A House Is Not a Home

Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971, Camden, New Jersey) is one of today’s most influential artists. Her innovative practice has yielded instantly recognizable and widely celebrated aesthetic languages within contemporary visual culture. Thomas completed her MFA at the Yale University School of Art in 2002 and a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2003, and soon became known for her large-scale acrylic paintings of Black women in states of leisure and repose. Her confident and assured subjects are often depicted in domestic interiors from Black America, claiming the agency of womanhood while deconstructing the art historical canon. Outside of her core practice, Thomas is a Tony Award–nominated co-producer, curator, educator, and mentor to many emerging artists. Thomas’s work has become an undeniable force within the contemporary art world and an indispensable inspiration to younger generations of artists. She lives and works in New York.

Maya Beverly (b. Atlanta, GA) is a visual artist based in New York, whose work is primarily centered around Sculpture and Ceramics. In 2020, she received her BFA from New York University in Studio Art. Her work has been shown in exhibitions widely throughout the United States and internationally in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, South Africa and Mexico. In 2024,  she was named 1 of “29 Emerging Black Artists to Discover” by Artsy. She has held ceramic and book-making residencies at Women’s Studio Workshop, The Archie Bray Foundation, The Center for Book Arts and Ox-Bow School of the Arts. Beverly’s work is held in several public collections and libraries, including Apple Music, Princeton University’s Graphic Art Collection and The Metropolitan Museum of Art's, Thomas J. Watson Library. Her work will be featured in Black Clay: Black Women, Ceramics and Contemporary Art by Dr. Jareh Das, published by Yale University Press (2027).

Lynthia Edwards is a Birmingham, Alabama-based multidisciplinary artist best known for her collage works that present the complex emotions associated with Black girls’ experiences in the American South. Edwards sources images from her current life both to channel the racial and gendered isolation she experienced as a child and express the limitations of her strict, Pentecostal upbringing, with her collage subjects as distinctive versions of her younger self.

Born in 1978 in Alexander City, Alabama, Edwards studied at the Art Institute of Atlanta (AA in Graphic Design, 1998), Auburn University of Montgomery (B.A., Art Education, 2002), and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (M.A. Art Education, 2012). She is the recipient of many awards, including the Purchase Award from the Alabama Art Colony in both 2005 and 2006, and “Best of Show” in the Montgomery Art Guild and Regions Bank Exhibition in 2019. In 2021, she earned the Alabama State Council for the Arts Fellow Award.

Edwards’ work can be found in numerous public collections and the private collections of philanthropist Beth Rudin DeWoody, businessman Ric Lewis, and finance executive Reginald Browne. She is currently represented by Richard Beavers Gallery, New York.

Kim Dacres (b. 1986, New York, New York; lives and works between Harlem and the Bronx, New York.; MS CUNY Lehman College, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, 2010; BA Williams College, Political Science, Art Studio, and Africana Studies 2008.) Dacres’s work has been exhibited around the world, including recent solo exhibitions at Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery in Paris, France (2025), The Chateau Fontainbleu in Fontainbleu, France (2025), Charles Moffett in New York, NY (2023), and Gavlak Gallery in Los Angeles, CA (2020) and Palm Beach, FL (2021). Recent major two-person and group exhibitions include Between Distance and Desire: African Diasporic Perspectives presented at The Soloviev Foundation Gallery in New York, NY (2025); The Space We Exist In curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah and presented at Heather Gaudio Fine Art in Greenwich, CT (2024-2025); Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists Since 1940 presented at Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2024); Part 1 of Bronx Calling: The Sixth AIM Biennial presented at The Bronx Museum (2024); The Hardest Love We Carry with Melissa Joseph presented by Charles Moffett at Art Basel Miami Beach 2024; We Insist Upon Ourselves in Perpetuity Throughout the Universe with April Bey presented at UTA Artist Space, Atlanta, GA (2024); and Black American Portraits at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA (2023) and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2021), among others. Dacres is the recipient of the Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) Grant in 2023 and the Artadia New York Award Grant (2022). The artist’s first site-specific and permanent outdoor sculptural installation, The Fountainkeepers, in partnership with Artbridge at the historic Harlem River Houses, was unveiled in June 2026.

