Amber Robles-Gordon

Amber Robles-Gordon is a DC-based multimedia visual artist with local and international exhibiting experience and a background in art education, and exhibition coordinating experience. Robles-Gordon has been commissioned to create temporary and permanent public art installations for numerous art fairs and agencies such as the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Northern Virginia Fine Arts Association (NVFAA), Humanities Council of Washington, D.C., Howard University, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and many more. Her solo exhibit debuting in May 2022 at Tinney Contemporary in Knoxville, Tennessee is entitled soveREIGNty: acts, forms, and measures of protest and resistance.

Robles-Gordon’s creations are visual representations of her hybridism: a fusion of her gender, ethnicity, cultural, and social experiences. Known for recontextualizing non-traditional materials, her assemblages, large sculptures, installations, and public artwork, in order to emphasize the essentialness of spirituality and temporality within life. The underpinnings of her creations are imbued to reveal racial injustice and the paradoxes within the imbalance of masculine and feminine energies within our society.

She received a Bachelor of Science, in Business Administration in 2005 at Trinity University, and subsequently a Master’s in Fine Arts (Painting) in 2011 from Howard University, Washington, DC.

Asha Elana Casey

Asha Elana Casey is a mixed media visual artist living and working in Mount Rainier, Maryland. Casey has been awarded the Anderson Ranch residency. Her exhibitions include shows at The George Washington University, The Katzen Arts Center, and the PG African American Museum. She earned her BFA from The Corcoran School of Art at George Washington University. Her body of work centers self-preservation and Godliness unique to African American culture.

Charles Philippe Jean-Pierre

Charles Philippe Jean-Pierre is a Haitian American artist groomed on Chicago’s south side. He is currently an adjunct professor at American University in Fine Arts. As U.S. State Department Art in Embassies Artist, his work is now in the permanent collection of the U.S. Embassy in Cotonou, Benin West Africa. He was a President Obama White House invitee for the role of art education in promoting national youth justice. Jean Pierre has participated in two Asian Pacific American Smithsonian exhibitions and has exhibited with the International Monetary Fund headquarters in Washington DC. His work has been highlighted by numerous media outlets including; The Washington Post, Ebony Magazine, Black Enterprise, NHK Japan, The Village Voice, BET, NBC, Netflix, and FOX.

Jean-Pierre has guest lectured at Stanford University regarding a positive vision of Haiti through the Mamelodi Project. He was named top five art educators by the District of Columbia and served as a creative communication instructor for Alvin Ailey Chicago. Jean-Pierre is the former National Arts Director for the Young and Powerful group and served on the board of the Diaspora of African Woman Network (DAWN). Jean Pierre holds a Master of Arts from Howard University and has created public art murals in South Africa, Panama, New York, Chicago, Washington, Istanbul, Montreal, Port-au-Prince, London, and Paris.

Chelle Barbour

A California native, Chelle Barbour is a multidisciplinary artist who’s practice includes assemblage, collage digital video, painting, photography, independent curating, and writing.  Today, Barbour’s collage work re-imagines the body of the black female through the lens of Afro-Surrealism. Barbour’s college portraiture conveys notions of allegory, desire, fantasy, femininity, fragility, tension, and the inherent complexity within the black female imaginary and is done on paper from Jacob Lawrence’s studio.

Barbour has participated in many group exhibitions and collaborations like the Black Lives Matter public art project at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery (2016); Simone Leigh’s International Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter project at the Project Row Houses in Houston, TX (2017), You IS Pretty! Surrealism and The Black Imaginary, a solo show at Band of Vices Gallery in Los Angeles (2018). Most recently Barbour exhibited her work at the Oakland Museum of Art and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art alongside Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald’s Obama Portraits in the exhibit Black American Portraiture.  Barbour’s artworks are also in the permanent collection of the California African American Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum photo archive, and in notable private collections. 

She has studied theatre, fine art, and design, and ultimately completed her education at UCLA and USC.

