stanley Emecheta

The Collection

Idris Habib

The Collection

Eric Odartey Cruickshank

The Collection

Eric Odartey Cruickshank

The Collection

Auudi Dorsey

The Collection

Auudi Dorsey

The Collection

Auudi Dorsey

The Collection

Olamide Ogunade

The Collection

Olamide Ogunade

The Collection

Olamide Ogunade

The Collection

Aplerh-Doku Borlabi

The Collection

Tyna adebowale

The Collection

Lamar peterson

The Collection

Jessie Makinson

The Collection

Lenz Geerk

The Collection

Daniel Crews-Chubb

The Collection

Peter ojingiri

About

Values & Mission

Up Next Art is the preeminent consortium of display, exhibition, and residency space in the Caribbean for contemporary artists who create with the intention of spreading meaningful and unique messages through art.  Featuring artists from across the globe, our goal is to educate people about culture and society through art. Puerto Rico, widely recognized as one of the most culturally rich and creative communities in the world, is visited by millions yearly and is the American hub in the Caribbean. Up Next Art is committed to fighting the widespread oppression that has bifurcated society throughout history and believes that it is a shared priority to re-evaluate our institutions in effort to dismantle prejudice targeted at creatives hailing from uniquely special backgrounds. The time is NOW to celebrate the accomplishments and stories of the incredibly talented creatives that are paving the way toward actionable change around us.

“Art must discover and reveal the beauty which Prejudice and caricature overlaid”
— Dr. Alain Locke

The Facility

The Vision

The exhibition space and residency is located just outside of San Juan, Puerto Rico on a hundred acre farm, perched high in the mountains with views stretching to the Atlantic Ocean. Construction is expected to be completed in 2023.

The space will have 24 hour security, 100% publicly accessible, exhibition space and a residency program with invitees from around the world.

Construction at June, 2022

Contact

Municipality of Vega Baja Cabo Caribe Ward Lot 96-57 Vega Baja, 00693, Puerto Rico

1-201-970-0226

operations@upnextart.com
Sungi Mlengeya is a Tanzanian self-taught artist. She works primarily in the acrylic medium on canvas creating paintings that are free, minimalist and with a curious use of negative space. The works consist of dark figures in minimal shades of black and browns against perfectly
white backgrounds with topics varying widely from self-discovery to empowerment, but common themes in her work are centred around women, specifically black women. She shades a light on their stories; their journeys,
struggles, accomplishments and relationships with their immediate societies, her stories included.
Sungi explores ‘space’ in her work, the white space in her paintings being any place that we are longing for. For her, the space represents a place of calm, free and detached
 
from social norms and restrictions, real and imagined, that have altered complete liberty. She is inspired by everyday lives of women who surround her as they try to pursue their true preferences freely and uninhibitedly.
Sungi’s work has been collected extensively and exhibited at A Force for Change by UN Women at Agora Gallery, Just Disruptions Afriart Gallery, Black Voices: Friend of My Mind Ross-Sutton Gallery, The Medium is the Message & Drawn Together Unit London, 1-54 Highlights Christie’s London, 1-54 Art Fair London and New York, Investec Cape Town Art Fair Solo Section, Latitudes Art Fair and Nairobi Railways Museum. The artist was honoured in the 40 under 40 Africa Artist list in 2020 by Apollo Magazine.
In the words of Mr. Star City – One could say my delivery of art is similar in the sense that I routinely address the world on the subject of personal healing with love in the form of storytelling, reminding myself and others of our human essence and the importance of sharing and supporting our basic human needs with the people around us. 
 
As a recurring theme in my bodies of work, I often use vulnerability as a tool for healing and uplifting (especially applied for the exhibitions “Fractured” and “After Party” earlier this year). It’s important for us as individuals, and as a society, to be understanding, to be aware of another’s suffering in order to have sympathy and ultimately have genuine love for one another. I think art has become my platform to deliver this message of love and spreading that love in which I so strongly believe and uphold.

Each of us is a cacophony of experience. Not just a seamless self.
—Nathaniel Mary Quinn

In his collage-like composite portraits derived from sources both personal and found, Nathaniel Mary Quinn probes the relationship between visual memory and perception. Fragments of images taken from online sources, fashion magazines, and family photographs come together to form hybrid faces and figures that are at once neo-Dada and adamantly realist, evoking the intimacy and intensity of a face-to-face encounter.

Quinn’s passion for drawing began at a young age, while he was growing up on the South Side of Chicago. In ninth grade, he received a scholarship to attend Culver Academies boarding school in Indiana—but a month after arriving at the school, Quinn received news from his father that his mother had suddenly passed away. He returned to Chicago for Thanksgiving the following month, only to find that the rest of his family—his father and brothers—had abandoned his childhood home without a trace. This jarring experience further propelled Quinn’s art, and he decided to commit himself to his education, adding his mother’s name, Mary, to his name so that she would appear on all of his degrees. He received a BA in art and psychology from Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 2000, and an MFA from New York University in 2002.

Portraying individuals from the Diaspora and beyond by highlighting self-perception and beauty, Amoako Boafo invites a reflection on Black subjectivity, specifically of its diversity and complexity. His portraits are notable for their bold colors and patterns, which celebrate his subjects, as a means to challenge representation that objectifies and dehumanizes Blackness. Able to capture critical subtleties and nuanced emotion in a manner that grabs and engages the viewer, it is however Boafo’s tenderness in how he renders his subjects that is the most striking quality of his practice. His powerful, concise style expresses the vibrancy of daily life with an easy familiarity, touching on topics such as community, social and political struggles, and the intimacy between like-minded friends.

Amoako Boafo paints flesh with his fingers. “This lack of instrumental barrier sets me free and diffuses a barrier between myself and the subject. I am able to connect with the subject in a more intimate way, which allows me to create an expressive skin tone. I don’t think this type of stroke can be achieved by a brush,” the artist explains. He’s described his portraits as self-reflection focused on identity, and challenging preconceived notions. 