Cortney Herron (b. 1988, Los Angeles, CA) is a contemporary figurative painter whose work lives at the intersection of surrealism and the inner emotional world. Her paintings are quiet worlds built from earthy, organic palettes, inviting viewers to slow down and inhabit a different quality of attention.

She paints the invisible: the energy that moves between people, the weight of an unspoken moment, the way an environment can hold or dissolve a feeling. Her paintings often capture intimate moments that may seem ordinary at first glance but reveal a deeper sense of calm and reflection over time.

Beyond her personal practice, Cortney has collaborated with brands including Olympia Le-Tan, Primark, NWSL, Target, Nordstrom, World Market, Pressed Juicery, Bombay Sapphire, Dagne Dover, Society6, Refinery29, and more, with a body of work that spans oil, acrylic, and digital mediums. Her art has been featured in numerous publications, galleries, and art fairs, earning recognition for its ability to pause time and offer viewers a moment of stillness.

Since 2023, she has been a working artist out of her Los Angeles home studio, where she remains deeply focused on her personal practice. Her original work is represented by Tappan Gallery in Los Angeles, with additional works available through Pop Up Home, as well as select exhibitions.

Bisa Butler was born in 1973 in Orange, New Jersey, the daughter of a college president and a French teacher. Butler earned her BFA at Howard University, Washington, DC, and her MA in arts education at Montclair State University, New Jersey. Trained as a painter, she shifted to quilt making during her graduate studies, when she made a quilt in honor of her grandmother. She later recalled, "As a child, I was always watching my mother and grandmother sew, and they taught me. After that class, I made a portrait quilt for my grandmother when her health was declining, and I have been making art quilts ever since." 

Since then, she has continued to create textile works inspired by photographs—portraits composed entirely of fabrics and textiles in vibrant colors and patterns that reimagine and celebrate Black life. Butler taught art in high schools in New Jersey for over ten years. In February 2021 she was awarded a United States Artist fellowship. She has exhibited in group and solo shows across the United States as well as in China, England, Japan, and South Africa. Most recently, she was featured in a solo exhibition that traveled from the Katonah Museum of Art to the Art Institute of Chicago. Butler’s work is in the collections of, among others, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Nelson-Atkins Museum, the Kemper Museum of Art, the Orlando Museum of Art, the Newark Museum, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Alyssa Royes Burke (b. 2003, Bronx, NY) is a visual artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science in 2025, where she developed a multidisciplinary practice centered on identity and representation through drawing, painting, and photography. These mediums exist in conversation with one another, allowing her to explore how identity is formed, remembered, and sometimes imagined, particularly within Black and Caribbean American communities. Her work draws from the complexities she finds in beauty, youth culture, hair traditions, and selfhood. In her drawings and paintings, she uses delicate linework and a light hand to render soft imagery that is meant to materialize the fragility that is memory through portraiture, while her photographs move between portraiture and landscape, documenting people, spaces, and sites of personal and cultural significance. As her practice continues to evolve, Burke engages in broader conversations about identity, memory, and representation, contributing to a cultural narrative that extends beyond her own experiences. She is the recipient of the 2026 Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant, awarded in support of her ongoing artistic research and practice.

Satchel Lee is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans photography, film, and installation. Through portraiture and moving image, she explores Black American visual poetics, spirituality, and generational memory, constructing intimate worlds that examine belonging, inheritance, and the emotional architecture of home. She presented her first solo exhibition, Where We Find Ourselves, in partnership with the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and was named one of Art in America's New Talent 2026. Lee received a BFA in Film and Television from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Alongside her artistic practice, she directs and photographs campaigns for commercial clients including Gucci, Coach, Jordan Brand, and others. She is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Silver Art Projects.

