Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, Man and Woman with Dignity, 2008
Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry have worked and exhibited their work internationally. Through their large-scale public projects, performative sculpture, painting, photography, video, and self-portraiture, they explore complex issues revolving around marginalized members of society. They also challenge audiences to face issues of race and social justice in communities, history, and the family. Embedded within their […]
Lauren Kelley, Big Gurl, 2006
Click here to watch Big Gurl on Vimeo Lauren Kelley uses stop-motion animation to explore stereotypes of femininity and race. By using her voice to speak for a cast of Black dolls, Kelley breathes life into plastic characters while poignantly and humorously addressing issues such as gender, womanhood, and the human condition. Whether telling stories […]
Myra Greene, Untitled, from the series Character Recognition, 2004 – 2007
Photographer Myra Greene supervises the photography major in the Spelman College Department of Art & Visual Culture. As an artist Greene explores photographic processes that engage issues about the body, memory, the absorption of culture, and the ever-shifting identity of African Americans. In 2013, Greene started experimenting with African fabrics to investigate her own relationship […]
Sheila Pree Bright, Suburbia, 2008
Sheila Pree Bright is an Atlanta-based, award-winning fine art photographer nationally known for her photographic series Young Americans, Plastic Bodies, Suburbia, 1960 Who, and #1960Now. Bright is described as a “social cultural anthropologist” whose works include photographic portrayals and provocative commentary on American beauty standards, urban and suburban themes, citizenship, and social movements. Suburbia is […]
Beverly Buchanan, Untitled (Red Ladder), 1995
Beverly Buchanan began creating her shack sculptures in the mid-1980s while living and working in Macon, Georgia. While she made large-scale abstract paintings and works of land art in her early career, she is widely recognized for her sculptures of shacks made from materials such as wood, tin, cardboard, and foam core. As a young […]
Jacob Lawrence, Praying Ministers, 1962
Jacob Lawrence is one of the most prolific American artists of the twentieth century. As a painter, storyteller, and educator, he was among the first African American artists to be represented by a New York gallery, have his work featured in prominent art museums, and consistently receive recognition. His work is in the permanent collections […]
Toyin Ojih Odutola, LTS VIII, 2014
Toyin Ojih Odutola creates intimate drawings that explore the complexity of identity as it relates to her personal journey of having been born in Nigeria before moving and assimilating into American culture in conservative Alabama. The artist renders life-size drawings in charcoal, pastel, and pencil while employing a distinctive style of intricate mark-making. Her lush […]
Marcia Kure LDIMEDILLIGAF, 2011 LBR and LGR, 2011 The Conformist, 2011
Marcia Kure creates drawings, photomontages, and sculptures that explore alternative worlds as a response to colonialism. She has garnered significant attention for her paintings and drawings that are made of the brownish pigment of kola nuts and watercolor. LDIMEDILLIGAF, LBR and LGR, and The Conformist are all from Kure’s series Fashionable Hybrids. She explained: “The […]
Berni Searle Lament II and III, 2011
Berni Searle is a South African artist who is renowned for her impressive body of work that employs video, photography, and various other media—including found objects and her body—to evocatively communicate trauma, loss, identity, history, agency, and hope. Lament is a series of six photographs that Searle created as a companion to Interlaced (2011), a […]
Carrie Mae Weems When & Where I Enter, The British Museum, 2006 – 2007
For over three decades, through image, text, film, and video, artist Carrie Mae Weems has created an impactful body of work that interrogates race, gender, class, politics, and power. Weems, a Prix de Rome and MacArthur Fellowship winner, asks salient relevant questions and examines our collective past. When & Where I Enter, The British Museum […]
María Magdalena Campos-Pons Spoken Softly with Mama II, 1998 – 2008
María Magdalena Campos-Pons is a Nashville-based artist who grew up in Matanzas, Cuba, in a family with Nigerian, Spanish, and Chinese lineage. Through her installations, painting, photography, performance, and video, she explores dislocation, femininity, identity, longing, and spirituality. Campos-Pons is the Vanderbilt Cornelius Endowed Chair of Fine Arts Drawing, Performance, and Installation at Vanderbilt University. […]
ROZEAL a3 blackface #65, 2003
ROZEAL, formerly known as iona rozeal brown is a D.C.-based contemporary artist and DJ who fuses Japanese imagery and hip-hop culture in her large-scale acrylic paintings. Brown created the series “ a3” an acronym for “afro-asiatic allegory” to interrogate issues surrounding authenticity and culture in the face of globalization. “I felt stung,” brown recalls of […]