Throughout his multimedia practice, Rashid Johnson explores elements of racial and cultural identity, African American history, and mysticism. While many of the artist’s early works took the form of conceptual photography, his practice has expanded to include sculptural installations, wall-based works that consider the legacy of painting, and assemblages that integrate manufactured materials such as shea butter, books, records, and incense. He also makes his own tools to score, scrape, engrave, and brand his pieces. Anxious, frenetically rendered square faces; mosaic compositions; and plant-filled installations are three recurring motifs. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Johnson has shown in New York, Los Angeles, Moscow, Mexico City, London, and Athens, among other cities. In 2011, he featured in the international pavilion at the Venice Biennale. At auction, his work has sold for six and seven figures. In 2019, Johnson released his first feature film, an adaption of Richard Wright’s Native Son.

Through her painting, Ewa Juszkiewicz challenges visual conventions and confronts stereotypical perceptions of women’s beauty in classical European painting. By deconstructing and reinterpreting the female subject in historical artworks, Juszkiewicz undermines their constant, indisputable character. One of the most celebrated contemporary Polish painters of today, Juszkiewicz challenges the viewers’ perception by experimenting with the form of the female figure and face, balancing human and inhuman elements within her work to reveal a style that is at once classical in technique, yet subversive and rebellious in content.

Selected as one of 100 Painters of Tomorrow in the eponymous 2014 Thames & Hudson book and included in the new edition of Vitamin P – Vitamin P3. New Perspectives in Painting published by Phaidon, and a Grand Prix laureate of the 41st Painting Biennale (Bielska Jesień) in 2013, Juszkiewicz has also been featured in exhibitions at museums and public institutions including: the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Cracow; Kunsthalle Bratislava; National Museum of China, Beijing; among others. Her work resides in the esteemed museum collections of the National Museum in Gdańsk, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, BWA Galeria Bielska in Poland, and Zachęta of Contemporary Art in Szczecin, Poland. Juszkiewicz currently lives and works in Warsaw, Poland.

Deborah Roberts makes bold, collaged portraits of Black children that critique societal conventions regarding beauty, the body, and race. The artist combines hand-painted details with photographs, magazine clippings, and Internet images as she conveys the complexities of identity and undermines the limitations with which American culture sees Black youth. Roberts received her MFA from Syracuse University and has exhibited in New York, London, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Dallas, among other cities. She is the recipient of multiple awards and grants, including a major honor from Anonymous Was a Woman in 2018. Roberts’s work belongs in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

Stanley Whitney has been exploring the formal possibilities of colour within ever-shifting grids of multi-hued blocks and all-over fields of gestural marks and passages, since the mid-1970s. His current motif, honed over many years, is the stacked composition of numerous saturated colour fields, delineated by between three to five horizontal bands running the length of a square-formatted canvas. The cumulative effect of Whitney’s multicoloured palette is not only one of masterly pictorial balance and a sense of continuum with other works in this ongoing series, but also that of fizzing, formal sensations caused by internal conflicts and resolutions within each painting. Taking his cues from early Minimalism, Color Field painters, jazz music and his favourite historical artists – Titian, Velázquez and Cézanne among them – Whitney is as much an exponent of the process-based, spatially-gridded square in art as Josef Albers, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin and Carl Andre. Whitney was born in Philadelphia in 1946 and lives and works in New York City and Parma, Italy.

Jeff Sonhouse’s painterly practice melds disparate materials to envision novel identities. Sonhouse’s subject is the African American male within Western culture. The artist focuses on the figure, more specifically, the African American male portrait, drawing inspiration from media images as well as the long history of portraiture, and employing a visual language he’s developed over the years. Repeated and edited over time, these characters have become his own. Sonhouse’s distinctive vocabulary includes the use of cut and collaged magazine images, carefully patterned matchsticks, steel wool and soldered metal, set against his carefully rendered painted illusions. His figures—always men—are mystic, though without reprising familiar myths. They could be harlequins, artistes, seers, or shamans. Their faces usually hidden by masks or oversized hats, their expressions enigmatic and inscrutable, attired in flamboyant solid colors, they often gaze into the distance. Sonhouse’s characters escape the identity trap of our contemporary politics and society, which ultimately turns Blackness into a series of commercially manufactured attributes. They show us what African Americans, people from the Caribbean, and other members of the African diaspora might be if our imagination were unshackled from the dialectics of oppression, degradation, and heroic transcendence. They propose a vision beyond old paradigms of the Black man’s identity. In Sonhouse’s portraits, Blackness emerges as a set of keys that open the doors to a hitherto undreamtof freedom to forge new identities.

Ferrari Sheppard (Chicago, IL). Sheppard received a BFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago (2004), as well as a Merit Award and Presidential Scholarship. Sheppard’s work examines the humanity of Black people in the Americas and within the diaspora. His paintings reflect a dimension of time and space that gracefully shuttles between otherworldly yet familiar, nostalgic yet present. Sheppard has been featured as a guest lecturer at various universities and cultural institutions across the United States, Canada, and Ethiopia, including The African Union in Addis Ababa (2014), and Harvard Law (2015). This is Sheppard’s first solo show at Wilding Cran Gallery.

Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) is an artist living and working in New York. Through his work he pursues an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across a body of work that builds critically on the legacies of modern painting and more recent conceptual art. He is best known for his text-based paintings, made since the late 1980s, which draw on the writings and speech of diverse figures including Jean Genet, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein and Richard Pryor. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. In 2011 the Whitney Museum of American Art held a mid-career retrospective of Ligon’s work, Glenn Ligon: America, organized by Scott Rothkopf, that traveled nationally. Important recent shows include Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions (2015), a curatorial project organized with Nottingham Contemporary and Tate Liverpool, and Blue Black (2017), an exhibition Ligon curated at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, inspired by the site-specific Ellsworth Kelly wall. Ligon has also been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at the Camden Arts Centre in London, the Power Plant in Toronto, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. His work has been included in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2015 and 1997), Berlin Biennal (2014), Istanbul Biennal (2011), Documenta XI (2002), and Gwangju Biennale (2000).

