Two dancers stride together across the canvas in a synchronized, rightward motion. Each figure is shown in profile with one heel lifted, elbows bent, and hands poised in a way that suggests rhythm more than literal anatomy. Their skin is rendered in deep brown tones, while their clothing erupts in saturated blue, gold, orange, black, and white patterns with checks, stripes, diamonds, and zigzags that feel like woven textiles translated into paint. White dotted headwraps echo the beat of the repeated shapes. The dark background, interrupted by warm vertical bands, gives the scene a stage-like setting while keeping our focus on the dancers’ bodies and garments. American artist Charles Searles does not paint a realistic performance so much as a visual pulse of repetition, color, and pattern to create the sensation of movement, music, and collective energy. That sense of motion is a highlight of the artist’s work. A Philadelphia-born African American artist, Searles studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and drew lasting inspiration from African art, textiles, and dance. Accounts of his work repeatedly connect his vivid patterning and kinetic forms to those interests. In “Dancers,” the paired figures are almost like variations on a single step, emphasizing continuity, companionship, and ceremony rather than individual portraiture. The painting is joyful, but also disciplined so that every repeated motif helps turn dance into structure. Searles turns dance into a language of memory and identity. The repeated figures suggest echo, ancestry, and shared movement across time, while the vivid blues, golds, oranges, and whites carry the energy of celebration, ceremony, and performance. His bold geometric patterns recall textiles and design traditions linked to Africa and the African diaspora, so the painting is not only motion in the present, but is a visual connection to cultural history, resilience, and joy.

“Dancers” by Charles Searles (American) - Acrylic on canvas / 1975 - Kalamazoo Institute of Arts (Kalamazoo, Michigan) #WomenInArt #CharlesSearles #Searles #KalamazooInstituteOfArts #AfricanAmericanArt #BlackArt #artText #BlueskyArt #DanceArt #AfricanAmericanArtist #BlackArtist #acrylic #1970sArt

American artist Robert Colescott made this painting late in a career devoted to recasting Western art history through Black presence, satire, and critique. Here he reworks Picasso’s "Les Demoiselles d’Avignon" and shifts the scene from Avignon to Alabama, moving the conversation from European modernism into the charged terrain of American race history. He once said he wanted to move back toward the African women at the source of Picasso’s borrowed forms and to imagine not “Africanism” as fantasy, but women as lived reality. The title word "Vestidas" (clothed) also plays against traditions of the female nude, suggesting costume, concealment, and social coding. Five women fill the canvas in a staged interior that feels crowded, theatrical, and knowingly artificial. Their bodies are large, angular, and exaggerated rather than naturalistic. At center and left, three Black women stand or recline in patterned dresses, their limbs and torsos broken into sharp, Cubist-like planes. At far right, a pale blonde woman with blue eyes appears partly turned toward the viewer, her body posed as spectacle. Another figure twists near the middle ground. A slice of watermelon sits at the front edge like an offering or warning. The palette is heated with pink, red, tan, black, cream, acid green, and blue all applied in loose, muscular brushwork. Faces are masklike expressions. No one seems relaxed. The women read less as individuals in a calm room than as figures inside a history of looking, desire, stereotype, and display. The blonde figure may embody a Eurocentric beauty ideal, while the watermelon transforms Picasso’s still-life reference into a racially-loaded symbol of anti-Black caricature. The result is potentially funny, abrasive, and unsettling on purpose to be a painting about who gets painted, who does the painting, and how modern art’s celebrated breakthroughs were entangled with colonial extraction and racialized desire.

“Les Demoiselles d’Alabama: Vestidas” by Robert Colescott (American) - Acrylic on canvas / 1985 - Seattle Art Museum (Washington) #WomenInArt #RobertColescott #Colescott #SeattleArtMuseum #SAM #FigurativeArt #BlackArt #art #arttext #AfricanAmericanArtist #AfricanAmericanArt #1980sArt #BlackArtist

American artist John Biggers’s mature work often joined African and African American histories through pattern, symbol, ritual, and the monumental presence of women. Here, cloth suggests labor, inheritance, and cultural transmission, while birds, stars, spheres, and watery ground lift the scene into a cosmological register. The women are shown less as individual portraits than as bearers of knowledge, ancestry, and communal survival. Nine Black female figures gather in a shallow, luminous landscape that feels part earth, part water, part sky. They wear long patterned robes in warm browns, golds, reds, and greens, with several white headwraps rising like halos or crowns. Some hold or present woven cloth while others bend, turn, or lift their arms in gestures that feel ceremonial and communal rather than simply narrative. Birds glide overhead, stars and geometric orbs float around them, and the surface is threaded with circular, diamond, and textile-like motifs. Their bodies are elongated and graceful, their faces calm and masklike, and the entire composition moves in a wide arc, as though the women are weaving not only fabric but rhythm, memory, and shared presence. No men appear. The painting centers women as a collective force: dignified, watchful, spiritually grounded, and deeply connected to one another. Biggers’s travels in West Africa reshaped his visual language, and this painting reflects that turn toward African design systems and sacred structure. The title adds another layer: “Band of Angels” suggests protection, song, or spiritual company, while “the Seventh Word” likely evokes a final sacred utterance, though its exact meaning remains unclear to me. That uncertainty gives the work part of its power. It feels like a vision of women weaving together the earthly and the divine, making culture into a living, sheltering act.