Marie-Jose is a contemporary visual artist based in Inglewood, California. Born in San Francisco in 1992, Marie has been exploring the multiplicity of the Black femme experience through painting, collage, and mixed media including stained glass, tile mosaic, and textile arts over the last decade. They employ surrealism as a tool for re-imagining the past and inspiring a previously indiscernible future and cite Rene Magritte, Dorothea Tanning and Kerry James Marshall, as well as their own Nigerian heritage as significant influences. Concepts for the work originate from an exploration of self-combined with uncanny allegorical imagery. Defining their style as ‘Afro-Surrealistic’, Marie’s work reexamines the pre-conceived barriers of Black liberation.

Marie-Jose has participated in multiple group exhibitions nationwide, including shows at the Museum of Science + Industry in Chicago and the University of Central Missouri. Their paintings were featured in the Affordable Art Fair in New York and Aqua Art Miami in Miami Beach in 2022. Marie exhibited her solo show, Between Walls I Find My Voice, at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Los Angeles in early 2025. They have just completed a year-long residency with Crafting The Future, Inc. in June 2026.

Louise Mandumbwa Manela (born 1996, Francistown, Botswana) is an artist working in painting, printmaking and drawing to explore ideations of home, figurative and botanical works. Her practice is a counter mapping endeavor examining the ranging registers or memory through material exploration, the illegible image and failed translation. Her works revisits sites of both familial and diasporic history to and appends them with affect and the anecdotal. Louise holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University as well as a BFA in Painting from the University of Central Arkansas. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Hearne Fine Art (Little Rock, AR), Orchid Gallery (Hamden, CT) Sakhile&Me (Frankfurt, DE,), Chili Art Projects (London, UK), Spurs Gallery (Beijing, CN), David Castillo (Miami, FL), The Wright Museum (Detroit, MI) and Yossi Milo (New York, NY). She has sustained a relationship showing her work in the American South through Hearne Fine Art. She was a 2024 recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth Greenshield foundation and the Elizabeth Canfield Hicks award from Yale University. She has participated in residencies at the Wassaic Project (2026) Low Season Artist Projects (2026) The Schneider Museum and Southern Oregon University’s VAST program (2025), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2024), The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts (New Berlin, NY 2022) and Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution (Chautauqua, NY 2019) and Louise lives and works in New Haven, CT.

Utē Petit (b. 1995, Southfield, Michigan) is a New Orleans-based artist whose work explores Black-Indigenous land-based traditions and the creation of 'Ailanthaland,' a free Black nation of heavenly beings conceptualized using charcoal and graphite drawings, quilts, installations, farming, and cooking. 

Utē specializes in textile practices, incorporating woven, quilted, and hand-printed fabrics, along with drawing, painting, and collage. Her practice partners with the Earth, incorporating land stewardship into the process. Utē's ancestry as a quilter, educator, and farmer informs her work, as does her upbringing on farms across the globe. She is currently stewarding her great-grandmother's and three neighbors' lots in New Orleans as part of her quest to rematriate family land stolen by the state of Louisiana. Through her work, Utē seeks to represent a nation divested from white-imposed societal constructs and committed to the self-determination of all beings. 

She was the winner of the third annual Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists (2022) and recipient of the Marsha P. Johnson Starlight Fellowship (2023). She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence) in 2018. Her work has been included in exhibitions at New Orleans African American Museum (New Orleans), Oakland Avenue Urban Farm (Detroit), and Library Street Collective (Detroit). Loyal Gallery, Swivel Gallery. She’s represented by Swivel Gallery.

Ryan Cosbert (b. 1999 Brooklyn, NY) is a first generation African-American (of Haitian & Guyanese descent) conceptual artist whose work approaches and focuses on her own humanistic experiences, self-expression, political issues and historical narratives. Cosbert aims to bring her viewers to see things from an internal / external perspective to explore and ignite conversations while encouraging higher consciousness. Cosbert rigorously researches the history and people of the African diaspora that she uses as inspiration for the subjects of her work. Cosbert is also interested in the consequences of subjugation and oppression along with their historical and generational impact on the Black community.