Brittney Leeanne Williams’ work explores the Black body as a site of suffering, memorialisation and transcendence. Rather than constructing Blackness through ‘black’ skin, Williams uses red to disrupt the viewer’s expectations, reinterpreting the figure carrying the Black experience. She excavates personal and familial histories to create surreal pastoral landscapes for these fictional red bodies to roam.

OSGEMEOS (b. 1974, São Paulo, Brazil), translated as “THETWINS”, Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo, have worked together since birth. As children growing up in the streets of the traditional district of Cambuci (SP), they developed a distinct way of playing and communicating through artistic language. With the encouragement of their family, and the introduction of hip hop culture in Brazil in the 1980s, OSGEMEOS found a direct connection to their dynamic and magical world and a way to communicate with the public. Guided mainly by their willpower, together they explored with dedication and care the various techniques of painting, drawing and sculpture, and had the streets as their place of study.

Botchway is interested in depicting compelling figurative portrait paintings from different generations. His point of focus is the Eyes, Nose and Mouth which is where our emotions are best portrayed, Botchway also believes it helps us better visually experience one another’s feelings; an exchange of information without using words.

His Paintings help create an intriguing dialogue between the subject’s message and the viewer. Botchway work compels the viewer to become physically and emotionally invested in the subject’s story. He aims to capture the spirit, essence and heritage of his subjects and use this as an opportunity to lend the world a glance into the lives and struggles of people whose stories are yet to be fully told.

His paintings are meant to trigger emotions of pride or shame, honor or disgust and sometimes even humor, It’s all about the story of his subjects, which words cannot fully explain.

Kwesi Botchway, is the Founder of worldfaze art studio. He was born in Accra-Ghana and studied Art, at the (Ghanatta College of Art and Design).

Born in Palo Alto, California in 1980, Hugo McCloud is one of the most prolific young artists working today. Self-taught with a background in industrial design, McCloud’s practice is unrestricted by classical, academic tenets. Drawing inspiration from the rawness and decay of the urban landscape, McCloud creates rich, large-scale abstract paintings and sculptural objects by fusing unconventional industrial materials—tar, bitumen, aluminum sheeting and oxidized steel plates —with traditional pigment and woodblock printing techniques. His approach is instinctive and physical, often working on the floor, sanding, hammering and torching his materials until a total metamorphosis takes place. Driven by an enduring desire to uncover beauty in the overlooked and abandoned, McCloud’s work pushes the boundaries of utilitarian materials and confronts aesthetic perceptions. McCloud lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

YoYo Lander is a figurative visual artist. Her art explores the essence of people of color. Her passion is to use body language as an introduction into the context. Choosing her subjects are very intuitive. She goes with what she feels. YoYo then takes several photographs of her subjects to capture an image that is definitive. Next, she combines several images to express the chosen image through individually dyed pieces of watercolor paper. Within the final piece one will find a sense of truth, perhaps a moment that you’ve seen or experienced.

 

YoYo’s aesthetic is visceral and expressive. What begins with a strictly defined intent, composition and color scheme is rarely visible in the finished piece. Layers of cut and dyed watercolor paper are strategically places over rough sketches. Because of this layering, the work is most frequently done on wood panel.

 

​This is a shift in YoYo Lander’s artistic approach, in which the context now plays a significant role in the depiction of the individual(s).

Despina Stokou’s furiously energetic canvases layer text, collage, charcoal, and oil paint. These paintings react with immediacy to the breakneck speed of our daily information consumption while maintaining an inventive sensitivity to the history of expressive mark making. Her paintings incorporate sources as varied as html code, song lyrics, blog posts, classical music compositions, and most recently emojis. While her new emoji paintings are a slight departure from her earlier text based paintings, they continue a trajectory of exploring contemporary vernacular. Reacting to the information in her periphery through densely layered gestures, Stokou creates a new conversation about collapses of language as they relate to the history of abstraction today.

Afia Prempeh projects the real and imagined lives of a sampling of contemporary women, as told through tales in oil on canvas. Subjects’ personalities unfold through a multiplicity of material expressions, wherein artifacts and sceneries speak as vibrantly as the body or face. Prempeh’s training in landscape and still-life leads to her time-traveling lens on the traditional figure. Her paintings open portals into other worlds and forms. These worlds of Prempeh’s creation meld the ornate aesthetics of classical painting, with cultural vernacular from her immediate environment. Layered compositions bury stories within stories, whose contents both describe and undermine their bigger pictures. What appears to be one thing, could become a multitude of others.

In the artist’s words:
“There’s something deeper about the paintings that even I myself can’t point out. It’s not just the physical—there’s some force behind it. My whole being, my whole soul, is in there. Every single detail is telling a story. My portraiture is not just portraiture: The object can also become the subject. 
 
I started off as a landscape and still-life artist, so when I finally learned to paint the human figure, I wanted to do it differently. Full-figure, classical style, with object and background details. And I wanted to make it about the person. I wanted it to tell a story. This body of work has to do with transition. The subjects are on a journey. I, myself, am also on a journey. It’s a spiritual journey: searching… seeking… believing… I had to go through certain transformations; I had to discover certain things about myself to get here.”

February James uses muted watercolors and ink, as well as bright pastels and oil paints, to create ethereal, expressionistic portraits that reflect on Black identity. They feature dreamlike subjects with smudged and distorted features. James worked as a makeup artist before earning her BFA at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. She has exhibited widely in Los Angeles, where she lives and works, and has been included in shows in New York, Tokyo, and Turin. Though James’s work is often inspired by her own experiences as a Black woman in America, it suggests emotional states that resonate broadly with viewers.

Monica Ikegwu is a Baltimore based figure painter. She presents her ideas of the figure in a way that is not only captivating, but also unconventional in her use of color, texture, and composition. The ideas for her work stems from her surroundings, experiences, and encounters with people while in Baltimore. The figures presented in her work are often her siblings and family from whom she draws most of her inspiration from as she watches them progress through life.
Ikegwu was awarded first place winner in the XL Catlin Art Prize (2018), a Young Arts Finalist (2017), and a Gold medal winner in the NAACP ACT-SO National competition (2016), and a Scholastic silver medal portfolio winner (2016).
She is currently enrolled in Pratt Institute’s Graduate Program, where she studies painting.

