Artist of the Month | Bob Clark Beyond

August’s Artist of the Month: Marcellina Akpojotor

A young artist whose work I admire immensely is Marcellina Akpojotor. She is from Nigeria and her art explores female empowerment and the roles of women in African society. She says she was drawn to art from an early age and spent a lot of her childhood observing her father, a sign maker in Lagos. After school, she would watch him working in his studio, learning calligraphy, painting, stenciling and drawing.

July’s Artist of the Month: Clotilde Jiménez

A visual artist I admire is Afro-Latino, Honolulu-born, Clotilde Jiménez, who grew up in North Philadelphia. He was raised in a tough neighborhood, but thanks to his mother, he used his artistic talent to move out of the city and enroll in college. Clotilde received his BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio in 2013 in printmaking. He completed an MFA in painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2018.

May’s Artist of the Month: Lauren Halsey

Lauren Halsey is one of the most exciting young artists working today. She produces standalone artworks in sculpture and mixed media, and site-specific installations, particularly in the South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles where her family has lived for several generations. She has the vision of an activist, and her work explores the relationship between architecture and community engagement in urban centers. Her sculptural environments and flat works combine imagery from contemporary life in Harlem and LA with ancient Egypt, outer space, technicolor, and funk.

November's Artist of the Month: Vaughn Spann

Vaughn Spann is one of the most talented artists working today, and he already is off to a great start in his artistic career despite being so young. His current work centers around paintings that seek to explore abstraction, figuration, and formalism in new ways and from different perspectives, and he’s currently been focusing on portraiture and mixed-material abstractions that have enchanted and inspired viewers. Vaughn was born in Florida in 1992 and grew up in Orange, New Jersey. He now lives and works in nearby Newark, and he received his Bachelors of Fine Arts degree from Rutgers University in 2014 and an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2018.

October’s Featured Artist: McArthur Binion

So many people have become captivated by the minimalist abstract paintings of McArthur Binion, but he is also an inspiration for me and countless others with the ways he’s dedicated to serving as an educator and mentor and seeks to lift up the next generation of Black artists. Though he found success later on in his career, he’s proven that all artists have the incredible ability to use their voices and platforms to give others a chance to be recognized as well, and he’s a great example of an individual who believes in opening up opportunities for others to rise. Binion has been working as an artist since the early 1970’s. After moving from Macon, Mississippi with his family at age 4, he grew up in Detroit, Michigan with his 10 brothers and sisters. He later enrolled at Wayne State University to study creative writing and poetry, but eventually dropped out to move to New York City. While he was there, Binion paid a visit to the Museum of Modern Art as part of his job at a publication. He was moved by the work of abstract expressionist artists and re-enrolled in school to study drawing. He went on to become one of the first Black artists to graduate from Cranbrook Academy of Art’s distinguished MFA program.

June's Featured Artist: Nathaniel Mary Quinn

Nathaniel Mary Quinn is an artist whose incredible work stays with you. Known for his captivating collage-like portraits, Quinn has created a distinct style that is a unique blend between mixed media drawings and paintings of fragmented figures that play with the viewer’s perception of identity. Quinn was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, where he grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes public housing project. It was here that he discovered an early passion for drawing, and when was in the ninth grade, he received a scholarship to study at Culver Academy boarding school in Indiana. While enrolled there, Quinn was told that his mother had passed away suddenly, and when returning home from school for Thanksgiving, he also found that the rest of his family had abandoned his childhood home with no explanation.

April's Featured Artist: Bisa Butler

Known for her stunning and colorful quilted portraits, Bisa Butler seamlessly blends a passion for storytelling with the dynamic medium of textiles to create vibrant works of art that document the Black experience. Butler was born in New Jersey in 1973, where she first learned sewing techniques passed down to her from her grandmother and mother. Her father was an immigrant from Ghana, and Butler drew inspiration from the colorful fabrics and garments of his homeland, as well as batiks from Nigeria, and prints from South Africa. After majoring in Fine Art and graduating cum laude from Howard University, she wanted to use art as a way to communicate and highlight the stories of people who far too often have been marginalized.

