Who are the best African-American visual artists in today’s art world? Who are the names to know, and who are the up-and-coming stars of the future? Our correspondent Julie Chang Murphy has done the research, and now she’s sharing a curated list of 20 of the most influential black and African-American visual artists right now, including painters, photographers and sculptors – names we all need to know and celebrate.
the most influential African-American Artists
It’s been a minute since we’ve wandered around an art museum or popped into a gallery. And we really miss it. Many of the most prominent art museums moved to virtual visits with immersive tours and videos for art lovers this spring. This week, many of the major institutions in New York are finally reopening, and many in Asia and Europe are now back in business, too. Yay!
This forced cultural pause has had one silver lining, though: along with the Black Lives Matter movement, virtual art tours have shined some light and given us the opportunity to devote time to discovering and learning more about black visual artists, who are less likely to be on the walls of some of the iconic institutions that are now reopening.
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This list of notable black visual artists could have easily been over fifty names long – and we’ll get there in future posts. But first, here are 20 of the most influential black visual artists working in mediums of painting to photography to sculpture that you should know. There is a mix of prominent names as well as emerging artists whose work you can start adding to your collection. Or just sit back in your chair and reflect on their powerful imagery and themes.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby, “And We Begin to Let Go,” 2013 (acrylic, charcoal, pastel, marble dust, collage, and transfers on paper). Image courtesy the artist.
Who are the Most Influential Black Artists in America Right Now
1. Nina Chanel Abney
Nina Chanel Abney describes her art as “easy to swallow, hard to digest.” The Chicago native who is based in NY, paints in a graphic and disjointed style with a boldly, colorful palette. She explores powerful themes of race, politics, celebrity, sex and gender through a frenetic 21st century lens.
Important works by influential African-American artists, including painters, photographers and sculptors: Nina Chanel Abney. Courtesy Photo.
Her work which is a confluence of current events and her own personal experience is included in collections around the world. This includes the Brooklyn Museum, The Rubell Family Collection, Bronx Museum, and the Burger Collection, Hong Kong.
2. Radcliffe Bailey
Radcliffe Bailey uses a mixed-media practice to delve into his black heritage and childhood in the South. He is known to employ paint, traditional African sculpture, tintype photography, clay, and other ephemera in order to make the personal, universal.
Important works by influential African-American artists, including painters, photographers and sculptors: Radcliffe Bailey. Courtesy Photo.
Today, his works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.
3. Sanford Biggers
A Los Angeles native currently working in New York, Sanford Biggers creates interdisciplinary artworks that encapsulates the installations, sculptures, drawings, performances, videos, and music through which he explores everything from Buddhism to African-American identity to art history. He describes the practice as “code-switching”: “To have there be layers of history and politics, but also this heady, arty stuff—inside jokes, black humor—that you might have to take a while to research if you want to really get it.”
Important works by influential black artists: Sanford Biggers. Courtesy Photo.
His works have appeared in venues worldwide including Tate Britain, Whitney Museum and Studio Museum in Harlem, as well as solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, SculptureCenter, Mass MoCA, Ringling Museum and Massimo De Carlo Gallery.
4. Diedrick Brackens
L.A Based textile artist Diedrick Brackens begins his process through hand-dying cotton, a deliberate choice “to pay tribute to those who came before me.” His vibrant woven tapestries explore African American and queer identity, as well as American history.
One of the best African-American artists: Diedrick Brackens. Courtesy Photo.
Along with typical commercial dyes, Bracken utilizes pigments from wine, tea and bleach to create his abstract and figurative works. At Frieze New York, his weaving When No Softness Came (2019) was snapped up by the Brooklyn Museum.
5. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
British oil painter, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye draws from traditional formal considerations in line, color, and scale, but her paint technique is contemporary.
Important works by influential black artists: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Courtesy Photo.
Working rapidly and intuitively, she often completes her dramatic compositions in a day. Her subjects are fictitious black men and women – from found images and her own imagination. She is included in numerous institutional collections, ranging from the Tate Collection, London to The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
6. Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Born and raised in Nigeria but now based in LA, Njideka Akunyili Crosby is a figurative painter who layers paint, fabric, and photography into collages that “lure the viewer into a riptide of images that tell complex narratives about dislocation and transcultural daily life.”
One of the best African-American artists: Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Courtesy Photo.
While her source imagery often references her African heritage, Akunyili Crosby’s works also frequently depict her experiences living in the United States and the point of contact where cultures meet. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Hammer Museum, and the Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach), among others.
7. Titus Kaphar
Known as a painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and installation artist, Titus Kaphar works through deconstructive techniques of cutting, shredding, stitching, binding, and erasing. And even the painting process itself comes to the embody the ongoing struggle for identity, visibility and recognition.
One of the best African-American artists: Titus Kaphar. Courtesy Photo.
