American, 20th century, male.
Born 28 November 1907, in Charlotte (North Carolina); died 27 April 1977, in New York.
Painter, sculptor, illustrator, lithographer. Murals.
Groups: Spiral, 306.
Charles Alston moved to New York with his mother in 1914, after his father died. Alston received his BA and MA (...
American, 20th century, female.
Born 1938, in Atlanta.
Painter, draughtswoman, print artist, photographer. Mosaics, posters.
Spiral Group.
Emma Amos studied at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, the Central School of Art, London, and New York University. She started her career as a fabric designer. From ...
American, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 19 February 1946, in Washington DC.
Painter, sculptor, draughtsman, engraver, photographer, video artist, glassmaker, decorative designer. Theatre design.
AfriCobra Group.
Akili Ron Anderson attended the Corcoran School of Art and Howard University in Washington DC where he lives and works. He is a member of AfriCobra (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) founded in ...
American, 20th century, male.
Born 13 November 1930, in Plainview (Georgia); died 10 November 2006, in New York (New York).
Painter, collage artist, installation artist, sculptor, photographer, illustrator, draughtsman, watercolourist, print artist. Figures, portraits, interiors with figures, landscapes, animals.
Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, Rhino Horn Group
African-American artist Benny Andrews was the second of ten children born to George and Viola Andrews in the small rural farming town of Plainview, Georgia. He served in the US Air Force during the Korean War. Upon his honorable discharge, Andrews moved to Chicago and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating with a BFA in 1958. He then moved to New York, where, in 1969, with Cliff Joseph and Valerie Maynard, he founded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), the aim of which was to force the major museums to include work by African-American artists in their shows. Andrews helped organize protests of several major museum shows including the Whitney Museum of American Art’s ...
American, 20th century, male.
Born 2 February 1914, in Washington (North Carolina), 1919, according to some sources; died 1977.
Sculptor, print artist, ceramicist, illustrator.
William E. Artis studied at the University of Syracuse, New York, New York State University and the Art Students League, New York. He was also a student of Augusta Savage at the Harlem Community Art Center, New York. Artis expressed his humanist ideals by depicting impassive faces in a purified style, combining African and classical sculpture....
American, 20th century, male.
Born 15 May 1923, in New York City; died 1 October 2004, in San Antonio, Texas.
Photographer, photojournalist. Portraits, fashion, news.
Born to a merchant of women’s clothing, Avedon was exposed to fashion and its consumers from an early age. He greatly admired the work of Hungarian fashion photographer Martin Munkasci, who exploited photography’s new ability to capture the immediacy of motion. After serving in the US Merchant Marines ...
American, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1968, in Bridgeton (New Jersey).
Painter, sculptor, mixed media artist.
Contemporary art.
Bailey was born in Bridgeton, New Jersey, and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, where he continues to live and work. Since receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Atlanta College of Art in 1991, where he concentrated primarily on sculpture, Radcliffe Bailey’s work has taken on many different forms and utilised a wide array of media. Bailey’s conceptual exploration of history and memory as filtered through his complex relationship to America and Africa has led the artist’s work to evolve into installation, mixed-media, drawing, painting, and assemblage. His work is made up of two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms of various scale, ranging from smaller curio cabinet-like objects to monumental installations.
Bailey incorporates painting, photography, and found objects to create engaging works that evoke the past, the present, and the magical unknown. Through his signature use of layering imagery, text, marking, and found objects, Bailey unveils important themes within his work. Often incorporating culturally evocative elements, such as bits of wood or textile, each element is pieced together to create an inquiry into Bailey’s own experience of history through the lens of his racial and global perspective....
American, 19th century, male.
Born in 1825, in Virginia; died in 1905, in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Photographer (daguerreotypes). Portraits, genre subjects, architectural subjects.
Born a free man in Virginia, James Presley Ball became one of the first African American photographers after learning the daguerreotype process from the Bostonian John B. Bailey, also an African American, in ...
Canadian, 19th century, male.
Born 2 November 1828, in St Andrews (New Brunswick); died 9 January 1901, in Providence (Rhode Island).
