Beyond Beauty

The different offshoots of Tadáskía’s work share a throughline in her affinity with drawing. Simultaneously markings and erasures, her traces in dry pastels, colored pencil, pen or nail polish create graphic tangles that evoke fluttering beings without turning them recognizable. The torn edges of her paper supports lend a sense of continuity, like an unbound…

Denise Stephanie Hewitt is a Brooklyn-born photographer and Gordon Parks Foundation Scholar. Beginning her career with a Marie Claire Magazine Cover during her apprenticeship at Red Hook Labs Photography Studio, Hewitt’s practice merges fashion, editorial, and documentary styles that center black and brown leaders, heritage, and beauty. Her portraits have graced Essence Magazine, Cultured Magazine...

Rugiyatou Ylva Jallow (b.1990 in Stockholm, Sweden), currently residing in Los Angeles, is a Swedish-Gambian visual artist known primarily for her work with acrylic and oil paint. Her bold self-portraits ensnare emotivity as each layer resonates the artist’s internal and outward strugglewith feeling distanced from the world around her as she tries to reconcile the…

Kelly Sinnapah Mary creates paintings, sculptures, and installations that draw upon the complex interrelationships between folklore, literature, inheritance, history, and the natural world. Sinnapah Mary’s work is rooted both materially and narratively in the artist’s immediate environment of the Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe, a French overseas department, and her own evolving understanding...

Renluka Maharaj was born in Trinidad and Tobago and works between Colorado, New York City andTrinidad. She attended the University of Colorado, Boulder where she earned her BFA, and her MFAat The School Of The Art Institute of Chicago in. She has received numerous awards includingMartha Kate Thomas Fund, the Presidential Scholarship at Anderson Ranch…

Portugal based sculptor Frida Baranek was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1961. She earned  an M.A. in Industrial Design at Central Saint Martins in London in 2012 and a B.A. in  Architecture at Santa Ursula’s University in Rio de Janeiro (1984).  In 2013, she was a recipient of a mid-career survey “Confrontos” at…

Lewinale Havette (b. 1990, Monrovia, Liberia) is a Liberian-born, Atlanta-based painter whose work reflects themes of African spirituality, migration, and fema identity. Influenced by her Liberian heritage and personal journey, Havette blen abstract painting with portraiture to depict stories of displacement, resilience, and cultural heritage. Her art often includes water deities and ancient proph...

Rajyashri Goody was born in 1990 in Pune, India. She lives and works between the Netherlands and India. Goody completed her BA in Sociology at Fergusson College in Pune in 2011, and an MA in Visual Anthropology at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, UK in 2013. In 2023, she…

Gio Swaby is a Bahamian interdisciplinary visual artist currently represented by Claire Oliver Gallery. She is known for her textile portraits that explore and celebrate Blackness.  With a multimedia practice that encompasses textile, installation, collage, performance and video, Swaby has exhibited in several galleries and museums including Claire Oliver Gallery in New York City, Die…

A’Driane Nieves was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1982. A visual artist and writer, A’Driane Nieves founded Tessera Arts Collective, an arts nonprofit, in 2018, and subsequently launched an art magazine. Nieves is a self-taught painter of over a decade. At the urging of her therapist, she began using painting as a form of…

Through her dynamic, celebratory quilted portraits of people of African decent , Bisa Butler (b. 1973, Orange, NJ) investigates the purposes and potential of portraiture within the Black historical narrative. Butler’s influences range widely from personal family scrapbooks to American folk traditions and AfriCOBRA philosophies. Although her finished works are made entirely of textiles, Butle...

Season 1 Reflections: Celebrating Voices and StoriesIn this special episode, I look back on the incredible journey of Beyond Beauty Season 1, highlighting the powerful conversations with Global women artists who shared their creative practices, personal stories, and bold visions for the future. From exploring themes of identity and resilience to celebrating the transformative power…

Photo credit Carolyne Teston Candice Hoyes is an artist of “chill-inducing range” (Vogue) across genre, medium and style. In 2024, Hoyes made her Lincoln Center composer debut in “Sadah Espii Proctor’s adrift” which is the first augmented reality installation in the Social Sculptures Project, a series of public art exhibitions. Upcoming debuts in 2024-25 season…

Photo: Mike Vitelli  Kennedy Yanko (b. 1988, St. Louis, MO) is a sculptor and installation artist working in found metal and paint skin. Yanko deploys her materials in ways that explore the limitations of optic vision, underlining the opportunities we miss when looking with eyes alone. Her methods reflect a dual abstract expressionist-surrealist approach that…

Photo Credit: Chez Awachie Ifeanyi Awachie is a Nigeria-born, Atlanta-raised writer, filmmaker, and scholar. She is a PhD Candidate in Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Her dissertation research is on transnational Nigerian women’s video installations. She is the writer and director of This Thing Is Not for You (2022), produced by…

Adebunmi Gbadebo is a multimedia artist who uses culturally and historically imbued materials to investigate the complexities between land, matter, and memory on various sites of slavery. Centering on deeply resonant materials like indigo dye, soil hand dug from plantations, and human Black hair collected throughout the diaspora. The resulting works tend to carry the…

Few artists understand metamorphosis as keenly as Saudi artist Manal AlDowayan. Long invested in interrogating the gender-biased customs that impact the condition of women in Saudi Arabia, AlDowayan is a sensitive yet critical witness to the cultural metamorphosis engulfing the Kingdom. Her practice, formally speaking, regularly shifts and evolves—from the assertive black and white photographic&#8...

Minne Atairu is a researcher and interdisciplinary artist interested in generative artificial intelligence. Utilizing AI-mediated processes, and materials, Minne’s artistic practice is dedicated to illuminating understudied gaps and absences within Black historical archives. Minne’s academic research focuses on Generative AI ,Art and Educational policy in urban K-12 Art classrooms. Minne has exhib...

Photo credit : Steph Murray Edra Soto is a Puerto-Rican born artist, curator, educator, and co-director of outdoor project space The Franklin. Soto instigates meaningful, relevant, and often difficult conversations surrounding socioeconomic and cultural oppression, erasure of history, and loss of cultural knowledge. Having grown up in Puerto Rico, and now immersed in her Chicago…

Photo Credits:  Solange dos Santos, Mariano Silva Maria Helena Pinto, founder of Dans’Artes, holds a Ph. D in  Arts Aesthetics, Science and Technology, Option: Dance and Theatre Studies, at the University of Paris 8 in France. Ms. Pinto is a choreographer, a dancer, a dance teacher, a contemporary dance field researcher in Mozambique and an artistic/cultural shows and...