His physical manipulations reckon with the nation’s racial past and connect it to contemporary concerns. In 2018, he received a “Genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation.
8. Simone Leigh
Brooklyn artist and trained ceramicist, Simone Leigh works primarily with sculpture, often combining premodern techniques and materials with objects associated with the African diaspora. Cowrie shells, plantains, tobacco leaves, Nigerian ibeji figures and nineteenth-century African American face jugs. Leigh creates objects and environments that reframe stereotypes associated with the black female experience and to ultimately, celebrate black life.
Important works by influential black artists: Simone Leigh. Courtesy Photo.
Some of her solo and group presentations include the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of America Art, New York; and Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston.
9. Meleko Mokgosi
Botswana-born and Brooklyn-based, Meleko Mokgosi believes that it is incumbent on “first-world” viewers to understand that “the world doesn’t revolve around them. There are other histories.”
One of the best African-American artists: Meleko Mokgosi. Courtesy Photo.
His large-scale paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures center around ideas of colonialism and democracy. They are heavy influenced by strongly influenced by cinema, psychoanalysis and critical theory. Last year, he had three solo shows at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, and at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami.
10. Jennifer Packer
Jennifer Packer creates enigmatic portraits, interior scenes, and still-lifes which she hopes “suggest how dynamic and complex our lives and relationships really are.” Her models are typically friends or family members. These models are always posed in relaxed settings, unaware of the artist’s or viewer’s gaze.
One of the best African-American artists: Jennifer Packer. Courtesy Photo.
In this way, Packer’s portraits critique the art historical “gaze” and address the privilege of viewership. Last year, the New York based artist exhibited at the Whitney Biennial.
11. Faith Ringgold
Born in Harlem in 1930, Faith Ringgold is most well known for her painted narrative quilts which are informed by her civil rights and political activism. Ringgold chose the medium of “story quilts” in part because she had limited access to materials and space for storage.
One of the best African-American artists: Faith Ringgold. Courtesy Photo.
With quilts, she could simply roll them up when she needed to move. Her works have been acquired by the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Harvard Arts Museums, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
12. Amy Sherald
Baltimore based painter and portraitist, Amy Sherald, renders her black subjects exclusively in grisaille – an absence of color that directly challenges perceptions of black identity. As shown in her famous portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama, Sherald offsets this against a vibrant palette and abstract background. Her subjects seem suspended in space and time, yet their assertive and expressive gazes force viewers to “ponder the thoughts and dreams of the black men and women she has depicted.”
Important works by influential African-American artists, including painters, photographers and sculptors: Amy Sherald. Courtesy Photo.
Sherald was the first woman and first African-American ever to receive first prize in the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.
13. Paul Anthony Smith
Visually magnetic and yet obscuring, Jamaican born Paul Anthony Smith who is based in Brooklyn uses a technique called “picotage.” Using a ceramic tool to pick away at surfaces of photographic prints, Smith achieves a geometric pattern over images he personally photographs.
Important works by influential African-American artists, including painters, photographers and sculptors: Paul Anthony Smith. Courtesy Photo.
With this method, Smith questions the potential of a photograph to retain and tell the truth of one’s past. In addition to several solo and group shows throughout the country, Smith’s work has been acquired by numerous public collections. This includes the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas.
14. Carrie Mae Weems
Carrie Mae Weems is known as one of our greatest living photographers. Her “The Kitchen Table Series” (1989-90), made her career and represented the first time an African-American woman could be seen reflecting her own experience and interiority in her art. Weems has said, “Photography can be used as a powerful weapon toward instituting political and cultural change,” she has said. “I for one will continue to work toward this end.”
Important works by influential African-American artists, including painters, photographers and sculptors: Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy Photo.
She was the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant in 2013. Her work has been included at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Tate Modern, London.
15. Kehinde Wiley
Most famous for his 2018 presidential portrait of President Barack Obama, Kehinde Wiley is a LA native and currently works between New York and Beijing. His distinctive portraits feature black men and women in a Photo Realist style. His colorful background patterns reference textiles and decorative patterns of various cultures, from 19th-century Judaica paper cutouts to Martha Stewart’s interior color swatches.
Important works by influential African-American artists, including painters, photographers and sculptors: Kehinde Wiley. Courtesy Photo.
Wiley’s penchant for these juxtapositions seek to complicate notions of group identity. In addition to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., the artist’s works are currently held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Denver Art Museum, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
16. Henry Taylor
From racial inequality, homelessness, and poverty, to the importance of family and community, LA-based painter Henry Taylor says, “My paintings are what I see around me…they are my landscape paintings.”
Taylor grew up in Oxnard, California where he worked as a psychiatric technician before attending the California Institute of the Arts, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. We were introduced to his work when we visited the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York, and we’ve been following him ever since.
The most influential black and African-American visual artists, including painters, photographers and sculptors right now: Henry Taylor.
