The industry and public alike have debated the disproportionately low number of black artists represented in museums. This has prompted us to think about compiling a list of the top 10 internationally recognised Black visual artists. Narrowing the list was not difficult, and several deserving names didn’t make it onto the final 10. The Venice Biennale has had a strong presence for people of colour, including the top award, the coveted Golden Lion, going to several artists. Here is our list, the first of many celebrating diversity in the visual arts!
10. Sonia Boyce RA
Over four decades, Sonia Boyce OBE RA has developed a powerfully original practice that transcends boundaries as an interdisciplinary artist and academic working across film, photography, print, sound and installation. Boyce creates immersive and experiential spaces that explore themes of play, disruption and revelation in which the audience becomes active participants. Boyce’s practice today is focused on questions of artistic authorship and cultural difference. She continues to break new ground through her commitment to questioning the production and reception of unexpected gestures, with an underlying interest in the intersection of personal and political subjectivities. In 2022, Boyce presented ‘Feeling Her Way’, commissioned for the British Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation.
9. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s oil paintings focus on fictional figures that exist outside of specific times and places. Her compositions are “suggestions of people…They don’t share our concerns or anxieties. They are somewhere else altogether.” This lack of fixed narrative leaves her work open to the projected imagination of the viewer. Yiadom-Boakye’s intriguing work appear traditional but are in fact much more innovative. Her portraits of imaginary people use invented pre-histories and raise pertinent questions about how we read pictures in general, particularly with regard to black subjects. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2013.
8. Michael Armitage
Michael Armitage’s paintings weave multiple narratives that are drawn from historical and current news media, internet gossip, and his ongoing recollections of Kenya, his country of birth. Living and working between Indonesia and Nairobi, Armitage paints with oil on Lubugo, a traditional bark cloth from Uganda, which is beaten over days, creating a natural material which, when stretched taut, has occasional holes and coarse indents. As noted by the artist, the use of Lubugo is at once an attempt to locate and destabilise the subject of his paintings.
7. Mickalene Thomas
Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971, Camden, New Jersey) is known for her elaborate paintings adorned with rhinestones, enamel and colourful acrylics. Thomas introduces a complex vision of what it means to be a woman and expands common definitions of beauty. Her work stems from her long study of art history and the classical genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life.
6. Yinka Shonibare
Over the past decade, Yinka Shonibare MBE has become well known for his exploration of colonialism and postcolonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation. Working in painting, sculpture, photography, film and performance, Shonibare’s work examines race, class and the construction of cultural identity through sharp political commentary of the tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe and their respective economic and political histories. Having described himself as a postcolonial hybrid, Shonibare uses wry citations of Western art history and literature to question the validity of contemporary cultural and national identities.
5. Isaac Julien
Isaac Julien was born in 1960 in London, where he currently lives and works. While studying painting and fine art film at St Martin’s School of Art from which he graduated in 1984, Isaac Julien co-founded ‘Sankofa Film and Video Collective’ in which he was active from 1983–1992. He was also a founding member of Normal Films in 1991.
Julien was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001 for his film The Long Road to Mazatlán (1999)
4. Kara Walker
Often provocative and humorous, Kara Walker’s work explores the tensions and power plays of racial and gender relations. Walker’s work engages with historical narratives, particularly the experience of African Americans in the antebellum American South, and the ways in which these stories have been suppressed, distorted and falsified.
3. El Anatsui
El Anatsui is one of the most exciting contemporary visual artists of our time. Emerging from the vibrant post-independence art movements of the 1960s and ’70s West Africa. El Anatsui has addressed a vast range of social, political and historical concerns and embraced an equally diverse range of media and processes. Making use of tools as diverse as chainsaws, welding torches and power tools as well as developing a range of processes such as the intricate and meditative ‘sewing’ process of his later work, he has shaped found materials that range from cassava graters, railway sleepers, driftwood, iron nails and obituary printing plates, aluminium bottle-tops, etc. El Anatsui was awarded the Golden Lion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
2. Steve McQueen
Steve McQueen is an English filmmaker and video artist. McQueen became interested in film while a student at Goldsmiths College, London. From his first major film, Bear (1993), exhibited at the Royal College of Art in 1994, McQueen achieved swift success on an international stage with a body of formally very distinctive work. His black-and-white silent films, in which he often appears, are characterised by their visual economy and by the highly controlled environment in which they are projected. He is the first black filmmaker to win an Academy Award for Best Picture for his 2013 film 12 Years a Slave, and he is also a former winner of the Turner Prize.
1. Chris Ofili
Chris Ofili is an English painter. He studied in London at Chelsea School of Art (1988–91) and the Royal College of Art (1991–3). In 1992, he was awarded a travelling scholarship to Zimbabwe, an experience that profoundly influenced his approach to painting. His works are vibrant, technically complex and meticulously executed, consisting of layers of paint, resin, glitter and collage. Ofili often incorporated elephant dung into his work. Lumps are attached to the canvas directly or used to support the paintings when displayed in the gallery space. His paintings are concerned with issues of black identity and experience, and frequently employ racial stereotypes in order to challenge them.