Featured Artists

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.

Alfonseca primarily employs the act of painting and drawing as her artistic weapons of choice. She situates her subjects within bold and picturesque settings in an active pursuit of opportunities that explore the nuances of the communities in which she is immersed in. Through immersion and rumination, Alfonseca utilizes these experiences as reference material within her work as she toils to construct new narratives and build a universe that is reflective of her upbringing as a Dominican-American woman in the Bronx. These narratives harken towards dialogue about womanhood, colorism, class, family, ritual, and memory; all of which are building blocks in her creation of an ontological framework that is responsive to how she sees and experiences the world.

Alfonseca’s approach to artmaking is catalyzed by her desire to tussle with W.E.B. DuBois’ philosophy of “double consciousness” in order to illustrate that containing multitudes is part of what makes Black and Brown communities and their experiences unique. While analyzing questions of identity and race, Alfonseca depicts subjects that are strong, graceful, and exuding agency in a world that wants to deny their existence. Her work honors the humanity of the Black and Afro-Latinx experience in a way that is declarative and reassuring. When you consider a history where Black and Brown bodies are constantly on guard, Alfonseca work serves as a safe space teeming with beauty and joy.

Politics, class struggle and history meld with the personal and autobiographical in Paul Anthony Smith's fantastically rendered and embellished portraits of his native Jamaica. With particular focus on anonymous citizens such as airport workers, Smith's works celebrate and pay homage to the oft overlooked. His picotage-like images are created by picking away at the surface material of photographic prints to create textures that echo tribal masks and scarification and create a near iridescent effect.

Smith's work has been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, with recent solo shows at Atlanta Contemporary in Georgia and Zieher Smith & Horton in Milan. He is numerous collections both private and public, including the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and the 21c Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. - ℅ Artspace

We are so excited to highlight the work of the incomparable Toyin Ojih Odutola, who recently opened her first museum exhibition in New York City at The Whitney. Organized by Assistant Curator Rujeko Hockley and curatorial assistant Melissa Lang, Odutola’s exhibition entitled To Wander Determined features a series of fictional portraits, chronicling the lives of two aristocratic Nigerian families. Many in the mainstream may know Odutola’s work from the set of Empire, but for the past several years she has carved out her own lane with her larger than life portraits that beautifully render her often anonymous subjects with style and grace. The exhibition is on view in the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Gallery on the Museum's first floor of the Whitney Museum, which is free and open to the public until February 25th, 2018.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is an award winning British-Ghanaian painter whose comprehensive oeuvre over the past decade has come to redefine who was look at portrait painting. The previous Turner Prize finalist depicts fictional characters in her paintings that defy time and space resulting works that are open to the interpretation and imagination of the viewer. By not being bound to a specific narrative, Yiadom-Boakye can explore the complexities of blackness and identity leveraging the language of painting innovative ways. Yiadom-Boakye’s work is currently on view in a stunning new exhibition entitled Under-Song for a Cypher at New Museum in New York City until Sept. 3, 2017

Delano Dunn is an award winning New York City based visual artist who utilizes painting, mixed media, and collage to explore the previously overlooked simultaneity of the 1960s American space race and the Civil Rights Movement. By placing socially historical imagery in a contemporary context, Dunn is able to rigorously question a range of issues from racial identity to social justice through his artistic practice. Dunn’s surgical precision to art making has resulted in a refreshing vernacular that seamlessly oscillates between the past and future. 

February 2017, Delano Dunn will be exhibiting a new body of work in his solo exhibition No One Can Be This Tomorrow at Long Gallery Harlem. The exhibition will explore the false promise of true freedom and equality in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil Rights movement, and the election of Barack Obama, all moments of jubilation in Black America.

No One Can Be This Tomorrow  will be on view from February 26th to April 2nd, 2017 at Long Gallery in Harlem.

Zanele Muholi is an award winning artist and activist who utilizes the medium of photography to re-write the narrative of black queer and trans visual history in South Africa.

Revered globally, Muholi confronts the stigma and stereotypes often erroneously attributed to black women and transgender individuals. Her landmark photo series “Faces and Phases” is a collection of portraits captured over the past decade that provides a voice and a face to an often invisible community in addition to calling attention to the horrific hates crimes against homosexuals in South Africa.

The co-founder of the Forum for Empowerment of Women and founder of Inkanyiso, Muholi uses photography as a tool to train women in the townships to tell their stories via the power of the photographic lens. Muholi’s latest exhibition Personae is currently on view in the FotoFocus Biennial at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, OH until January 23rd, 2017.

Angolan multimedia artist Nástio Mosquito has gain international acclaim for his provocative use of music, video, installation and performance as tools to explore themes of cultural inheritance, tradition and identity. This summer Nástio is exhibiting a new body of  work at the Prada Foundation in Milan, Italy. The exhibition entitled: Template Temples of Tenacity is a multisensory presentation that invites the audience to be an active participates in what promises to be a truly unique experience.

Born in Tanzania, based in the UK, and professionally active around the world, architect David Adjaye has made a name for himself by creating physical spaces that enrich and improve a community’s daily life through design. 

Adjaye’s holistic approach aims to marry geography with social and historical implications, and can be seen throughout all of his work, which spans across private residencies, civic buildings and public institutions.

Recently named a finalist to design the Obama Presidential Center in the South Side of Chicago, David’s career-topping work includes the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC,  the Nobel Peace Prize Center in Oslo, the Moscow School of Management, and the Aishti Foundation in Beirut, among others. 

As a recipient of MIT’s Eugene McDermott Award, Adjaye’s approach to design can only be seen as an artform, informed by cultural narratives that lay the foundation of his work.

“For me, the primary act of architecture is to be socially edifying and socially liberating. It’s an emancipatory form. And inherent to this is having a politic which is to do with bringing people up, the politics of progression and of the progression of people.” - David Adjaye

“People who are familiar with my work know that I’m always picking hot topics,” she says, adding that the work also addresses “how something could be hot and then fizzle.” But don’t go prodding for a backstory, she wants the work to stand alone: “I’m not going to give you one story, because I’m more than one thing,” says Abney. “Whatever I feel like painting, I just paint it. For me, nothing is off-limits.” - Kurt McVey, Vanity Fair, October 15th, 2015