Nnena is the 2025 winner of the Turner Prize. She is the first learning-disabled artist to win. Born in Glasgow in 1966 to Nigerian parents, Kalu is known for sculptures resembling cocoon-like forms that she strews with videotape, cellophane, and other unconventional materials.
#nnenakalu
I hope if you’re in the Bay Area you’ve seen Muzae’s newest at pt. 2 Gallery. Juxtapoz had words about his practice several times. The paintings are really something else (I’ve seen a couple irl- this post is a revisit also).
More (IG)
#muzaesesay
I wasn’t familiar with Allie until I saw below in an ArtNews article about updates to the Detroit Institute of Art’s collection*.
Allie McGhee has been a leading figure in the Detroit art scene since the 1960s. Initially a figurative painter, McGhee moved away from representation and toward the more universal abstract language he is best known for today. His mixed-media paintings, including sculptural works in which he folds, bends, and crumples the canvas, are notable for their signature arcing forms and brilliant washes of color.
*The DIA was among the first museums anywhere to build and exhibit a collection of African American art, which it began in 1943. In 2001 it became the first US museum to name a curator devoted to that field in Valerie J. Mercer, who still serves as the museum’s curator and head of African American art.
#alliemcghee
Local (to the Triangle!) writer Colony Little calls our attention to Uman’s kaleidoscopic journeys. Their journey spans from Somalia to New York (and soon the south of France); this self-taught artist transforms migration, memory, and emotion into vibrant worlds of movement and hue.
More and more
#uman
work explores the intersection of pattern and symbol in Surinamese Maroon culture, the larger African Diaspora, and twentieth-century modernism. He was recently in Carried Over as part of the International Studio & Curatorial Program.
#remyjungerman
Luis De Jesus just presented Francisco Masó: Documentary Abstraction, the Cuban conceptual artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. The exhibition brings together new works from Masó’s ongoing series Aesthetic Register of Covert Forces. The series establishes a catalog and archive of acrylic on canvas paintings which serves as an abstract geometric guide for identifying the forces of power within a state control apparatus while simultaneously generating discourse on the militarization of Cuban civil society.
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#franciscomaso
Kristina Kay Robinson visits the studio of Matthew, a multidisplinary artist working in New Orleans who repurposes salvaged materials, for Burnaway. The work is composed of recognizable images and objects much like Hunter.
#matthewrosenbeck
One of the most celebrated Australian painters of the 20th century, Emily Kame Kngwarreye painted over 3,000 abstract acrylic paintings of dots, gestural lines, and vibrant hues, all inspired by her Aboriginal community’s symbols, rituals, and daily life.
#emilykamekngwarreye
Ronald Joseph started his artistic career in Harlem, New York City at the Harlem Community Arts Center, where he was one of the youngest pupils. Joseph’s early oil paintings were influenced by Picasso, Braque and other European artists while most of his contemporaries focused on social realism. By 1943, he was hailed by art historian James Porter as New York’s “foremost Negro abstractionist painter”.
#ronaldjoseph
doesn’t yet hold the esteem attributed to peers like Sam Gilliam and Betty Blayton (although he was included in Something to Look Forward To). Most information on the internet about his work is short bios from auction sites (example). Kolawole lived in Munich in the 1960s before returning to the U.S. His work has been included in a number of museum exhibitions in addition to Something… (which took place at the Morris).
#williamlawrencecomptonkolawole
Bill Hutson, also known as William R. Hutson, (September 6, 1936 – September 21, 2022), was an African-American abstract fine artist, who specialized in painting and collage.
#billhutson
Painting After Art is Dead 