According to his gallery, recently Taylor has begun collecting emptied Clorox bleach bottles, which when spray painted black and inverted on broomsticks take the form of African tribal masks or dancing statues.
His solo exhibitions include the floaters, a public art installation on the High Line and a 2012 exhibit at MoMA PS1. Taylor’s work has been included in group shows at the 58th Venice Biennale; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
17. Betye Saar
The subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the fall of 2019, Betye Saar is a groundbreaking artist. Saar grew up in Los Angeles and Pasadena, California, and studied design at the University of California, Los Angeles. While her work has always been concerned with spirituality, cosmology, and family, after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., her mystical assemblages became increasingly radical and focused on race in America.
The most influential black and African-American visual artists, including painters, photographers and sculptors right now: Betye Saar.
In an interview, Saar notes “To me the trick is to seduce the viewer. If you can get the viewer to look at a work of art, then you might be able to give them some sort of message.”
18. Kerry James Marshall
A major career survey, Kerry James Marshall: MASTRY, was shown in 2016-17 at the Met Breuer in New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. That was the exhibition that cemented his stature as a painter, and put the artist’s name on the lips of contemporary art collectors all over the world. That’s where we first saw his work, and we still can’t take our eyes off of it.
Marshall was born in Alabama in 1955 and grew up in Watts, Los Angeles. He is a 1978 graduate of the Otis College of Art and Design and currently lives and works in Chicago.
The most influential black and African-American visual artists, including painters, photographers and sculptors right now: Kerry James Marshall.
His work represents the full scope, depth and richness of black life in America in way that has never really been done before. He shows black families having a picnic by the lake. Black lovers locked in a romantic embrace in a park in the spring. Harriet Tubman in a tender portrait with her husband. These images unlock a deep sense of our common humanity that’s without precedent in contemporary art.
They clearly strike a chord with others: the artist set a new sale price record of $21.1 million in 2018.
We were delighted to learn that Marshall has been hard at work during the Great Lockdown of 2020. Inspired by John James Audubon, Marshall has just shared two paintings that explore the societal “pecking order.” They show black birds against a sapphire blue sky, and dovetail with “this mystery about whether or not Audubon himself was Black.” We can’t wait to see what happens next.
19. Kara Walker
Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California, in 1969. She received a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991, and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. The artist is best known for exploring the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality through her iconic, silhouetted figures.
The most influential black and African-American visual artists, including painters, photographers and sculptors right now: Kara Walker.
Walker exploded onto the contemporary art scene with an exhibit where she upended the traditionally proper Victorian medium of the silhouette. Painting directly onto the walls of the gallery, she created a space in which unruly cut-paper characters – both black and white -fornicate and inflict violence on one another.
Her work has since been shown at MoMA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Guggenheim; and the Whitney. A 1997 recipient of the MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, Walker is also a sculptor. The monumental 2014 work A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby was installed in the former Domino sugar factory on the Brooklyn waterfront. And her work Fons Americanus was the prestigious annual commission for the Tate Modern’s iconic Turbine Hall.
20. Jordan Casteel
Born in Denver, Colorado, Jordan Casteel is known best for painting from her own photographs of people she encounters in daily life. With an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art, she now lives and works in New York City. At age 31, she’s catching fire. Forty of her works were on view at the New Museum for the solo show “Within Reach” (her first New York City museum show) when the coronavirus intervened earlier this year. The New York Times art critic described the show as having “a distinct sense of being let in on a casual but celebratory gathering, like a potluck or a block party.”
The most influential black and African-American visual artists, including painters, photographers and sculptors right now: Jordan Casteel.
Casteel’s “Portrait of Her ‘Mom” sold for nearly $667,000 in February 2020, a new record for the artist.
Vogue magazine invited Casteel and Kerry James Walker to create new works for the covers of the September 2020 issue. They had complete freedom over their choice of subject. Casteel chose to portray fashion designer Aurora James, who made headlines in June with her 15 Percent Pledge, a campaign to support black-owned businesses by making their products 15% of the shelf space in leading retail stores (she’s wearing a dress designed by Pyer Moss.) That’s some serious Black Girl Magic right there.
Who are the Most Influential Black Artists in America Right Now
There are so many brilliant and influential black visual artists that it’s impossible to capture them all in one short dispatch. But here are 20 to get to know better. And we promise, we’ll be adding more to this list in the future!
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Crediting her training as a cultural anthropologist at Wellesley College, Julie has immersed herself in various industries in the last 15 years including fashion design, event planning, and fitness. Julie lives in New York where she loves trying every ramen and dumpling restaurant with her husband and three children. She finds joy in bold prints, biographies of fierce women, kickboxing. And spending way too long finding the perfect polish color to express her mood.
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For access to insider ideas and information on the world of luxury, sign up for our Dandelion Chandelier newsletter. And see luxury in a new light.