Collins Obijiaku’s deeply felt portraits feature Black subjects who gaze directly at the viewer: His paintings require the audience to participate in a discursive, two-way experience. The self-taught, Nigerian-born and -based artist uses an array of materials and often mixes oil, acrylic, and charcoal to achieve soft gradients, significant texture, and beguiling linework. Obijiaku has exhibited in New York, London, Lagos, and Accra. The artist’s subjects are often people close to him and occasionally strangers he meets on the street. As he captures their features with care, Obijiaku creates intimate records of his home and the society around him.

Oluwole Omofemi’s work can best be described in his own words, ‘unapologetic’. His muses; black women depicted with skin as dark and rich as the oil that serves as the lifeblood of the artist’s home country of Nigeria, are adorned with deep tribal marks, and crowned with engulfing halo-esque afros that are reminiscent of past martyrs of the black power movement that swept the global African diaspora in the late 1960’s right through to the early 1980’s.


Oluwole’s depiction of untamed manes, midnight hue skin, and deep, penetrating tribal marks is a rallying cry against what he views as the deterioration of the pride and self esteem amongst his ‘black sisters’ today; both in Nigeria, and abroad, whom he believes have been most subjected by post-colonial indoctrination and pandering to Western society’s ideal of beauty and civilisation.


Raised predominantly in the company of his grandfather who shaped Oluwole’s worldview and greatly informed his understanding of his culture, and his appreciation for his heritage and identity; Oluwole was inspired by his grandfather’s period which nurtured the generation of Nigerians who fought for independence against colonial rule, and embraced the notion of self determination, and their Africanness.


Prevalent in his work are overtones of nostalgia and longing for what the artist suggests to be a golden age for the esteem, strength and beauty of black women. Conversely, Oluwole’s work infers that as time has proceeded, there has actually been a regression in the true liberty and emancipation of black women as far as their ability to embrace their most true and authentic versions of themselves, which is anchored in their Africanness, seen and felt viscerally through their skin tone and hair.


For Oluwole, true liberty and emancipation for Africa, and black people at large, can only be achieved and realised once, black women are free to be their true selves and embraced and celebrated as they are.

Tiffany Alfonseca (b. 1994) is a Bronx- based Dominican-American mixed media artist who creates vibrant and colorful artworks that celebrates Black and Afro-Latinx diasporic culture. Alfonseca continuously taps into her Afro-Dominican roots and leverages it as a conceptual cantilever that provides a dynamic framework for her artistic practice. Moreover, her work aims to visually articulate that the Black and Afro-Latinx diaspora does not exist within a monolith, but that these communities are a cultural cornucopia that is vast, varied, and complex. Alfonseca’s artwork is an intricate combination of beauty, diversity, and multilingualism that exemplifies the strength of the Black and Afro-Latinx diaspora.

Conrad Egyir is known for his bold, graphic portraits of Black individuals that deliver the immediate visual punch of Pop art. Portrayed like royalty and other canonized icons, his subjects preside over canvases that are shaped like large-scale stamps, postcards, and perforated notebook pages. Egyir experienced a meteoric rise in the art world after receiving his MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, garnering interest from collectors; singer Beyoncé also included a print of the artist’s work in her 2020 visual album Black Is King. Egyir also had his first solo museum exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in 2020, where portraits on view embodied the artist’s visions of the self-liberated citizens of a better, imagined world. Another solo show followed in 2021 at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José. Informed by West African iconographyreligious motifs, and pop culture, Egyir explores notions around identity politicsmigration, and community.

Lauren Pearce is a black artist based in Cleveland Ohio who pulls inspiration from her community, creating powerful mixed media art and completing texture in her portraits, and iconic shape and color to her murals that captivate all who walk by them. Her passion for expressing her identity led her to become a young student at an art School. At an early age of 24, she began her professional career as an artist. Using an array of materials in her work, she transfers her world onto her paintings and allows her imagination to bring forth the colorful language of Identity, race, and womanhood, beyond a canvas. Her pieces focus on diversity and bridging the black and white halves of her identity. Lauren uses an array of materials and hues to highlight the beauty of people of color in her life. Most of her work features portraits of either individuals she personally knows or are derived from her own imagination as though from a melting pot of faces. She was the first Black woman to paint a mural in the City of Cleveland.

Born in Sudan, Cairo-based artist Salah El Mur spent years travelling and living across East Africa and the Middle East. Floating between different geographical places and nationalities, El Mur has a rich and diverse background while maintaining a distinctive and peculiar Sudanese identity to the extent of becoming a flagship of Sudanese art. His paintings portray a variety of heterogeneous tradition, folklore, vernacular of people and environments yet translated in a powerful contemporary visual language. El Mur deliberately ignores the logics of the relationship between elements. Thus, components are decontextualized and appear recombined together in a spontaneous family gathering. The plain aesthetic combines archaic traditions and visionary language. In this sense, personal memories interact with survivals from the past, creating artworks that unfold as relics of a suspended present as much as documents of a recurrent social phenomenon integrated into social life.