When it comes to Cosbert’s abstract paintings she creates a sense of control using the grid format to apply what she calls “tiles” which creates a geometrical balance. She forms different layers using the tiles, paints, and physical objects giving the work more depth and a three-dimensional composition. Both color and materiality play an important role in her work. She often incorporates physical objects and colors that tie directly to the subject matter of the painting. Cosbert graduated from The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City with a BFA in Fine Arts (Class of 2021).

Sheryll Cashin studied painting for years at the Corcoran School of Art, and was an active member of A. Salon, Ltd. artists’ cooperative (now known as DC Arts Studios) and in 1996 began selling large acrylic paintings of famous and ordinary African Americans. Early collectors of Cashin’s work included Peggy Cooper Cafritz, Ambassador Susan Rice and executive Robert Mallett. Known as an author and law professor at Georgetown Law, Cashin’s latest book, White Space, Black Hood illuminates residential caste and the systems of American racial inequality. “I made these collages as an act of self-care in a time of ugliness. In works like, Breonna Taylor, Her Life Mattered I surround Black women in nature and imagine them being healed. I was healed as I produced them. Beauty and internal peace are their own form of resistance.”

Adama Delphine Fawundu is a Brooklyn-born visual artist from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea.  She is an educator and cultural organizer whose interdisciplinary practice is rooted in photography and expanded through textiles, video, sound, and handmade paper. Grounded in what she terms Kpoto Patchwok—a methodology informed by ancestral intelligence, embodied memory, and ecological knowledge—her work explores how stories are carried and preserved through bodies, landscapes, and material culture.

Fawundu is co-author and editor of MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. She has received numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, CatchLight Fellowship, Rema Hort Mann Foundation Artist Grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the São Paulo Biennial and the Malta Biennial, and is held in numerous public and private collections.  In 2026, she released two books, Praise House (Archive Books) and In Search of the Spirit House (Express Newark/Project for Empty Space).   She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Art at Columbia University.

Genevieve Gaignard (b.1981) is a multidisciplinary artist that splits her time between her hometown in Massachusetts, the Bronx, and Los Angeles. Her work elicits dialogue around class, race and cultural identity. Last year she presented a solo exhibition, Thinking out Loud, with Vielmetter Los Angeles, and curated a group show, Stop and Stare, with UTA Artist Space in Atlanta. Her work has appeared in numerous group exhibitions, including The Nerman Museum, Overland Park, KS; Rennie Museum, Vancouver, CA; The Broad, Los Angeles, CA; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; The Getty Center, Los Angeles, CA; The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, AR; The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY. In July 2022, Gaignard partnered with Orange Barrel Media on Look At Them Look At Us: a permanent, site-specific public art installation in downtown Atlanta. Gaignard received her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and her MFA from Yale University.

Born Faith Willi Jones on October 8, 1930, in Harlem, Faith Ringgold was a pioneering painter, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, author, teacher and activist whose powerful works address issues of race, gender, and social justice. Ringgold’s innovative use of quilting and storytelling techniques revolutionized the art world by bridging the gap between fine art and craft traditions.

During the early 1960’s Ringgold traveled to Europe. She created her first political paintings, the American People series from 1963 to 1967 and had her first and second one-person exhibitions at the Spectrum Gallery in New York in 1967 and 1970. Following a second trip to Europe in the early 1970’s Ringgold began making tankas (Tibetan paintings framed in richly brocaded fabrics), soft sculptures, and masks. She used this medium in her masked performances of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Although Ringgold’s art was initially inspired by African art, it was not until the 1970’s that she traveled to Nigeria and Ghana to see the rich tradition of masks that have continued to be one of her greatest influences.

Katharen Wiese is a multidisciplinary artist from Lincoln, NE, residing in New Haven, Connecticut. She holds a B.F.A. in Studio Art from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (2018) and an MFA from Yale University (2024). Wiese is a Community-Engaged Teaching Fellow at the University of New Haven (24’ - 26’) and an Artist in Residence at the Eli Whitney Museum and Workshop (24’ - 26’). Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Chilli Art Projects (London), SPURS Gallery (Beijing), the Yale Peabody Natural History Museum (New Haven), Yossi Milo Gallery (New York) , David Castillo Gallery (Miami), the Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum (Iowa), and Toshkova Fine Art Advisory (Durham, NC).