March’s Featured Artist: Candida Alvarez

March’s featured artist of the month is Brooklyn-born, Candida Alvarez. She is well-known for her bold and colorful creations such as the piece featured above. I became acquainted with her work through her involvement within Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago. The painting featured in the Clark Collection, titled “No Chickens,” is particularly special because we added it while it was still being made. Since 1998, Alvarez has been a tenured professor of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Alvarez works in a range of diverse mediums, including but not limited to sculpture, collage, and painting. Her work is often highly complex. It is full of pop, historical, and modern art references, while also incorporating world news and personal memories.

February's Featured Artist: Theaster Gates

My great friend, Theaster Gates, is a visual artist and urban planner who describes himself as “equal parts artist, bureaucrat, and hustler.” As an artist, Gates creates multimedia projects, installations, and performance art that confront issues of social justice, racial inequality, and poverty in the United States.

January's Featured Artist: Kerry James Marshall

Untitled (Pen), 1998. C-Print. Gallerist: Kavi Gupta, Chicago Kerry James Marshall was born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama before his family moved to South Central Los Angeles where he was raised in the Watts neighborhood—known for the riots in 1965 that were a response to police brutality. Marshall witnessed the riots and grew up surrounded by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s, which impacted him deeply and shaped his perspective as an artist.

December's Featured Artist: Amoako Boafo

Teju, 2019. Oil on Canvas. Gallerist: Mariane Ibrahim, Chicago. Ghanian artist Amoako Boafo resides between Vienna, Austria, where he has lived since 2014, and Accra, Ghana where he was born in 1984. He never imagined that his childhood love for painting would turn into a career as an artist. After losing his father when he was very young, he was raised solely by his mother, who worked as a cook. As a child, he taught himself to paint at home while his mother was away at work.

November's Featured Artist: Zanele Muholi

“I’m reclaiming photography as a black female being. I’m calling myself a visual activist, whether I am included in a show or not, whether I am published or not. That’s my stance as a person, before anything else, before my sexuality and gender, because photography doesn’t have a gender.” — Zanele Muholi

October's Featured Artist: Sanford Biggers

This month’s featured artist, Sanford Biggers, is a New York City-based multidisciplinary artist who defies categorization. There is hardly a medium that Biggers has neglected to experiment with, boasting an oeuvre that includes sculpture, painting, mixed media, performance art, conceptual art, and film. Mr. Biggers, however, has not limited himself to the visual arts. As the lead and keyboardist of the multimedia concept band Moon Medicin, he also operates as the creative director, putting together performances in collaboration with other musicians featuring backdrop images of “sci-fi, punk, sacred geometry, coded symbology, film noir, minstrels, world politics, and ceremonial dance.” Born and raised in Los Angeles, Biggers received his master’s from the Art Institute of Chicago with a specialization in painting, before landing in New York City in 1999 to complete an artist residency at Harlem’s Studio Museum. Place is an important notion in his work, as he draws from his experiences of growing up in Los Angeles, teaching English in Japan, and spending a large part of his adult life in New York City. Biggers’ work in general is an act of “material storytelling” that employs motifs related to his concerns with the Black experience, violence in America, Buddhism, and the narrativization of the cultural and political history of the United States.

December’s Artist of the Month: Jerrell Gibbs

A provocative artist whose work I admire is Jerrell Gibbs. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, he was self-taught. Despite never completing a bachelor’s degree, he earned a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2020. When he was still a student, four of his paintings were chosen to be part of the 2019 exhibition “Blackface: A Reclamation of Beauty, Power, and Narrative” at Galerie Myrtis. This was a significant turning point in his career. His first solo exhibition was Sounds of Color: Recorded Memories at the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery in 2021.