Painter, draughtsman, watercolourist, engraver, photographer. Portraits, religious subjects, genre scenes, landscapes, seascapes, still-lifes.
Bannister's father was form Barbados and his mother was Scottish. He was born in Canada right after slavery was abolished. He went to live in New York were he was a sailor and settled in Boston in ...
American, 20th century, male.
Born 2 September 1911, in Charlotte (North Carolina); died 12 March 1988, in New York.
Painter (including gouache), watercolourist, lithographer, screen printer, engraver, collage artist, newspaper cartoonist, illustrator, art theorist. Religious subjects, figure compositions, local figures. Humorous cartoons, frontispieces, stage sets...
American, 20th century, male.
Born 13 April 1924, in Gastonia (North Carolina); died February 2001.
Painter, sculptor, draughtsman, print artist, illustrator. Figures, scenes with figures. Murals.
John Biggers studied at the Hampton Institute, Hampton, Virginia. From 1943 to 1945, he served in the US navy. After the war, he studied under Viktor Lowenfeld at Pennsylvania State University, first earning a BS, and then an MS in ...
American, 20th century, female.
Born 1934, in Los Angeles.
Sculptor, ceramicist, draughtswoman, print artist, photographer, film maker. Figures, scenes with figures. Murals.
Camille Billops has a BA from California State College and an MFA from City College in New York. She settled in New York, where in ...
American, 20th century, male.
Born 1942.
Sculptor, draughtsman. Figures, portraits.
Willie Birch studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, and at Southern University, New Orleans and Baton-Rouge. For his papier-mâché sculptures, he draws on Southern folklore and African American traditions. Harnessing acrylic paints, drawing and collage, he achieves realistic portraits of New Orleans black people such as the ...
American, 20th century, male.
Born 1920, in Summit (New Jersey); died 21 April 2003, in New York.
Painter, print artist. Murals.
306 Group.
The son of Jamaican immigrants, Bob Blackburn grew up in Harlem, where he met many artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance. He studied at the Harlem Community Art Center ...
American, 20th century, female.
Born 10 July 1937, in Williamsburg (Virginia).
Painter, collage artist.
Betty Blayton-Taylor studied at Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York and the Art Students League, New York. In 1968, she set up a children's art centre, the Children's Art Carnival, New York, under the aegis of the Museum of Modern Art. Blayton-Taylor paints abstracts based on the movement of dense colour and organic forms that suggest the human skeleton, as in ...
Guinean, 20th century, male.
Active in England.
Born 29 February 1935, in Bartica, Guinea.
Painter. Figures.
London Group.
Frank Bowling moved to London in 1952. In 1959 he was awarded a scholarship to attend the Royal College of Art where his classmates included David Hockney, Derek Boshier and RB Kitaj. In ...
American, 19th century, male.
Born 1820; died 1900.
Painter. Portraits, landscapes.
David Bowser Bustill was described as a 'free man of colour'. He was the grandson of Cyrus Bustill, founder of the African Free Society and a member of the St Thomas Free African Church in Philadelphia. David Bowser Bustill was active in Philadelphia ...
American, 20th century, male.
Born 15 September 1940, in Connelsville (Pennsylvania).
Painter, print artist.
Peter Bradley studied at Cranbrook Academy, Bloomsfield, Michigan, the Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit, and Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. He settled in New York. Bradley has taken part in various group shows, such as: ...
American, 19th century.
Born 1841, in Harrisburg (Pennsylvania); died 1918, in St Paul (Minnesota).
Painter, draughtsman, lithographer, cartographer, illustrator. Landscapes.
Grafton Tyler Brown was the son of emancipated slaves who had come from Maryland in 1837. He moved with them to San Francisco in 1861...
American, 20th century, female.
Born 29 April 1929, in Laurel (Florida); died 23 July 1993, in New York.
Painter, print artist, illustrator. Figures, portraits, landscapes, still-lifes.
Vivian E. Browne studied at Hunter College, New York, earning a BS in 1950, and an MA in 1959...
