“Jean-Michel Basquiat: How A Street Artist Transcended Pop Art.” YouTube, uploaded by JakeZeeman, 3 May 2020.

An American artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican roots. He achieved his fame as part of a graffiti duo called SAMO. Basquiat used social commentary in his artworks as a tool for introspection and for identifying with his experiences in the black community, and attacks on power structures and systems of racism. Untitled sold at Sotheby’s in 2017 for $110.5 million, becoming one of the most expensive paintings ever purchased.

An American portrait painter based in New York City, known for his highly naturalistic paintings of African Americans. He often references Old Masters paintings for the pose of a figure, and his work blurs the line between the traditional and the contemporary. In 2017 he was commissioned to paint a portrait of former President Barack Obama for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.

Kehinde Wiley at his Brooklyn studio with his oil “Judith Beheading Holofernes” (2012). Credit: Chad Batka for The New York Times.

Art21. “Kara Walker: Starting Out | Art21 Extended Play.” YouTube, uploaded by Art21, 25 July 2014.

Best known for exploring the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality through her iconic silhouetted figures. Walker exploded onto the contemporary art scene with an exhibit that upended the traditionally proper Victorian medium of the silhouette. Painting directly onto the walls of the gallery, she created a space in which unruly cut-paper characters, both black and white, fornicate and inflict violence on one another.

An American photographer, musician, writer, and film director who became prominent in U.S. photojournalism from the 1940s through the 1970s, particularly on issues of civil rights, poverty, and African American life. He is best remembered for his photographs of poor Americans in the 1940s, his photo essays for Life magazine, and as the director of the 1971 film Shaft.

Gordon Parks, Self-Portrait, 1948.

Gordon Parks, American Gothic (Ella Watson), 1942.

Girgenti, Maria. “Portrait of the Artist: Nina Chanel Abney.” art.newcity.com, 18 July 2015.

Describes her art as “easy to swallow, hard to digest.” The Chicago native, now based in New York, paints in a graphic and disjointed style with a bold, colorful palette, exploring race, politics, celebrity, sex, and gender through a frenetic 21st-century lens. Her work is held in collections around the world, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Rubell Family Collection, the Bronx Museum, and the Burger Collection in Hong Kong.

A Los Angeles native working in New York, Sanford Biggers creates interdisciplinary work spanning installation, sculpture, drawing, performance, video, and music, exploring everything from Buddhism to African American identity to art history. He describes the practice as code-switching: layers of history and politics alongside inside jokes and black humor that reward the work of digging in.

Credit: Lexie Moreland / WWD.

Sam Gilliam in his studio in the 1980s. Photo: Anthony Barboza / Getty Images.

“Hard At Work At 84, Artist Sam Gilliam Has Never Felt Better.” NPR Morning Edition, 30 August 2018.

One of the great innovators in postwar American painting. He emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid-1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of Color School painting.