“Band of Angels: Weaving the Seventh Word” by John Biggers (American) - Oil & acrylic on canvas / 1992–1993 - Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, Connecticut) #WomenInArt #JohnBiggers #Biggers #art #ArtText #WadsworthAtheneum #TheWadsworth #AfricanAmericanArt #BlackArt #AfricanAmericanArtist

Seven Gullah Geechee women dance in a loose circle across a Lowcountry clearing bordered by marsh water and tall grass. Two large trees rise like a frame at either side, their branches meeting overhead and opening onto a bright blue sky streaked with soft clouds and a few birds in flight. The women’s skin is painted in deep brown and blue-black tones, and their features are intentionally simplified, shifting attention to gesture, rhythm, and shared presence. One woman at the far left beats a tambourine. The others lift their arms, turn at the waist, or step barefoot through the grass, their long dresses swinging outward in violet, blue, white, gold, red, and green. Several wear white headwraps. One carries a broad straw hat and another a green hat with ribbon. The painting feels musical as hems flutter, scarves stream, and the group’s movement carries the eye from figure to figure as if the dance continues beyond the frame. American artist Sonja Griffin Evans, born and raised in Beaufort, South Carolina, builds her art from Gullah Geechee memory, place, and survival. In “Freedom Dance,” joy is not decorative … it is historical and communal. The title invites connections to emancipation, Freedom’s Eve, Juneteenth, and other Black traditions of gathering, praise, and release. Evans centers dignity, beauty, and motion with an insistence that Black Southern womanhood be seen in celebration as well as endurance. That approach aligns with her larger practice, which she has described as a way to honor her ancestors and “continue to tell their stories.” The marsh setting, the ring-like choreography, and the women’s vivid clothing make the painting feel both contemporary and ancestral, grounded in the Sea Islands yet resonant far beyond them. Seen within the context of Black Southern Belles and Evans’s longer-running American Gullah exhibitions, the work is an affirmation that cultural memory lives most powerfully when it is embodied, shared, and danced forward.

“Freedom Dance” by Sonja Griffin Evans (American) - Mixed media / c. 2017–2018 - Brookgreen Gardens (Murrells Inlet, South Carolina) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #SonjaGriffinEvans #BrookgreenGardens #BlackArt #art #arttext #AfricanAmericanArt #Gullah #AfricanAmericanArtist #WomenArtists

American artist William Y. Cooper interprets with paint Nina Simone’s 1966 song “Four Women,” which names Black female archetypes shaped by slavery, racism, sexual violence, colorism, and generational pain. He transforms the lyrics into a vivid, musical structure of line and color. That approach fits the artist well as he was deeply inspired by music and rarely painted without it, while his broader practice joined African heritage and American experience through symbolism and metaphor. Four stylized women fill the canvas, their bodies elongated and interlocked like a chorus. Cooper breaks their forms into angular planes of violet, indigo, orange, red, pink, and blue, so that skin, dress, and background pulse together. Their faces are masklike and expressive. Hands lift, torsos turn, and patterned fabrics ripple, creating a feeling of rhythm, motion, and emotional pressure. Across their bodies, painted words identify Simone’s four victimized and overlooked Black women as Aunt Sarah, Saffronia, Sweet Thing, and Peaches. - Aunt Sarah is strong with black skin, woolly hair, and a strong back that is “strong enough to take the pain … Inflicted again and again.” - Saffronia is a product of sexual violence inflicted on her mother by her white father. Having yellow skin with long hair, she is caught between two worlds. - Sweet Thing represents the Jezebel archetype, with tan skin and fine hair. Universally accepted because of the sexual gratification she provides, Simone sings, “Whose little girl am I? … Anyone who has money to buy.” - Lastly, Peaches is described as brown skin, tough, and embittered “because [her] parents were slaves.” With her endures the generational trauma of oppression and racism. By 1999, Cooper was a mature Buffalo artist, muralist, teacher, and self-described “Afrocentric artist,” using color to create rhythm and layered meaning. Here, beauty and critique coexist. The women are sensual, dignified, fractured, and resilient all at once.

“Four Women” by William Y. Cooper (American) - Oil on canvas / 1999 - Burchfield Penney Art Center (Buffalo, New York) #WomenInArt #WilliamCooper #Cooper #BurchfieldPenney #BlackArt #BlackArtist #art #artText #NinaSimone #AfricanAmericanArt #AfricanAmericanArtist #1990sArt #BurchfieldPenneyArtCenter

American artist Jeff Donaldson’s title invokes Shango, a ruler of the Oyo empire and a major Yoruba spiritual figure associated with thunder, lightning, power, and justice. The three strong women represent his wives: Oshun, Oba, and Oya who fought beside him. Donaldson reimagines them in the language of Black pride and liberation in 1969. They are not distant mythic figures, but modern, self-possessed women whose beauty, dignity, and readiness suggest spiritual authority as well as political power. They connect Yoruba memory to Black self-determination during the Black Arts Movement, making the painting a vision of women as protectors, cultural anchors, and agents of resistance. The three Black women stand close together, like a shared monument. Their skin is modeled in deep browns, amber, copper, and gold, and the watercolor surface flickers with warm oranges, reds, and yellows, making the whole composition feel radiant and heat-filled. All three wear natural Afro hairstyles that expand their silhouettes with pride and presence. The woman at left turns her face outward in profile, wearing a pink-orange dress, an ankh pendant, and a belt of bullets slung low across her hips. A long firearm hangs vertically beside her shoulder. The central figure wears white, a necklace of large beads, and a cross pendant. The woman in profile at right, in a yellow dress with patterned trim, holds an open fan. Donaldson presents them not as passive muses but as dignified, alert, and formidable women. Painted just after Donaldson helped found AfriCOBRA in Chicago, the work reflects his commitment to a proudly Black, community-centered aesthetic that celebrated beauty, power, and African diasporic connection. Rather than placing women at the margins of revolution, he centers them as intellectual, spiritual, and political equals. The glowing palette intensifies the sense that these women feel iconic and almost sanctified like a vision of Black resilience and sovereignty.

