John Walker

Born in Birmingham, England in 1939, John Walker was educated at the Birmingham School of Art and Académie de la Grande Chaudière, Paris. In 1976 he was awarded the John Moores Painting Prize, represented England in the 1972 Venice Biennale, was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1985. Since then, he has gone on to receive numerous awards and honors and has exhibited both nationally and internationally. The Ogunquit Museum of American Art recently organized From Low Tide to High Tide to highlight his work.
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Bonolo Kavula

Artforum notes that Bonolo decided early in her career what she did not want her art practice to be about: the political burden of being a Black woman in South Africa. Born in 1992, the artist found that most of the art history she encountered in her country was charged with the discourses of racial and cultural identity politics. Since her time studying at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town, Kavula has been determined to play and experiment with form.

If readers find the broader conversation about abstraction in the hands of Black creatives interesting, you should look at Artsy’s ’23 curator outlook in which Larry Ossei-Mensah predicts that abstraction by artists of color will become even more prominent in 2023.

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Hale Woodruff

Green Family Art Foundation presents Black Abstractionists: From Then Till Now, curated by Dexter Wimberly. Readers can find the other artists featured in the show on this blog. His early work is figurative. During the mid-1960s Woodruff and fellow artist Romare Bearden were instrumental in starting the Spiral organization, a collaboration of African-American artists working in New York. Woodruff’s New York works were greatly influenced by abstract expressionism. More

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