Patrick Eugène’s brightly colored gestural paintings draw on Abstract Expressionism while alluding to the poignant work of influential Black artists of the past and present, such as Beauford Delaney, Ed Clark, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Henry Taylor. In his practice, Eugène reflects on his Haitian-American identity, his trips to Haiti, and the everyday experiences of Black Americans. His figurative paintings often begin with his own photographs of people; he transforms his subjects with colors and forms that invoke the Caribbean and the African diaspora.
Eric Adjei Tawiah is a Ghanaian artist living and working in Accra. Using a technique, he calls ‘ sponge martial’ – an approach inspired by the experience of watching his mother’s body being cleansed in a mortuary and evoking a figurative cleansing of negative thought processes – he creates brightly colored yet delicately textured portraits across mixed media.
Eziefula Johnson Jnr is a self-taught mixed media artist practicing art under the movement known as Contemporealism; coined from Contemporary Art & Hyperrealism. He is currently a finalist studying Pharmacy at the University of Lagos. Johnson specializes in drawing and painting; exploring the medium of charcoal, acrylic, pastel and fabric on paper and canvas. His interest and love for art has been evident since he was a child, as he would draw and paint on any surface he found suitable. Overtime he evolved and began practicing art professionally and publicly in October, 2019. He focuses on Cultural Hybridity, Blackness, pop-culture, Identity, Personality and Human Psychology (although his scope of discussions are not limited to these subject matters) and aims to depict his observations, personal encounters, curiosities and his person, through the combination of colour, shapes, portraiture & symbolism.
Katherine Bradford paints radiant, Rothko-esque color fields, then dry-brushes figurative elements on top. Her subjects have spanned UFOs, superheroes, ocean liners, and faceless, swimsuit-clad bathers. Altogether, Bradford’s scenes explore loneliness, agency, gender roles, and consciousness. Bradford received her MFA from the State University of New York at Purchase, and has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Milan, New Haven, and Columbus, Ohio. Her work belongs in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Menil Collection, among others.

Bianca Nemelc is a figurative painter whose work explores the connection between the female form and the natural world. Born and raised in New York City, Bianca’s work is inspired by her own investigative journey into her identity, paying homage to her heritage through the use of many hues of brown that make up the figures in her work. The world within her paintings are loosely inspired by the tropical and carribean landscapes where her families are originally from and her roots can be traced back to. Through her work, Bianca aims to highlight the beautiful and symbiotic relationship between nature and the female body.

Inspired by Joseph Cornell’s assemblages and Simon Rodia’s Los Angeles monuments, the Watts Towers (made from found scrap materials), Betye Saar’s work mixes surreal, symbolic imagery with a folk art aesthetic. As a participant in the robust African-American Los Angeles art scene of the 1970s, Saar appropriated characters such as Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, and other stereotypes from folk culture and advertising in her works—usually collages and assemblages. African tribal mysticism, history, memory, and nostalgia are also important for Saar. She was invited to participate in “Pacific Standard Time,” a 2011 survey of influential LA artists, for which she created Red Time, an installation of her assemblages from both past and present that explored the relationship between personal and collective history. “I’m the kind of person who recycles materials but I also recycle emotions and feelings,” she explains.

In photo-based collage, painting, assemblage, and sculpture, Brenna Youngblood explores the iconography of urban African American experience, issues of identity, ethics, and representation, and the politics of abstraction. Youngblood’s early work—layered photomontages drawn from her everyday life—incorporated images of her family and friends, storefronts, and police cars, and snapshots of domestic objects, such as bare light bulbs, cheap wood veneer, TVs, and aging upholstery. Concerned with the formal qualities of imagery and objects, she integrates found objects and materials into her painterly compositions, and has sometimes examined more political subject matter, such as in www.Alphabetboys.com (2012), a grid of institutional acronyms, from IRS to FEMA. Her work is often considered in the context of West Coast assemblage artists such as Noah PurifoyJohn Outterbridge, and Betye Saar

Adegboyega Adesina (b. 1998, Nigeria) creates intimate portraits of Black subjects featuring rich color palettes and a dynamic sense of personality. The works present a complex but highly personal investigation of Nigeria seen through the lens of his personal history, his people and the cultures, traditions and political views shaping his country. Adesina produces paintings that create an intriguing dialogue between the subject’s message and the viewer, ultimately declaring the confidence and pride of his people. He describes his work ‘as a form o energy transfer from myself to the canvas. This is quite therapeutic for me as my works are masked emotions triggered by events that affect me directly or indirectly, hence creating a space for my imaginations and reality to coexist’.
Lord is the current artist in residence at Thud Studio. He is a Ghanaian portraiture, figurative, and life painter born in the Ashanti Region of Ghana, West Africa. He lived in Accra and later moved to Amsterdam to pursue his art career. Like many other Ghanaian artists, Ohene is a product of the Ghanatta College of Art and Design. He holds a Diploma in Fine Art. He is a self-taught art director which landed him a career in art directing and prop making in the Ghanaian movie industry for two years (2012-2014). Ohene has worked tirelessly to master his craft. Combining figurative and portraiture skills and techniques, Ohene has developed his own unique style of bold stunning portraits making use of beads and stones which has made his work easily identifiable.
Based in Lagos, Nigeria, Victor Ubah reflects upon social infrastructure, self-determination and identity in his artistic practice. Influenced by the anime and popular cartoon animations he watched throughout his adolescence, he was inspired by an image’s ability to communicate intricate ideas about identity and personality. He was further inspired by Cubism, the early 20th-century avant-garde art movement led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized the representation of three-dimensional forms by painting from many viewpoints, rather than a singular perspective. In a body of acrylic portraits, Ubah paints his subjects as multidimensional personalities existing within one dimensional social structures. His poetic visual language marries vibrantly colored, one-dimensional background with expressive cubist geometry. commenting on the symbiotic correlation of the individual to their community. Ubah translates the uniqueness of each personality by rendering their faces in a mosaic of protruding cubist forms while attending to their gaze with a naturalist style. His attention to each figure’s personal fashion expressed through bold textile patterns and rich color palettes amplify his ethos that “there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.”
Born In ilorin, kwara state and having lived all his life there, Juwon Aderemi has always had a creative mindset , he viewed the world much more differently , and always found himself somehow around papers and pencils, drawing or sketching things his mind was accustomed to, at his much more early stage of life However this transformed into something more concrete after a life changing event, while on a long vacation from school, he suffered from a domestic accident where he confided in the solace of his room, isolating himself from the rest of the world. It was at this point that he took a step towards rediscovery in art and creativity. Juwon Aderemi started drawing again; this time with a defined focus in the year 2016 and went fully into painting in 2020. He is a self-taught artist who currently lives and works from his studio in Ilorin, Kwara state, Nigeria. In his current practice, his paintings express a bridge between features and elements of the past and present as a means of expressing his thoughts and ideas about life., thereby making intriguing paintings.
Raelis Vasquez is a visual artist who draws on historical, political and personal narratives through depictions of daily life and whose painterly compositions evoke the complexities of Afro-Latinx experiences. Through attentiveness to the people and places he portrays and through his gestural brushwork, contrast of warm and cool hues, and use of texture, the figures in Raelis Vasquez’ work often appear to simultaneously inhabit a space of ease and vulnerability, encouraging viewers to consider their own positions on class, race and geography. Vasquez shares, “Today, I feel an overpowering responsibility (or calling) to the arts and towards my Black, Latinx and immigrant communities. I paint using oils in a naturalistic manner as a means to give clarity to the subjects I present. My devotion is to the accurate representation of the convoluted histories of the Dominican Republic. I am aiming to highlight an allegorical narrative that presents the psychological states of the figures in my works while presenting a window to the viewer of their daily lives.” Vasquez earned a BFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and he is a 2021 MFA candidate in painting and drawing at Columbia University. Vasquez’s work is in several notable public and private collections, such as the Perez Art Museum in Miami and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. The artist lives and works between New Jersey and New York.