“Wives of Shango” by Jeff Donaldson (American) - Watercolor with mixed media on paper / 1969 - Brooklyn Museum (New York) #WomenInArt #1960sArt #artText #art #JeffDonaldson #Donaldson #Yoruba #BrooklynMuseum #BlackArtsMovement #BlueskArt #BlackArtist #BlackArt #AfricanAmericanArtist #AfriCOBRA

🌹 Spirit boost 🌹

#painting #womeninart #DanceArt #AfricanAmericanArtist #beauty #peace #hope #conservation

Two Ghanaian women dance in close connection, their bodies angled toward each other as if mid-step in a shared rhythm. One bends low with her headwrap glowing in warm light. The other leans in, upright and steady, her patterned blue blouse catching our eye. Their skin tones are deep brown against a dark, nightlike backdrop. A large green circular form behind them is textured with tiny dot-marks and creates a haloed space that feels both intimate and expansive. White highlights skim across skirts and hips, turning fabric into moving light. The women’s hands meet near the center, making the dance feel like conversation rather than performance. The scene is just two people, close enough to exchange breath, weight, and timing. The green disk functions like a moon/world for an image of cycle, season, and return while its seedlike dots suggest growth and abundance. The surrounding dark field, sprinkled with small starbursts, places their movement inside a bigger order like night sky, spirit space, or cosmic time. The dancers’ looped poses (bend/lean; reach/receive) feel almost like call-and-response or a visual metaphor for community knowledge passed body-to-body. Even the choice to show one figure turned partly away protects interiority as we witness relationship and presence without demanding full access. American artist John Biggers’ Ghana works are often discussed as shaped by his deep engagement with West Africa after his 1957 UNESCO-supported travel, and this painting carries that ethos with dance not as decoration, but as a living archive. Biggers once wrote, “I began to see art… as a responsibility to reflect the spirit and style of the Negro people,” and here that responsibility appears as joy with gravity via two women grounded, radiant, and self-possessed inside a world that seems to turn with them.

“Ghana Women Dancing” by John Biggers (American) - Oil, acrylic, and chalk on canvas / 1968 - National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, DC) #WomenInArt #JohnBiggers #Biggers #NMAAHC #AfricanAmericanArt #art #artText #BlueskyArt #BlackArt #AfricanAmericanArtist #DanceArt

Painted in 1932, over 30 years prior to U.S. swimming pools being desegregated across most of the country, this painting turns leisure into a form of dignity and insistence. A “bathing girl” can suggest sport, freedom, and summertime ease, yet the era’s realities make those ideas politically charged to ask who was allowed to swim, where, and under what conditions? A teenage Black girl sits turned slightly toward us, her long legs extending to the right as if she has just paused mid-rest. She has warm brown skin and a steady, direct gaze that looks out with confidence. Her dark hair is pulled back smooth. She wears a turquoise one-piece bathing suit paired with dark shorts with a white band at the waist. Her right shoulder lifts subtly, creating a gentle diagonal through her torso and arms. Behind her, dense leaves and soft, mottled greens form an outdoor backdrop that feels humid, shaded, and more close garden than beach. The paint handling emphasizes quiet presence over spectacle with soft modeling of face and limbs, controlled highlights along cheekbones and shoulder, and a calm, composed expression that is reflective rather than posed. William Arthur Cooper, an American artist-minister, repeatedly worked against degrading caricature by portraying Black individuals as specific, complex people that are self-possessed, varied, and fully human. In the 1930s, while serving as a pastor in Charlotte, he gained wider attention, including a major commission to paint portraits of African Americans across North Carolina. Those works were later published with his captions as “A Portrayal of Negro Life” (1936). His stated aim was quietly radical because his book, he wrote, might make “its silent contribution to Race appreciation… and interracial good will.” Here, the girl’s calm stare does that “silent” work while asking us to see Black girlhood not as stereotype or symbol, but as lived interiority full of beauty, thought, and rightful space.

“The Bathing Girl” by William Arthur Cooper (American) - Oil on canvas / 1932 - The Johnson Collection (Spartanburg, South Carolina) #WomenInArt #TheJohnsonCollection #WilliamArthurCooper #AfricanAmericanArt #BlackArt #art #artText #BlueskyArt #PortraitofaGirl #AmericanArt #AfricanAmericanArtist

The title “Mary Jane” carries a double meaning like a person’s name, but also the classic strap shoes that signal childhood and “proper” presentation. American artist Noah Davis gives that presentation dignity without sentimentality depicting a young Black girl standing with clasped hands and steady look directly at us. Behind her, a dense, mottled backdrop of pale greens and blacks like camouflage could mean both protection and threat at once: a world that can swallow you up, and a pattern you learn to navigate. She has deep brown skin and a calm, direct gaze. A white headscarf frames her face. She wears a white collared blouse under a light-blue vest, and a striped tan-and-white pinafore or apron over a pale-blue skirt. Her hands are clasped neatly at her waist. White knee socks with a couple faint stripes rise above black Mary Jane shoes. A dark horizontal band of floor at the bottom, grounds her small figure in a quiet, contained space. In 2008, Davis was deepening a practice that treated everyday Black life as worthy of the grand scale of painting and linking the intimate to the historical. His belief that art should be for everyone later shaped the Underground Museum (cofounded with Karon Davis). For the Philadelphia presentation of his retrospective, curator Eleanor Nairne said, “On every encounter, I am struck again by the potency of Noah Davis’s work.” The potency here is almost quiet, as we take in a child seen clearly, held at the center, and refusing to be blurred into the background.

