Gherdai Hassell (1991-)
Gherdai Hassell’s (b 1991) art work celebrates the black female figure and themes, centering black cultural heritage through family histories. She works in a range of mediums including painting, sculpture, installation and collage.
Born in Bermuda, Hassell currently lives in the United Kingdom. Her work was featured in the 2021 Havana Biennial which she was the first Bermudian artist to be featured. In 2020, she was named one of the top five black artists to consider for one’s collection by Whitewalls magazine.
Hassle’s work is in both private and public collections and is featured in biennale worldwide—the United States, Bermuda, China, United Kingdom, Nigeria and Cuba.
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Jonathan Green (1955-)
A nationally and internationally renowned artist, Jonathan Green’s (b 1955) work has been exhibited worldwide in major art museums and galleries. He is known for depicting colorful images reflecting the beauty, history and place of Gullah Geechee culture.
Gullah people are descendants of enslaved West and Central Africans who were brought to the Southeast coastal states to work on plantations. These states were also known as the lowlands, encompassing North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia. Green grew up in the South Carolina lowlands in the small rural Gullah community of Garden’s Corner. His experience of growing up Gullah became the inspiration for the visual narrative in his art work.
In 1982, Green earned a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the first known artist of Gullah heritage to earn a degree in fine arts. Green has since won various awards recognizing his accomplishments in the fine arts, including the Pinckney Award from the South Carolinian House of Representatives in 1997, a History Makers Award in Fine Arts in 2002, and the NAACP’s Key of Life Award for his accomplishments in the visual arts in 2009.
His work is in numerous private and public collections throughout the world, including the Norton Museum of Art, the Afro-American Museum in Philadelphia, Gibbes Museum of Art, and the Mckissick Museum of the University of South Carolina.
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Nelson Stevens (1938-)
Born in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn in 1938, artist and educator, Nelson Stevens was one of the original five members of the Chicago based black arts group African Commune of Black Relevant Artists. The group was better known as AfriCOBRA, established in 1968 during the period of the Black Arts Movement (1965-1975).
Nelson along with the four other members of the AfiCorba—Jeff Donaldson, Wadsworth Jarrell, Jae Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu, and Gerald Williams—strived to create what they referred to as the “black aesthetic“ that would empower the black community.
Stevens’ figurative work focused on African-American culture, and jazz was an important influence on his work. He loved jazz and his complicated innovated approach to painting the black figure was rooted in the same black cultural brilliance that gave birth to jazz music and its innovations. He painted coming attractions for The Jazz Temple Club where he saw jazz masters such as John Coltrane perform. Stevens created album covers for jazz musicians Max Roach and Archie Shepp, who were also his friends. In 1956, while living in Utica, Ohio, he began painting murals on the walls of jazz clubs.
Stevens worked as a middle school teacher and later taught at Northern Illinois University. In 1972, Stevens taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Massachusetts. He helped develop the University’s African-American Studies program.
His work is in many private and public collections, including Schomburg Library and Research Center in New York City and the Chicago Institute of Art and the Smithsonian.
Nelson Stevens died this past weekend. He was eighty-four. His work and other accomplishments are important parts of African-American art history.
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Ariana Vaeth
Identity and place as a Black woman are key components in the realist narrative portraits and self portraits created by Baltimore native, Ariana Vaeth. Vaeth’s paintings documents her personal interactions with those who are important in her life. Hence, her visual documentations of her personal interactions give insight into the conscious of a young Black woman living in America today. Vaeth currently resides in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
A graduate from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Vaeth completed her BFA in 2017. She minored in Art History. She also participated in an exchange student program at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Since graduation in 2017, she has received honors and has been exhibiting her work in several institutions and galleries. She was awarded two fellowships: the 2017 Mary Nohl in the emerging artists category and, in 2018, she was the first recipient of gener8tor Art’s Fellowship (a 12-week program which provides a $15,000 grant, studio space and support to help the artist’s career). In 2022, she was one of the awardees of the Museum of Wisconsin Art’s Wisconsin Visual Art Achievement Awards.
Vaeth’s exhibition history include the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison, Wisconsin; Woman Made Gallery in Chicago; Miller Art Museum in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin; Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago; the Lynden Sculpture Garden in Milwaukee; the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee; the Trout Museum of Art in Appleton, Wisconsin; Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee; Buckham Gallery in Flint, Michigan; Charles Allis Museum In Milwaukee; and 5 Point Art Galleries & Studios in Milwaukee.
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Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017)
American painter, Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) worked in various media including photography, but he is best known for his life-size portraits of urban Black Americans. Before he became a painter, Hendricks was a photographer. However, throughout his career, he refused to be relegated to any one particular media and genre. He also painted landscapes, abstracts and still lifes. During the 1960s, Hendricks began painting the hipness of Black Americans’ style in his life-size portraits.
Hendricks was born and raised in North Philadelphia. His parents came to Philadelphia from Virginia during the Great Migration.
In 1967, he graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and, in 1970, he attended Yale University. He earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in 1972. While attending Yale, he focused mainly on photography, studying under noted photographer and photojournalist Walker Evans. Evans became known for documenting the effects of the Great Depression for the Farm Security Administration during the 1930s.
Between 1984 to 2002, Hendricks stopped painting portraits to primarily focus on photography and painting landscapes. However, he returned to doing portraits the last fifteen years of his life.
Several major museums have Hendricks’s work in their collection, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, National Gallery of Art, The National Portrait Gallery, the Tate Modern, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Hendricks’s work has been exhibited in several major museum art exhibitions, including “30 Americans,” a traveling exhibition of the Rubell family collection of art works by black artists, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s traveling exhibition, “Black Male” (this exhibition also helped launched the career of Kehinde Wiley), and Hendricks will be the first artist of color to have a solo exhibition at the Frick Collection in the museum’s eighty-seven year history: September 21, 2023 thru January 7, 2024.
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