José Bedia is a contemporary Cuban painter known for his Neo-Primitivistic figurative style and is one of the most important Latin American Artists of his generation. Bedia’s large-scale paintings are inspired by his Santería faith, an amalgamation of Yoruba, indigenous, and Christian beliefs, with his works frequently depicting mythical elements, altars, and other sacramental imagery, often serving as a pointed critique of colonialism. In one of his best-known paintings, Figure Who Defines His Own Horizion Line (2011), the line of sight emerges from a colossal head and breaks at the wilting drapes of a flag. He was born on January 13, 1959 in Havana, Cuba and studied at the city’s Instituto Superior del Arte. Bedia participated in the first Havana Biennial in 1984, and later was selected to represent Cuba at the Venice Biennale in 1990. Two years later, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in New York. The artist has shown work all over the world, notably including a solo show at the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles.  Bedia has created a unique synthesis of the artistic traditions of Africa and the indigenous Americas.

Malian-American Artist Penda Diakité grew up between Mali, West Africa and Portland, Oregon. Her mixed media work is usually comprised of a mixture of collage, acrylic, rubber, and oil among other mediums. She meshes the vibrant colors and patterns of her Malian heritage with influences of her urban American upbringing. Her artwork is a reflection of her experiences as a bicultural woman, her blended cultures, and is a visual commentary on historical West African tradition and how it co-exists among popular media’s portrayal of people of color. She was first introduced to painting as a 4-year old in Mali, as she learned traditional bogolan (mud-cloth) painting. By the age of 10 she landed a book deal with Scholastic Press and published her first Africana Award-winning Children’s book I Lost My Tooth in Africa which was featured on various platforms such as Reading Rainbow. This book was the catalyst for creatively expressing her identity, and delving deeper into the life she straddled between Mali and the USA.

The Turner Prize-winning artist Laure Prouvost is known for her lush, immersive films and mixed-media installations. Interested in confounding linear narratives and expected associations among words, images, and meaning, she has said that in her works “fiction and reality get really tangled.” At once seductive and jarring, her films are composed of a rich, almost tactile assortment of pictures, sounds, and spoken and written phrases, which appear and disappear in quick, flashing cuts. These are often shown nestled into installations filled with a dizzying assortment of found objects, sculptures, paintings, drawings, furniture, signs, and architectural assemblages, based on the themes and imagery in her films. Prouvost does not allow for passive viewing. Through her work, she often addresses viewers directly, pulling them into her unruly, imaginative visions.

Born in Harare and raised in Rusape, Option began sketching at an early age. He has developed a versatility that allows him to elegantly express himself when printmaking, painting, or using mixed media. The exploration of the impact of technology on urban youth in townships as well as the illusions, attractions and trappings of contemporary township life thematically unite option’s work. 

Option was awarded the Artist in Residence Programme at the National Gallery School of Visual Arts and Design in 2014. His work is held in international collections, including Manchester United Football Club in the UK, the residences of the Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Ambassador of the European Union Delegation in Zimbabwe, and the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. His works also form part of private collections in Switzerland, South Africa and Italy.

Monica Kim Garza (b. 1988 New Mexico) has gained widespread recognition through her vibrant portrayals of women of color. The Mexican-Korean artist rejects the male gaze, celebrating confident and uninhibited women through her figurative works. Visually her paintings are lively and instantly recognizable, presenting brown-skinned, curvy women engaging in leisurely activities. Garza experiments with form and contour, reimagining the classical female nude in oil, acrylic and collage on canvas. She has exhibited at V1 gallery and New Image Art for many years and recently also Ruttowski 68 in Cologne and Galerie Julien Cadet in Paris.

John Madu is a Nigerian multi-disciplinary artist born in Lagos, best known for his figurative symbolic style of paintings, usually along the lines of the complexity of identity, social behavior and the effects of cultural globalization on individualism. His work can be described as eclectic because of how he derives ideas, from a various range of influences and sources based on popular culture, African history, art history. and personal experiences. symbolism is usually evident in his work, with reoccurring iconography such as books, apples, and other recognizable items which convey a certain meaning in art, and act as metaphors to a subject.

John’s source of inspiration is from a variety of places, but can be narrowed down to a few things that inspire a major part of his art works, which could be current situations affecting society, be it political, social or just banal everyday life issues. Giving him opportunities and reason to record the history of his time, with the aid of resource materials such as magazines, books, social media, news and even real time situations. He believes the best kind of art is a reaction to certain issues of interest and divulging information to educate and also entertain.

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s paintings and drawings build upon the intersections of sociopolitical narratives and commonalities within the human condition. Her often figurative work holds an inventory of memories and moments that, when brought to the fore, seems to enact a therapeutic release. The everyday and subtle moments of life she captures are, upon closer inspection, deeply layered, systematic, and tied to specific historical trajectories. The artist, who grew up in rural upstate New York and then briefly relocated to New Orleans, is now rooted in Los Angeles, and she paints her community: her friends, lovers, family, and favorite sports teams. Through this focus on people, the artist generates a microcosm of the ever-evolving nature of the country.