“Mary Jane” by Noah Davis (American) - Oil and acrylic on canvas / 2008 - Philadelphia Museum of Art (Pennsylvania) #WomenInArt #PhiladelphiaMuseumOfArt #NoahDavis
#FigurativePainting #AmericanArt #art #artText #BlueskyArt #PortraitofaGirl #AmericanArt #MaryJane #AfricanAmericanArtist #BlackArt

This full-length portrait by American artist Ayana Ross depicts a young Black girl standing against an off white background that becomes a multi-shade green checkerboard band, like a tiled floor. She has deep brown skin and a soft, rounded face, her natural hair forming a short, airy halo. She wears a crisp white, short-sleeved dress that flares gently at the hem, with white socks and black shoes. Her posture is steady and self-possessed with shoulders relaxed and steady gaze direct but calm. At her side she holds a bright red book with saturated color. Ross renders skin, fabric, and light with careful realism, letting the pared-down setting keep attention on the girl’s presence, dignity, and quiet authority. The palette stays restrained with creamy whites, muted greens, and a gentle shadow so that every decision reads intentional including the clean edge of the dress and the careful modeling of her legs. The simplicity also amplifies the ethical stakes of portraiture so we are asked to slow down, notice the child’s agency, and question any urge to project a story onto her. Based in Atlanta and recipient of the 2021 Bennett Prize, Ross uses realism as a platform for examining race, gender, identity, economics, and the value systems that decide who is believed. The title, “She Who Knows,” likely turns the portrait into a statement about authority because knowledge here is carried, guarded, and chosen. The red book, as the sharpest, most insistent color in the painting, probably signals learning as something precious and hard-won, not passively received. It invokes histories of restricted access to education, but the book also insists on the sitter’s agency. Her calm, unwavering gaze completes the message: she isn’t staged as “innocent” for our comfort. She stands as someone already aware, already informed, and already centered.

“She Who Knows” by Ayana Ross (American) - Oil on canvas / 2022 - Muskegon Museum of Art (Muskegon, Michigan) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #AyanaRoss #MuskegonMuseumofArt #BlackArt #art #artText #BlackArtist #AfricanAmericanArtist #AfricanAmericanArt #BlueskyArt #PortraitofaGirl

Photograph of artist Allan Rohan Crite (1910-2007), 1952; Boston National Historical Park. #blackhistorymonth #blackculture #blackhistory #africanamerican #africanamericanartist #blackculture #art #arte #museum #artgallery

An almost smiling Black woman fills the panel in a heroic, three-quarter pose, turned slightly while her gaze lifts above and beyond us. She wears a warm orange blouse that catches light in broad, velvety planes of tempera. Her skin is modeled in beautiful luminous browns. Her hands are large, strong, and carefully shaped as one grips a pitchfork and the other rests on her hip. Behind her, vertical bands suggest a door frame with slices of blue and yellow cutting through the middle ground, adding depth to the figure’s steady presence. The title “Our Land” is likely a collective claim that belonging is earned through work, care, and endurance and therefore cannot be denied. American artist Charles Wilbert White sharpened that argument in 1951, when he exhibited a group of paintings centered on Black women, insisting they be seen not as background labor but as the moral and cultural center of American life. The pitchfork deliberately reworks the visual language of American Regionalism (an echo of “American Gothic”), but here the tool is held by a Black woman whose enlarged hands and lifted gaze turn labor into authorship. Around this time White described art as a “weapon,” and his career made that conviction tangible. He actively moved between Chicago and New York’s activist art circles, learned from print and mural traditions, and built a lifelong practice of “images of dignity.” Later, in Los Angeles, his impact rippled outward through teaching by mentoring artists such as David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall. He helped reshape what American figuration could hold including history, politics, tenderness, and pride, all at once.

“Our Land” by Charles Wilbert White (American) - Tempera on panel / 1951 - Frye Art Museum (Seattle, Washington) #WomenInArt #FryeArtMuseum #CharlesWilbertWhite #CharlesWhite #SocialRealism #BlackWomanhood #art #artText #BlackArt #ArtBridges #AfricanAmericanArt #AfricanAmericanArtist #BlackArtist

Photograph of Faith Ringgold; Miami Museum of Contemporary Art of the African Diaspora; courtesy: Estate of Faith Ringgold. #blackhistorymonth #faithringgold #africanamericanartist #blackculture #art #modernart #americanart #womanartist #museum #artgallery

A stylized portrait centers on a Black woman seated against a flat, velvety crimson background. She is shown from the waist up, shoulders squared and posture upright, looking directly at us with a relaxed, yet unflinching gaze. Her features are modeled in warm amber and deep brown tones plus highlights along her nose and cheekbones as shadows collect under the eyes, cheek, and chin. Her eyebrows are strong and arched. Her lips are softly closed, neither smiling nor tense. Her natural black hair forms a rounded afro that fans outward on both sides, held back by a wide orange-red headband. She wears a dark, structured jacket with narrow collar, buttoned placket, pronounced shoulders, and thin lines that trace seams and edges like a drawn outline. Down the center of the composition rises the golden neck of a banjo, with small tuning pegs near the top. A hand wraps the instrument, suggesting control and readiness rather than performance for an audience. Simplified shapes, tight cropping, and high-contrast palette make her presence feel iconic and dignified. Made in 2021, “Afros and Banjos” pairs two resonant signifiers of Black cultural memory: the afro (as a visible claim to self-definition), and the banjo (an instrument with West African roots that became central to Black musical life in America, even as it was later distorted through minstrel stereotypes). American artist Charles Eady’s broader project draws on research about free Black communities in the pre–Civil War South, and his exhibition “The Unscene South: Charles Eady Revisits History” invited viewers to reimagine who belongs in history. Here, the unidentified woman’s direct gaze refuses spectacle while the red background feels urgent, and the instrument’s upright line reads like a banner depicting music as lineage carried forward.

