By African American artist Romare Bearden (1911−1988), Guitar Magic, 1986, collage & watercolor on board, The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC. © 2025 Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society. #art #blackart #blackartist #blackartists #collage

From the Bearden Foundation: ‘Bearden takes us backstage to the glamour, grit, and grace of Black performance. Bearden understood that jazz wasn’t just sound. It was a repository of memory—a form of Black historical consciousness. The improvisational nature of jazz mirrored the adaptability required of Black Americans, who had to continuously remake identity and community in the face of change and displacement. Much of Bearden’s art functions the same way. His collages are full of migrating trains, front porches, street corners, and jukeboxes—images loaded with the weight of history. In these works, jazz becomes a stand-in for cultural endurance. He once said, “The artist has to be something like a whale, swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.” Bearden devoured both visual and musical traditions, then recombined them in ways that felt utterly new.’

By Geoffrey Holder (1930-2014), “Carmen,” oil on masonite board, ca. 1960, 47 1/2 x 36 in. (120.7 x 91.4 cm.), photo: Swann Auction Galleries, April 2, 2026. #arthistory #blackart #blackartist #painting #oilpainting

From the auction listing: “Geoffrey Holder was born in Trinidad in 1930 and moved to New York City in 1952 after being invited to teach choreography at the Katherine Dunham School of Dance. By 1954, he had his first successful one-man show in New York at the Barone Gallery and won a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts in 1956. Despite his talent as a painter, Holder is best known as an actor and dancer. He was a principal dancer with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet from 1955-56. He also had many roles as an actor and was featured in such movies as Doctor Dolittle (1967), Live and Let Die (1973), and 7 Up commercials. He was also a costume designer for Prodigal Prince (1967), The Wizard of Oz (1975), and Firebird (1982). His artwork has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Museum of the City of New York, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and the Barbados Museum.”

Your art history post for today: by African-American artist Laura Wheeler Waring (1887-1948), Woman with Bouquet, ca. 1940, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum. #arthistory #blackartists #blackartist #blackart #womanartist #womenartists

From the museum: “With hand on hip and confident bearing, this woman is self-assured and elegant. She was probably from the Philadelphia area, where the artist Laura Wheeler Waring lived and worked. Like Waring’s other portraits of sophisticated or dignified working-class African Americans, this painting countered the many racial stereotypes that were prevalent at the time. Waring’s work, with its strong color palette and energetic brushwork, flourished during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, a period of great African American artistic and cultural production.”

By Nigerian artist Wole Lagunju (born 1966), Black Girl V (Ibori), 75 x 57.5 inches, oil on canvas, 2025, ©️ Wole Lagunju. #art #blackartist #blackartists #AfricanArt #africanartists #africanartist

From Montague Contemporary: “Wole Lagunju practices a visually stunning form of Onaism, wherein he appropriates Western cultural artifacts and combines them with Yoruba cultural artifacts, notably Gelede masks, to challenge the audience to consider how we often look at culture through a Western lens.

The Gelede masquerade is a performance celebrating motherhood, fertility, and femininity - and combining these themes with Western cultural icons, he evolves our understanding of the role of Yoruba culture - and broadly African art - to reframe our perspective.⁣ Sampling from a wide variety of cultural iconography across history - from Dutch Golden to Elizabethan to fifties Americana to Nigerian adiré batik - Lagunju’s paintings are both fashionable but also imbued with layers of inspiration and meaning.

Lagunju’s cultural references, mined from the eras of colonization and decolonization of the African continent critique the racial and social structures of the 19th century whilst evoking commentaries on power, femininity and womanhood.
Wole Lagunju is a 1986 graduate of Fine arts and graphic design at the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. Lagunju has exhibited widely in Nigeria, United States, Europe, and the Caribbean.

His works are included in various private and public art collections including the Denver Art Museum, St Louis Art Museum, the Toledo Art Museum, The Virginia Museum of Fine Art (promised), the World Bank, the Norval Foundation, The United States Art in Embassy Collection in Nigeria, the Africa First Collection, the Ashley Longshore Collection, the Mack Collection, the Glasser Collection, the Chinn Collection, amongst others.”

By African-American artist Manet Harrison Fowler, Still life with flowers and Tuskegee pennant, 1966, watercolor on paper, 17 3/4 × 14 1/2 inches, photo: Swann Galleries, March 24, 2022. #art #blackart #blackartist #womanartist #womenartists

From the gallery: "Manet Harrison Fowler (1895-1976) was a Texas native and 1913 graduate of the Tuskegee Institute who later studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and toured the country as a soprano opera singer. She brought the Mwalim Center for African Culture to Harlem in 1932, and became an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance.”

By Kehinde Wiley (born 1977), “Shantavia Beale II,” 2012, oil on canvas, 60x48 inches, private collection. #blackart #blackartist #blackartists #oilpainting #painting

From the Saint Louis Art Museum: “Kehinde Wiley’s vibrant paintings actively engage with the traditions of European art. In his work, Wiley replaces historical depictions of white figures with images of contemporary African Americans, Africans, and people of the African diaspora. His work is widely recognized for calling attention to significant absences and erasures in Western art history, exposing the lack of representation of black individuals in figurative painting.”

Your art history post for today: by African-American artist Charles Ethan Porter (1847–1923), Floral Still Life, ca. 1880-1890, oil on canvas, 16 1/8 × 20 3/8 × 13/16 inches (41 × 51.8 × 2 cm), Detroit Institute of Arts. #ArtHistory #blackart #blackartists #blackartist #BlackHistory

Information on the artist from the National Gallery of Art: ‘In 1881 Porter decided to travel abroad to continue his development as an artist…

Less than two years into his time in France, Porter’s money ran out. He wrote to Mark Twain, asking him for help. His letters to the writer are the only known first-person accounts from Porter. On April 4, 1883, he wrote:

Now I am aware that there are a goodly number of my Hartford friends and others who are anxious to see how the colored artist will make out, but this is not the motive which impresses me. There is something of more importance. The colored people—my people—as a race I am interested in, and my success will only add to others who have already shown wherein they are capable the same as other men.

Conscious of his place in an art world dominated by white men, Porter was eager to show what he, and other Black artists, could do.’