With a wry observation of detail and a near-Fauvist palette, the American figurative painter—a standout in this year’s Whitney Biennial—intertwines the personal and the political. She also works fast: in her characteristically small-scale “Durham, August 14, 2017,” she commemorates the recent toppling of a Confederate statue in front of a North Carolina courthouse, showing the crumpled metal soldier defeated in sunlit grass, the smudgy legs of protesters in the background. A painting of the Cajun Navy, although made in 2016, feels eerily topical in its depiction of a floodwater rescue. Other canvases are more intimate—and more raucously rendered. In one of her larger paintings, queer lovers spill out of an open window; in another, Dupuy-Spencer offers a transporting view of a busy, ramshackle country hotel on a starry night.

Debra Cartwright is redefining beauty with a few strokes of her paintbrush. The sought-after artist depicts Black women in an ethereal manner that is not often showcased in the art world. And that’s most definitely on purpose.

Debra, prefers to showcase women of color of all different shapes and skin tones, but all of her pieces emphasize a woman’s natural hair. In fact, it was Debra’s own journey from straight, relaxed hair to a more natural wave that prompted her, to begin painting in this manner.

“I only felt beautiful with straight hair, and I did a lot of reading at the time–a lot of Black women anthologies and bell hooks,” said Debra, who was a featured artist at last year’s Essence Music Festival. “I was feeling upset that I was so conditioned. You want to feel pretty with your hair, so that’s why I started painting these–to feel pretty and not as mad.”

Her goal is to help overcome the heaviness in media around Black women who are often portrayed as angry or militant — especially when they wear their natural hair.

“We are in this American society that places this [militant] image at the top and we can’t get out of this hierarchy and it’s not catering to us, so it’s frustrating,” she said. “[These are] really strong subliminal messages. I want to change that conversation by inserting Black women and our natural hair as the main story.”

In order to create her work, she looks through magazines and advertisements. She has a Pinterest page full of poses and another full of the different faces of Black women. She then merges these separate elements into one illustration. Cartwright says seeing images of so many blond women all day at work drives her to recreate those images as women of color.

A self-taught artist from north-central Nigeria, Barry Yusufu often creates paintings that meld charcoal and acrylic to create a variety of tones and textures that are uniquely his own. Yusufu describes his art as Kolo art, meaning “madness in a sane way,” and he leads a movement of Nigerian artists called The Kolony. His portraits are characterized by boldly colored, expressive backgrounds that contrast with more subtle figures who are rendered in achromatic charcoal with deep shadows and fine gradations. Though his style is entirely his own, this type of boldly contrasting portraiture recalls painters like Amy Sherald, Barkley L. Hendricks, and Kehinde Wiley, as well as modern European schools of painting like the Expressionists and the Symbolists. Yusufu paints those around him, drawing his inspiration from his community. “My people are my inspiration, I paint the stories of my people,” he told Visionary Art Collective. “As an African from Nigeria I tell the story of my race as well. I see there has been hardly any documentation of my people in the past, and I’m trying to do my part.”

Foster Sakyiamah (b.1983) is an emerging contemporary artist based in Accra, Ghana. Even though his art comes naturally, he developed his artistic skills gradually from his primary education, through middle school up to the advanced level at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Ghana. Graphic Design and painting were his areas of interest. The rich cultural heritage of his people can be described as a clear manifestation of his art.

His work portrays his innermost feelings and activities within his surroundings. Sakyiamah doesn’t believe in monotony or binding himself with one style, but rather believes in being dynamic. He is currently the Artist in Residence at the Noldor Residency for the 2021 year.
Idris Habib, (AKA Sir Idris) is a unique artist whose work culminates an obvious sense of culture, vibrant colors, bold contemporary flair and a majestic texture. His approach is one of genuine expressionism. The work can range from images depicting his deep relationship and passion for music and its influence, emotion, spirituality and the socio-political aspects of humanism and culture.Provocative and bold, his approach in creating exemplifies an artist who is immersed in the process and truly uses art as a therapy and vehicle to convey his innermost thoughts and beliefs. His work is powerful and engaging. Self-taught, the world was indeed a classroom in which Idris drew his inspiration, labeling himself a “citizen of the World”. Traveling often since childhood, especially abroad, he was influenced from street art, to galleries and museums in Africa, Europe, and here in the states. In addition to the artwork, he has always been motivated by a challenge. This is evident in his sense of adventure and experimentation with various mediums and diverse approaches to application, often using his hands and fingers, rather than traditional brush strokes to obtain a desired effect. Therefore, allowing the paint to dictate where it would end up and how it would react in combination with the concept, tone and emotional climate of a particular piece. Playful in nature, in addition to being audacious, he allows a sense of freedom to exist, letting the inner-child have its way with the canvas or whatever he finds useful. By doing this, true creativity and exploratory forms emerge. His goal is to inspire people through art. The best way to accomplish this is to create opportunities for his work to be shown, nationally and internationally. The objective is to find proper exhibition spaces and art communities that respect and reflect his style of work, creativity, expressionism, and imagination.
Eric Odartey Cruickshank, professionally known as “lines being “ is a versatile and self taught artist born in Accra,Ghana in 2000. Currently (2020) a student of Odorgono Senior High School offering Visual arts as a course, he developed the aptitude and creativity for the execution of everyday contemporary art and works in various medium ranging from sculptures to painting. Eric achieved success at an early age, winning the “Best Unique Talent for a contemporary artist” in the 2021 WTB awards. Odartey often selects and portrays famous people in his works, such heroes as the late Kofi Annan. He aims at projecting black identity worldwide through the use of lines in his art pieces. Every line according to Eric tells the viewer something distinctive, be it thick, straight, curved, wavy, spiral and/or even faded or broken. He believes that there’s a strong relation between lines and nature and his works can be easily identified by the line forms within the subject’s skin. By way of example the line patterns can be found on the backs of trees and also on the palm of the individual, and each tell a story. Lines express mood and feelings in a work and can completely change the tenor of the work.
Auudi Dorsey’s paintings often reflect his own emotions from the past and present. He is unafraid to express the reality of his life and broader Black experiences. Many of the artist’s most popular works focus on Black subjects in quotidian scenes. These pieces serve as a source of pride and a reminder of where he came from and represent all of the ‘Black kids from the hood,’ both those who have left, as well as those who have not. Many of his works are also notable for their cultural influences, particularly representations of life in New Orleans and the broader American South. Auudiʼs paintings attempt to reveal the hidden stories that often go untold, depicting those living outside the ‘visible’ part of New Orleans. As a result, his subjects often reflect themes of poverty, joy, pain, and celebration of Black life in his home city.
Olamide Ogunade is a contemporary Nigerian visual artist. He is passionate about art in general, hence his involvement in artistic things like acting, dancing and drumming which are reflected in his works. Olamide gets inspiration from the happenings in his society. He expresses himself using any medium like ballpoint pen, oil paint, charcoal, acrylic paint or pencil based on the concept at that given point in time. His kind of art takes a lot of time as it requires patience and persistence; making a mere shading come to life, it’s almost impossible to believe it was created by hand.