“Afros and Banjos” by Charles Eady (American) - Oil on canvas / 2021 - Appleton Museum of Art (Ocala, Florida) #WomenInArt #art #artText #arte #CharlesEady #Eady #AppletonMuseumofArt #BlackArt #AfricanAmericanArt #TheUnsceneSouth #AfricanAmericanArtist #PortraitofaWoman #AmericanArt #AmericanArtist

A black-and-white lithograph centers on the head and shoulders of a Black girl set against wide, unprinted paper. Her skin is modeled with velvety grays and deep shadows, plus bright highlights on the forehead, nose, and cheekbone that make the face feel carefully lit and 3D. Short, textured hair is gathered upward, leaving one ear visible. She turns to our left, focused as if listening or watching for something beyond the frame. Her expression is quiet, serious, and tired in a way that suggests endurance rather than drama. A pale shirt is loosely drawn at the shoulders, with a few darker strokes and speckled marks suggesting folds and shadow. Over the entire figure lies a rigid grid of barbed wire with horizontal and vertical strands across her face and clothing, with twisted knots and sharp points at the intersections. The wire lines are thin but insistently repeated, so the barrier is a restraint made visible. Made in 1968, the work turns a single portrait into a statement about imposed limits. The girl is presented with dignity and specificity, yet seen through a structure designed to divide. The wire grid is both literal fencing and a compressed symbol for segregation, surveillance, and the everyday boundaries that define where safety, freedom, and possibility are permitted to exist. American artist Ernest Crichlow heightens that meaning through stark color contrasts of black against white as well as soft human shading against hard linear constraint, so our eyes keep moving between the child’s living face and the cold geometry that interrupts it. The title, “Waiting,” lands as a condition as much as a moment. Is she waiting to pass, to be allowed, ot to simply be treated as fully human? And because her gaze stays fixed outward, still, alert, and unresolved, the image holds tension between confinement and persistence, likely asking us to notice not only the barrier, but the person who lives behind it.

“Waiting” by Ernest Crichlow (American) - Lithograph / 1968 - Delaware Art Museum (Wilmington) #WomenInArt #ErnestCrichlow #Crichlow #DelawareArtMuseum #Arte #1960s #Lithograph #BlackArt #art #artText #BlueskyArt #PortraitofaGirl #AmericanArt #RacialJusticeArt #AfricanAmericanArtist #AmericanArtist

A young Black woman with deep brown skin stands against a softly graded pink backdrop marked by horizontal bands. She faces forward, weight settled, and meets our gaze through oversized burgundy glasses. With both hands raised, she lightly pinches the frames at her temples for an in-between moment of looking …. and being looked at. Her natural, coiled hair spreads in short twists around her head. A small septum ring and subtle highlights on her cheekbones and glossy lips catch the studio light. She wears a cropped, magenta-and-black striped cardigan over a pale pink top tied with a black ribbon as the hem lifts to show her stomach and a belly-button piercing. High-waisted, wine-colored trousers sit low on her hips, their seams and folds modeled with careful shading. Layered necklaces include a small heart-shaped pendant. Her wrists are stacked with beaded bracelets and a watch while rings glint on her fingers. American artist Monica Ikegwu renders skin, fabric, and jewelry with crisp realism while keeping the surrounding pinks velvety and quiet, so the woman’s serious, alert, and unflinching expression is self-possessed and fully present. By 2023, Ikegwu had built her practice around Black portraiture and the politics of perception including how people are seen … and how they choose to appear. She has described her aim as portraying sitters “not as subjects to paint, but as people with their own sense of self.” “Brea” leans into that tension as the gesture of adjusting glasses becomes a quiet claim to authorship, as if the young woman is setting the terms of visibility in real time. The saturated pink palette is both tender and emphatic to turn a familiar “pretty” color into a stage for confidence and edge. This painting gives everyday style such as bracelets, piercings, stripes, and streetwear a monumental feeling, insisting that contemporary self-fashioning is not vanity but identity work for a practiced, dignified way of saying, I decide how you meet me.

“Brea” by Monica Ikegwu (American) - Oil on canvas / 2023 - Muskegon Museum of Art (Muskegon, Michigan) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomenArtists #MonicaIkegwu #Ikegwu #MuskegonMuseumofArt #BlackArt #BlackArtist #art #artText #BlueskyArt #BeYou #AfricanAmericanArtist #AmericanArt #WomenPaintingWomen

In a cool violet-blue bedroom, a young Black woman, the artist Ariel Dannielle herself, sits at a glassy vanity table facing us, her body cropped at the chest. Very short, bleached waves of hair hug her scalp, framing pink eyeshadow, winged liner, and glossy lips she paints with a raised lipstick. Her brown skin is modeled in rosy highlights, a floral tattoo curling over one shoulder and thin gold chains at her bare collar. Behind her, a carved headboard crowns a rumpled bed stacked with pillows. Framed flower studies, purple sconces, and a vase of red blossoms glow against a mottled night-sky wall. On a table, a mirror, wine glass, brushes, palettes, creams, lashes, and sprays cluster into a busy field of self-care tools. Dannielle paints herself mid-routine, centering a beauty ritual that is usually private and brief. The large scale turns getting ready into something monumental, honoring the time Black women spend tending to their own image and comfort. Atlanta-born, she uses self-portraiture to frame Black millennial womanhood. The “glittery veil” is makeup, but also a shield she chooses, a way to meet the world on her terms. Part of her Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA) exhibition “It Started So Simple,” the painting joins a series of interior scenes where wine, flowers, skin care, and soft bedding signal rest, pleasure, and Black joy rather than trauma. Her steady gaze invites us in yet insists she remains the author of how she is seen.