Brooke Fierce Bronner is a contemporary painter whose work explores the intimacy of everyday rituals, the quiet choreography of human connection, and the beauty of Black leisure. Rooted in scenes of domestic life, friendly contests, and cultural memory, her paintings celebrate the ways Black people gather, talk ish, compete, and make each other better by virtue of proximity, love, and shared rhythm.

Drawing on personal history and collective traditions, Bronner layers bold color with gestural mark-making to capture the emotional texture of presence spontaneous, structured, and alive. Her work transforms the familiar backgammon games, kitchen tables, sideline conversations into luminous narratives of communion, care, and unspoken legacy.

Based in Washington, DC, Bronner has exhibited in galleries throughout the region and continues to expand her practice through explorations of narrative, craft, and community.

Emily Manwaring graduated from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and has a BFA in Fine Arts. Emily Manwaring’s work has been featured in galleries and museums such as Canada, New Image Art Gallery (LA), Venice Biennale (Italy) and The Brooklyn Museum. Emily Manwaring has been in articles for JUXTAPOZ, It’s Nice That, ArtDaily, Artnet, Office Magazine and The New Yorker. Manwaring's work has been featured in Usher's "Ruin" music video and the book " The Nameplate: Jewelry, Culture, and Identity" featured in The MET Library.

Turiya Adkins (b. 1998, Brooklyn, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn. She received her BA in Fine Arts from Dartmouth College in 2020 and has participated in numerous international group exhibitions. Her work explores Black bodily motion, flight, movement, and histories of resistance, drawing on influences from Black athletics, African folklore, and historical narratives. Adkins’s practice combines painting, collage, and abstraction to articulate visual languages of motion, myth, and speculative futures.

Steeped in African American history, Carrie Mae Weems makes alternately searing and tender photographs and videos that explore race, family, class, and gender identity. The artist, who has also worked in verse and performance, embraces activism throughout all her work—in particular, she looks to history in order to better understand the present. In the early 1990s, Weems rose to prominence with her beloved “Kitchen Table” series: intimate black-and-white photographs that undermine tropes of African American life and womanhood as they depict the artist seated at her kitchen table alone or alongside various other characters. Over the course of her career, Weems has received countless honors, including the Prix de Roma, the National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, and the MacArthur “Genius Grant.” In 2014, she became the first Black woman to mount a retrospective at the Guggenheim, and her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Renée Cox is a visual artist, working foremost in photography and video. Her work arises at this intersection of history, race theory, and sexuality. In her practice, Cox works to deconstruct stereotypes, engage the viewer and to challenge their preconceived ideas about gender and race. She explores the possibilities of new and affirming self-representations for Black diasporic peoples as a visual corrective to both art history and history writ large—transforming dispossession into self-possession. By deconstructing the Black female body, she reveals the myths behind it.

Cox began her career as a commercial photographer, working for Condé Nast, and the music and film industries. She turned to fine art after receiving an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1992. Since then, Cox has worked as a visual artist, educator, curator, lecturer, and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine. The Archives of American Art (Smithsonian, Washington, D.C.) acquired Cox’s personal archive in 2019.

Renée Cox lives and works in Harlem, NY and Amagansett, East Hampton. Her work is included in several institutional collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Princeton Art Museum.

Taylor Thomas (b. Chicago, IL 1995) is a Black artist based out of Los Angeles. She graduated Magna cum Laude with Distinction from Amherst College in 2017 where she double majored in Sociology and Film & Media Studies. After receiving her undergraduate degree, Thomas spent 6 years developing feature films at Netflix and The Walt Disney Company. However, witnessing a lack of diversity in the entertainment industry drove Thomas to change careers and create the representation that she craved in the visual arts. She received her MFA in Fine Art with a Certificate in Education from CalArts in 2025.