Painted either from life, memory or imagination Borlabi’s subjects have a palpable sense of personality emanating from them. Stylish, posed and engaged these disparate characters at once confront and communicate. There is no formula for these paintings as one subject stares into space holding her coffee cup, another holds his beloved pet pug, and another holds the viewer in an emotional gaze of intense sadness.
When painting Borlabi uses mainly oil on canvas after making preparatory sketches either while observing people at the beach or in the studio. He is drawn to flora and pattern which is evident is the detail and care with which he treats clothing and fabric; checks, stripes, leopard print are combined with ochres, mid to vivid greens and blues which sing against the skin.
Borlabi treats skin with gradations of brown creating areas of light and dark which work to bring out a sense of personality in his subjects. In the background of the paintings the scenery fades upwards often meaning wherever the sitter is placed their faces sit on a plain background bringing focus to the eyes, the souls of these paintings.

Tyna Adebowale’s multidisciplinary artistic practice has a strong focus on societal processes and constructions regarding gender, queerness, ostracism, community, and identity politics. With an interest in the gender fluidity in the African cultural and spiritual histories prior to colonisation, the artist reflects on contemporary Nigerian society and its diaspora and its echoes in other cultures. Having gone through an emigration process herself, Adebowale is interested in the understandings of home and community. An exiled body is a home on the move; a queer exiled body is a particularly beleaguered one. In the nomadic hindrances that displacement brings about, a craving to socially anchor oneself implies a need for community. That is why the artist is actively building one in which asylum seekers and refugees’ journeys orbit around common struggles and desires. Not only do they become the models of her paintings, but they are also involved in self-initiated social projects such as a uneme | mobile library. On other occasions the models are queer activists, like the three times painted Azeenarh Mohammed, who alongside Rafeeat Aliyu edited She Called Me Woman (2018, Cassava Republic), a collection of thirty stories of queer Nigerian women. Intrinsic in Adebowale’s work are ongoing processes of questioning and representation of queer bodies, stories, and histories. The models in her paintings are infused with raw emotion and defiance while exuding an unapologetic power in reclaimed intimacies and visibilities. Just like the vividness through which they are painted, they are testimonies of the dualities of joy and agony, of belonging and displacement, of tenderness and harshness. There is no other position but to see them and be, even for a moment, unavoidably faced with their striking presence. Their monumentality is of a rebelling new-found comfort in their bodies, despite being constantly othered. When we contemplate Tyna Adebowale’s work, we become aware of the unrelenting negotiation of relationships, sexualities, and freedom of people identifying in the queer spectrum. The difficulties of being and striving under the restrains of heteronormative biopolitics and the pervasive religious substrate of colonialism are fought with an artistic practice that centres dissidence in beautiful and powerful depictions of empowered resistance.
Florida-born, Minneapolis-based painter, Lamar Peterson, whether through Bob Ross, comic books or growing up in suburbia, the man behind such elegant and, at times, biting social-commentary paintings, has found a way to channel an almost pop beginning into series after series of figurative and experimental representations of Black America. The paintings can be funny, bleak, enchanting, folkloric, historic and darkly idyllic. Now an Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting at the University of Minnesota Department of Art, Peterson’s work
reflects the fear, anger, hopelessness, and rage that was going on in communities of color who were dealing with police brutality, police acquittals, and the callous indifference by politicians to these matters.  Calm repose, dappled light, create a sense of safety—as a contrast to balance the horrors elsewhere in the news and city streets.   

Ibrahim Mahama was born in Tamale, Ghana in 1987 where he currently lives and works. Mahama uses the transformation of materials to explore themes of commodity, migration, globalisation and economic exchange. Often made in collaboration with others, his large-scale installations employ materials gathered from urban environments, such as remnants of wood, or jute sacks which are stitched together and draped over architectural structures. Mahama’s interest in material, process and audience first led him to focus on jute sacks that are synonymous with the trade markets of Ghana where he lives and works. Fabricated in South East Asia, the sacks are imported by the Ghana Cocoa Boards to transport cocoa beans and eventually end up as multi-functional objects, used for the transportation of food, charcoal and other commodities. ‘You find different points of aesthetics within the surface of the sacks’ fabric’, Mahama has said. ‘I am interested in how crisis and failure are absorbed into this material with a strong reference to global transaction and how capitalist structures work.

A critical feature of the artist’s practice is the process by which he obtains his materials. For Non-Orientable Nkansa for example, Mahama engaged dozens of collaborators to produce hundreds of ‘shoemaker boxes’. These small wooden objects were made from structural materials found in the cities of Accra and Kumasi, and used to contain tools for polishing and repairing shoes. Bearing the marks of the trade of ‘shoeshine boys’, the boxes also functioned as an improvised drum, pounded to solicit business. Mahama and his collaborators obtained these items through a process of negotiation and exchange. Gathered together in a single, monumental unit, the containers were crammed with other re-purposed items such as heels, hammers and needles, all of which are part of Mahama’s ongoing inquiry into the life of materials and their dynamic potential.