Visual Art

Larry Ossei-Mensah is the Susanne Feld Hilberry Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and the co-founder of ARTNOIR, a global collective of culturalists who design multimodal experiences aimed to engage this generation’s creative class. Recently named to Artnet’s 2020 Innovator List, the Ghanaian-American curator and cultural critic sees contemporary art as a vehicle to redefine how we see ourselves and the world around us. He contributed to the first-ever Ghanaian Pavilion for the 2019 Venice Biennale and will be co-curating the 7th Athens Biennale in 2021.

Derrick Adams’ work spans painting, collage, sculpture, performance, video, and sound installations. He is a recipient of a ​Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency, Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship,​ Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, and Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. ​In addition to numerous solo exhibitions around the country, his work is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Birmingham Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

A painter whose work explores the social and political landscape of Black American culture, Alvin Armstrong's paintings are often filled with real and fictional subjects culled from black and white archival material, his community, and lived experiences. Armstrong received a MS in Oriental Medicine and is a licensed acupuncturist. His solo exhibition “This Place Looks Different” was held at Medium Tings, a gallery and project space, in September 2020 and he was recently selected as resident for Pioneer Work’s 2021 class.

Documentary photographer Laylah Amatullah Barrayn is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and has been published in Le Monde, National Geographic, Vogue, NPR, VOX, Vanity Fair, among others. She was nominated for a 2020 News and Documentary Emmy. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at The Museum of the African Diaspora San Francisco and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporic Arts in New York.

Dominican participatory artist and designer Lizania Cruz is interested in how migration affects ways of being and belonging. Through research, oral history, and audience participation, she creates projects that highlight a pluralistic narrative on migration. Cruz has been an artist-in-residence and fellow at the Laundromat Project Create Change (2018—19), Agora Collective Berlin (2018), Design Trust for Public Space (2018), IdeasCity:New Museum (2019), BRIClab: Contemporary Art (2020—21), and Center for Books Arts (2020—21), among others.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed grapples with the poetics, politics, and pleasures of the unfinished. She has had numerous solo exhibitions and projects, including at the New Museum, Transmissions Gallery in Glasgow, and Brooklyn Museum, and public installations with Public Art Fund and For Freedoms / Times Square Arts. Her work was exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale and will be included in the upcoming Glasgow International and Prospect.5.

A conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture, Hank Willis Thomas’ work is included in numerous public collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, and National Gallery of Art. He is a recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2019), Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2018), and Art For Justice Grant (2018), among others, and a former member of the New York City Public Design Commission.

We come together to honor the iconic civil rights leader at this digital adaptation of our beloved annual event, featuring world-renowned activists and civic leaders alongside musicians and other performers.

A brand new 4K restoration of William Greaves’ (Symbiopsychotaxiplasm) long-lost documentary about the 1972 National Black Political Convention, narrated by Sidney Poitier.