“A Glittery Veil” by Ariel Dannielle (American) - Acrylic on unstretched canvas / 2019 - Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (Atlanta) #WomenInArt #art #artText #ArielDannielle #Dannielle #MOCAGA #BlackArt #BlueskyArt #arte #AfricanAmericanArtist #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #SelfPortrait

In this vertical oil painting, a young Black woman, the artist herself, fills a small Masonite panel from chest up, turned slightly to her left while facing us with a steady, unsmiling gaze. Her medium-brown skin is modeled in bold planes of yellow-tan, olive green, and rosy shadows, so the face feels both sculpted and vulnerable. Thick, visible brushstrokes build the high bridge of her nose, full lips, and her wide, pale eyes that seem to catch light without sharp pupils, intensifying her watchful expression. Her dark hair is parted and swept back close to the head, forming a compact cap of paint. She wears a deep green top with a warm coral-pink collar wrapping snugly around her neck, adding a band of color that echoes the tones in her face. Behind her, loosely painted greens and creams suggest a studio interior or landscape glimpsed through a window, leaving the setting deliberately indistinct so that our attention stays on her searching, self-defining stare. Painted in 1962, when Howardena Pindell was studying painting at Boston University, this early self-portrait shows her working through figuration before the abstract, hole-punched canvases that would later make her famous. Rough, layered brushwork and deliberately exaggerated color signal an artist testing how paint can register both likeness and emotion. The yellow-green mask of her face may suggest the tension of being seen and mis-seen as a young Black woman in predominantly white art institutions. Seen in hindsight, the work quietly anticipates Pindell’s lifelong engagement with racism, feminism, and the politics of visibility, even as it remains a straightforward exercise in looking hard at herself. This modest panel stands as an important record of an emerging artist who would go on to become a trailblazing curator at MoMA, a co-founder of A.I.R. Gallery, and a vital voice in contemporary art and criticism, insisting that Black women artists be visible on their own terms.

“Self-Portrait” by Howardena Pindell (American) - Oil on Masonite / 1962 - Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, New York) #WomenInArt #art #artText #artwork #HowardenaPindell #Pindell #TheMet #SelfPortrait #BlackArt #BlackWomenArtists #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #AfricanAmericanArtist

Painted in 1966, this early self-portrait shows Emma Amos asserting herself within an art world that largely centered white male abstraction. By placing her own image at the heart of a modernist, geometric composition, she insists that Black women’s lives and pleasures belong inside the canon, not at its margins. Inside a wide circular frame that feels like both window and mirror, a young Black woman, Smos herself, with medium-brown skin sits in profile, her body turned while her head tilts toward us. She wears a vivid red dress with a blue collar, her straight black bob cut neatly framing her face. Her gaze meets ours, steady and thoughtful, even as she bends slightly over a small bouquet of green, yellow, and red flowers cradled in her hands. The circle is edged with warm browns, set against a flat field of saturated blue. Within the circle, the background is divided into soft off-white and pale yellow planes, with a sliver of magenta tabletop and stacked color blocks at the lower right. Broad, visible brushstrokes, simplified shapes, and bold contrasts flatten the space, turning this quiet act of smelling flowers into a striking, graphic image. The artist’s posture, rich color, and framing convey a sense of contemplation, sanctuary, and self-possession. The circular “portal” can be viewed as a mirror, a studio window, or even a halo-like emblem of self-regard, echoing Amos’s belief that, “For me, a Black woman artist, to walk into the studio is a political act.” The small bouquet suggests both everyday joy and self-care, as if she has gathered these flowers for herself in the midst of struggle. Decades later, she would insert this painting inside “Sandy and Her Husband,” literally weaving her younger self into a narrative of Black love and intimacy. Born in segregated Atlanta and later the only woman in the Spiral collective, Amos used color, pattern, and figuration to challenge racism and sexism in art history.

“Flower Sniffer” (Self-portrait) by Emma Amos (American) – Oil on canvas / 1966 – Brooklyn Museum (New York) #WomenInArt #EmmaAmos #BrooklynMuseum #artText #art #BlackWomenArtists #arte #AfricanAmericanArtist #BlueskyArt #selfportrait #BlackArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #ContemporaryArt

Painted in mid-1960s New York, this self-portrait comes from a period when American artist Vivian Browne, newly trained at Hunter College, was concentrating on figuration and the relationships around her before turning to the more overtly satirical “Little Men” series and later her Africa and tree paintings. Here, she claims space as a working Black woman artist and not a model or symbol, but a painter surrounded by her tools, an art study in the background, and everyday objects. This vertical canvas shows Browne from the waist up, turned three-quarters toward us in a softly lit studio. Her medium-brown skin is modeled with greens, tans, and mauves that pool around her high cheekbones and strong jaw, giving her face a sculpted, shifting presence. Short dark hair with brown highlights frames an intent gaze with her eyes slightly widened, eyebrows arched, and full lips gently closed as if holding back speech. She wears a loose, rose-violet robe or coat that falls in broad planes rather than detailed folds. Behind her, a second canvas with a female figure in warm tones hangs on a pale wall, and a shallow wooden bowl rests on a ledge, anchoring the space. The background is built from creamy yellows and cool grays, so that the artist’s alert expression becomes the image’s brightest focal point. Her chromatic risks of green shadows on brown skin, mauve flesh against a yellow backdrop signal the experimental color that would define her later abstract works. The steady, complicated stare echoes her oft-quoted belief that “Black art is political,” yet the politics live in self-definition rather than slogan. Reintroduced in the traveling retrospective “Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest,” this self-portrait anchors the story of an artist whose portraiture, activism, and teaching insisted that Black women’s inner lives belonged at the center of American art.

“Vivian (Self-portrait)” by Vivian Browne (American) - Oil on canvas / 1965 - The Phillips Collection (Washington, DC) #WomenInArt #VivianBrowne #Browne #ThePhillipsCollection #SelfPortrait #art #artText #BlueskyArt #BlackArt #BlackArtists #AfricanAmericanArtist #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists

American artist Lee Ransaw portrays Josephine Baker at rest, not in mid-dance but in a reflective pause, as if looking back over a life that remade popular culture. Born in St. Louis, Missouri and later a naturalized French citizen, Baker became the toast of Paris after La Revue Nègre in 1925 and went on to break barriers as a star of the Folies Bergère, a French Resistance courier and spy in World War II, and a prominent voice for civil rights. By placing her calm, mature figure between the memory of her electric performance and the monumental Arc de Triomphe, Ransaw honors her both as entertainer and as culture-changer. In this tall, teal-green portrait, a Black woman with warm brown skin leans against a carved bench, her body angled toward the viewer while her face turns gently to our right. Her eyes are closed, lashes lowered in a quiet, inward gaze. She wears a deep blue, off-the-shoulder evening gown with a soft ruffled neckline that frames her bare shoulders and long, elegant neck. Pale blue opera gloves sheath her forearms; her fingers interlace loosely in her lap, suggesting poise rather than performance. Her hair rises in a sculpted updo crowned with a jeweled band and a long tail of hair. She wears cascading, star-like earrings that echo the curves in her hairstyle. Behind her, saturated turquoise walls and columns suggest a Parisian terrace at night. To the left, an archway contains a glowing vignette of Josephine in a radiant stage costume, arms flung wide in dance before a silhouetted audience, while the Arc de Triomphe to the right, anchors her story in Paris. The lush greens and blues, elongated forms, and stylized features echo modern Black figurative painting while reclaiming Baker from the exoticizing gaze that once framed her. An Atlanta-based artist, professor, and founder of the National Alliance of Artists from Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Ransaw casts Baker as a dignified, self-possessed icon whose legacy still radiates.

“Josephine” by Lee A. Ransaw (American) - Acrylic on canvas / 2012 #WomenInArt #art #artText #artwork #LeeRansaw #Ransaw #JosephineBaker #BlackArt #AfricanAmericanArt #PortraitPainting #ParisArt #AmericanArt #PortraitofaWoman #BlueskyArt #AfricanAmericanArtist #AmericanArtist #ArtOfTheDay #portrait

I am my paintings. My paintings are me. They are my children and they give birth to me. I am my paintings, my paintings are me. I paint through my paint & my passion. My paintings set me free.
#art #artist #painting #painter #africanamericanartist #blackart #blackartist #acrylicpaint #watercolor

Studio door: “The Banjo Lesson” : Henry Ossawa Tanner
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-#oilpainting #fineart #africanamericanartist #banjo #banjomusic #artist

The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles!

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Marion Sampler, Untitled (Flag), 1965
Oil on linen
48 x 48 ins

#art #africanamericanartist #thoreau #walden #quote

Kerry James Marshall, born on 17 October 1955 #KerryJamesMarshall #ContemporaryArt #BlackArt #BlackArtist #ArtActivism #AfricanAmericanArtist #MacArthurFellowship #artherenow #artagenda

Happy 70th Birthday Kerry James Marshall! 🍾
#KerryJamesMarshall #Painting #ContemporaryArt #BlackArt #BlackArtist #ArtActivism #Painter #Maler #AfricanAmericanArtist #MacArthurFellowship #ZeitgenössischeKunst #artherenow #artagenda

Painted for American artist Ariel Dannielle’s exhibition "We Outside!" (Nov. 6–Dec. 18, 2021), the picture is a love letter to Black joy and Atlanta nightlife. Working from staged photoshoots with friends ... often with herself ... Dannielle projects, outlines, and paints to monumentalize ordinary rituals of getting ready, going out, and feeling cute together. This square, street-bright scene brings us face-to-face with a young Black woman pausing mid–lollipop on Atlanta’s Edgewood Avenue. Her skin, warm brown with rosy undertones, catches slick highlights across glossy lips and cheekbones. Braided hair, threaded with indigo-blue, is pulled back by a pink tie as gold smiley-face earrings wink beside a confident, sideward gaze. She wears a mauve-pink Bebe zip jacket. Long pink nails balance the candy’s red sheen as the white stick angles toward us. Behind her, red-brick storefronts, a traffic light, and the green "EDGEWOOD AVE NE" sign anchor the setting. A white "Do Not Block" placard and looping overhead wires crisscross the sky. A second figure in a blue top and a passerby on the sidewalk deepen the city’s pulse. Windowpanes reflect patches of neon and painted letters loom large across the building façade as part billboard and part backdrop so the whole street reads like a weekend stage. “My goal…is to show the fun parts of being Black…to be with your friends,” Danielle notes, describing "We Outside!" as a post-lockdown ode to confidence and connection. The saturated pinks of lip gloss, nails, jacket, even skin undertones reflect what the artist calls her “pink era,” when she leaned into chroma to honor the range of tones within Black skin. "Weekends on Edgewood" borrows the immediacy of a selfie while asserting permanence. The lollipop’s playful sweetness becomes a small act of self-care while the famous street setting locates that pleasure in a beloved corridor of the Old Fourth Ward (O4W) in Atlanta.

