10 Amazing Black Artists - Creators For The Culture

#RunTheCulture

Black art is bold. Black art is beautiful. Black art matters. Check out our list of 10 amazing black artists creating for The Culture.

ADDYE NIEVES

Addye Nieves is an abstract and expressionist artist focused on images of the body. Completely self-taught, she integrates materials in her paintings such as fibers, plastics, beads, and silk sari scraps. Her work explores heavy themes like the affects of trauma on black identity and internalized otherness. Her pieces are bold and anxious yet controlled.

ARCMANORO NILES

Arcmanoro Niles’s is a portrait artist with a twist. Niles’s subjects are usually his friends, family members, or even himself. The works are drawn in a historical portraiture style and deal with themes of loss and disappointment (some of his paintings feature people in somber interactions for example). But the paintings themselves are eye-catching. His figures are backlit by vibrant hues, like luminous oranges, reds, and blues. His work has been featured in the New York Times and Cultured magazine.

CHARLY PALMER

Charly Palmer is a painter focused on portrayls of black icons and historical events. He has done black athletes like Muhammad Ali. Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King. Rappers like Nipsey Hussle and prominent figures like Barack Obama. The constant theme in his work is the exploration of black identity, activism and race in America. He has also done the illustrations for two children’s books, “There’s A Dragon In My Closet” and “Mama Africa”.

CHRIS CLARK

Chris is a visual artist and a published author/illustrator. His work celebrates Black identity, culture, and beauty. Chris fills his creations with colorful, uplifting biblical images and life memories. He works on objects using them as his canvases. He has used quilts, chairs and other objects. “Spirit Sticks” are a particular favorite of his harkening back to his days growing up in the church.

DAWN OKORO

Dawn is a Nigerian American artist who also happens to have a law degree (from HBCU Texas Southern University). But her love of fashion, illustration, photography, and design lead her to become an artist. She incorporates those divers passions into her work using oil, acrylic, and pencil. Her artwork embodies space, movement, pattern, design, texture, and color. Okoro’s work has been featured in Forbes and Drawing Magazine. And her work has been shown at places including NYU and the George Washington Carver Museum.

DEBORAH ROBERTS

Deborah Roberts is a collage creating artist. Her works are strikingly beautiful and black as they examine the intersection of race and beauty and the status quo. Her latest pieces center on black girls. They are situated against white backgrounds, dressed in bright hues and attention-grabbing patterns while still keeping the viewer’s attention on the girls rich skin tones and demeanors. All with the goal of empowering black girls and presenting them as queens: cool, strong, and resilient.

DÉVONTÉ GIOVANNI RHEA

DéVonté is an abstract artist from New Orleans, LA. As a college student he discovered that art was his true passion deciding to pursue his dream of becoming a professional artist at an early age. He has a unique style that he uses to create colorful, unique and captivating pieces that are thought provoking. His mission is to open up the broader world to his version of abstract realism from an abstract mind that is firmly anchored within The Culture.

JAMAAL BARBER

Jamaal is an emerging artist to look out for. His work is a mixture of narrative, portraiture and positive black propaganda. Barber’s art prints range from black nostalgia, to contemporary life, and afro-futurism. All of his work however comes back to the themes of black identity, and the color black, as the main driver of the The Culture and the American narrative overall.

KEHINDE WILEY

Kehinde is a Nigerian-American visual artist and portrait painter who is known for his highly naturalistic paintings of black people. His signature is painting his subjects using vivid colors in front of a bold floral background. And in the honor to end all honors, in 2017 he was personally selected by former President Barack Obama to paint his portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.

KENTURAH DAVIS

Kenturah uniquely paints pictures with her words, making emphatic marks by applying oil paint with stamp letters. Mixing portrait with design, her portraits encourage the viewer to look for deeper meanings as form becomes intertwined with content. She explores the fundamental role that language has in shaping how we understand ourselves and the world around us. This manifests in a variety of artistic forms including drawings, textiles, sculpture and performances.