Welcome to our 16th #aroundtheworld! Today, we will be discussing 5 revolutionary Black artists. Enjoy our article on Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Mequitta Ahuja, Nina Chanel Abney, Jennifer Packer and Amy Sherald. Enjoy!
Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Njideka Akunyili Crosby (born 1983) is a Nigerian-born visual artist working in Los Angeles, California. Akunyili Crosby's art "negotiates the cultural terrain between her adopted home in America and her native Nigeria, creating collage and photo transfer-based paintings that expose the challenges of occupying these two worlds".
Based on her art, historical, political and personal references, Njideka Akunyili Crosby creates densely layered figurative compositions that precise in style, nonetheless conjure the complexity of contemporary experience. Akunyili Crosby was born in Nigeria, where she lived until the age of sixteen. Her cultural identity combines strong attachments to the country of her birth and her adopted home, a hybrid identity that is reflected in her work.
Mequitta Ahuja
Mequitta Ahuja (born 1976) is a contemporary American feminist painter of African American and South Asian descent who lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Mequitta Ahuja creates works of self-portraiture that combine themes of myth and legend with personal identity. Mequitta Ahuja turns the artist’s self-portrait, especially the women-of-color's self-portrait, which has long been defined by identity, into a discourse on picture-making. Of South Asian and African American descent, the artist positions herself boldly within her compositions, but makes the turn away from subjectivity by focusing on painting as a received form. Ahuja visually catalogs painting conventions which she established over centuries while using those conventions to make new meanings.
Nina Chanel Abney
Nina Chanel Abney is an American artist, based in New York. She was born in Harvey, Illinois.
Combining representation and abstraction, Nina Chanel Abney's paintings capture the frenetic pace of contemporary culture. Broaching subjects as diverse as race, celebrity, religion, politics, sex, and art history, her works eschew linear storytelling in lieu of disjointed narratives.
Jennifer Packer
Jennifer Packer (born 1984) is an American painter living and working in New York City. In 2020, she won the Hermitage Greenfield Prize and the Rome Prize. Packer won the Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome 2020-2021.
Jennifer Packer creates portraits, interior scenes, and still lifes that suggest a casual intimacy. Packer views her works as the result of an authentic encounter and exchange. The models for her portraits—commonly friends or family members—are relaxed and seemingly unaware of the artist's or viewer's gaze.
Amy Sherald
Sherald was born on August 30, 1973 in Columbus, Georgia to Amos P. Sherald III and Geraldine W. Sherald. As a schoolchild, Sherald had an early interest in art; she stayed behind during recess to draw and often added images to the ends of sentences, depicting whatever she was writing about—a house, a flower, a bird.
By painting skin tones in gray scale, Sherald breaks against identifying individuals based on their skin tone. “I want people to be able to imagine life outside of the circumscribed stereotype, or identity that can be controlled by many circumstances such as your environment, your parents, your friends, your skin color, your class,” she has explained.