"Weekends on Edgewood" by Ariel Dannielle (American) – Acrylic on canvas / 2021 – We Outside! Exhibition, Monique Meloche Gallery (Chicago, Illinois) #WomenInArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #ArielDannielle #Dannielle #artText #art #BlueskyArt #AfricanAmericanArtist #BlackArt #acrylic #WomensArt

Faith Ringgold | 8 October 1930 – 13 April 2024

Happy Birthday Faith Ringgold | Faith Ringgold | 8 October 1930 – 13 April 2024

#FaithRinggold #StoryQuilts #HarlemRenaissance #BlackFeministArt #ArtActivism #NarrativeArt #WomenArtists #AfricanAmericanArtist #MoMA #Künstlerin #art #kunst #artherenow #artagenda

A beautiful young Black woman, American artist Monica Ikegwu herself, stands before a field of saturated crimson, the hue echoing across background, coat, and lipstick. She glances back over her left shoulder with a level, downward gaze. The high-gloss, quilted puffer coat is zipped and drawn close; deep, crisp folds gather at the collar and sleeves, catching pinpoint highlights that read like flashes on vinyl. Only a sliver of bare shoulder peeks out from the jacket. Her left hand rises just under her chin. Her hair is pulled into a low ponytail while her brows are neat and mouth composed. The red-on-red palette collapses space so the figure seems almost 3D, her silhouette defined by value shifts rather than outline. Hyper-real textures like stitched seams, knuckled fingers, specks of light on the coat contrast with the velvety, brush-quiet background. In "Closed," paired with its companion "Open" (posted by me a few months ago on Bluesky), Ikegwu uses fashion as psychology: a zipped coat becomes armor; an unzipped one (in the other panel) signals exposure and ease. The monochrome crimson operates like a mood conveying heat, attention, and power while also flattening context so that presence itself is the subject. Ikegwu calls her practice a study of “perception… how people are viewed and how they want to appear,” and she aims to “capture the person… their essence” without forcing them into someone else’s ideal. Here, the artist stages herself as both model and message, aligning with hip-hop’s sartorial codes where outerwear telegraphs status and stance. The downward gaze reads regal rather than deferent; the hand near the chin, a pivot between reserve and declaration. Painted in 2021, while the Baltimore-born artist was consolidating a hyper-real, figure-forward language, "Closed" reflects her broader project: celebrating Black self-presentation including youth, attitude, and choice through academic precision sharpened by contemporary style.

“Closed“ by Monica Ikegwu (American) - Oil on canvas / 2021 - Baltimore Museum of Art (Maryland) #WomenInArt #WomenArtists #ArtText #WomanArtist #AmericanArtist #SelfPortrait #WomensArt #BaltimoreMuseumofArt #AfricanAmericanArtist #HipHopFashion #artwork #AfricanAmericanArt #Ikegwu #MonicaIkegwu

A tall Black woman stands against a vivid, turquoise-blue ground mottled with faint, watery red drips. American artist Amy Sherald renders her skin in nuanced grays of soft charcoal, pewter, and silver so that tonal shifts depict her cheekbones, brows, and hands. Her gaze meets ours directly, steady and calm. She wears a short-sleeved, pink blouse scattered with small white polka dots and tied with a large bow at the collar, paired with a plain white skirt. Her bare arms rest alongside her body. Her short natural hair forms a simple silhouette. The composition gives primacy to presence, poise, and style. Painted soon after Sherald completed her training in Baltimore, this work marks the emergence of key strategies that would define her practice. She had encountered the sitter, a curatorial intern at the Walters Art Museum, and was struck by her height, hairstyle, and thrifted polka-dot outfit: “I saw my story in her,” Sherald recalls. Photographing the model and then translating the likeness to paint, she eliminated place to focus on personhood. The grayscale skin is a deliberate nod to the history of black-and-white photography and self-representation. Sherald refuses to let color stand in for race, inviting viewers to read character, not stereotype. The title, lifted from a poem, functions like one of Sherald’s “small poems,” offering a runway into the painting’s psychology: a subject who is impeccably composed yet out of step with rigid social expectations. The speckled blue ground, with its faint reddish drips, signals an earlier phase in Sherald’s evolution, before she moved toward flatter planes of color; nevertheless, the essentials are here: stylish self-presentation, quiet authority, and a reparative re-centering of Black life. Sherald has said her mission is “to put more complex stories of Black life in the forefront of people’s minds and on the walls of museums…to take up space and reclaim time.”

“Well Prepared and Maladjusted” by Amy Sherald (American) – Oil on canvas / 2008 – Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) #WomenInArt #WomenPaintingWomen #WomenArtists #art #artText #artwork #WomensArt #AfricanAmericanArt #AfricanAmericanArtist #WhitneyMuseumofAmericanArt #AmySherald #Sherald