Chinedu Osuchukwu

A native Washingtonian, Chinedu Felix Osuchukwu spent his early years between Washington DC and Nigeria, the homeland of his parent. His works explore his Igbo-Washingtonian identity across different media including paintings, sculptures, and several murals. In 2016 he was selected to be a part of the DC Commission of the Arts “Washingtoniana Collection”. In 2017, he was appointed by Mayor Muriel Bowser as commissioner of the DC Commission of the Arts and Humanities. Osuchukwu is also an accomplished teacher and founder and CEO of an arts education and portfolio development program. He finds his strength in being active in the community through the church as a Eucharistic minister and by sharing his art. 

Chinedu has been featured in Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine, and his pieces have been in the personal collections of Peggy Cooper Cafritz and Bill and Melinda Gates. Most recently his artwork has been acquired by the Studio Museum of Harlem on permanent collection in New York City and he has been featured in the new Netflix Movie “Really Love”. Osuchukwu graduated from Duke Ellington School of the Arts and received his BFA from Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC, and a Masters in Fine Arts at Maryland Institute College of the Arts (MICA) in Baltimore. He currently resides in Washington DC with his two daughters, two sons, and wife. 

Marryam Moma

Marryam Moma is a Tanzanian-Nigerian visual artist who melds the palette of repurposed hand-cut pieces, paper, and media together into fresh, layered imagery with new associations. Deconstructing images, then re-integrating them to create something new, is an intuitive and ongoing visual experiment where color, texture, balance, shape, and space come into play.  Moma uses collage to explore the space where spirituality, gender, race and identity, and sexuality intersect. She celebrates the human form in her work and reinforces ideas about individuality and self-love. The clarity, discipline, and execution of Momas work reflect applied strengths from a formal education in architecture.

You will find Momas work in The Jealous Curator, the Microsoft permanent art collection, the Starbucks permanent art collection, Kai Lin Art Gallery, Zucot Gallery, MINT Gallery, Jus Lookin’ Gallery, Knowhere Art Gallery and exhibited at PRIZM, during Miami Art Basel 2021 and more. Moma is included in Artsy’s “22 Artists To Discover at New York’s September Fairs” after exhibiting with Dominique Gallery in New York, at The Future Fair, in September 2021. Marryam Moma currently lives, loves, and creates in Atlanta, GA.  She holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia.

E. Franklin Frazier

Edward Franklin Frazier was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1894 as one of five children of James H. Frazier, a bank messenger and Mary Clark Frazier, a homemaker. Upon his graduation from Colored High School in 1912, he was awarded the schools’ annual scholarship to Howard University. Frazier graduated from Howard in 1916 where he was a top scholar studying Latin, Greek, German and mathematics and an active student leader serving as two-time class president and member of the NAACP. After graduating from Howard, Frazier attended Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts where he studied sociology and earned a master’s degree in 1920. His thesis: New Currents of Thought Among the Colored People of America, represented the beginning of Frazier’s deep interest and thought-leadership on the topic of African-American history and culture.

In 1920, Frazier took a fellowship as a Russell Sage Foundation at the New York School of Social Work. He then joined Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia where he established what is now known as the Atlanta University School of Social Work. There he wrote an article title “The Pathology of Race Prejudice” where he explored the moral duality demonstrated by the capacity of otherwise kind and law-abiding white Americans to show revolting levels of cruelty toward black people. After facing strong criticism and even physical threats against his life, Frazier accepted a fellowship from the University of Chicago’s sociology department where his studies culminated in his earning a Ph.D. in 1931. After a five-year stint at Fisk University, Frazier returned to Howard University where he spent the balance of his career.

While at Howard, Frazier founded and led the D.C. chapter of the American Sociological Association and was ultimately elected as the national organization’s first black president in 1948 and received the Association’s MacIver award for his contributions in the field of sociology. Throughout his prolific career, Frazier published eight books, 89 articles and 18 chapters in books edited by others. In his seminal work, a Black Bourgeoisie, released in 1957, Frazier presented a critical evaluation of the upwardly mobile black middle class as a group whose identity shaped by respectability politics, conspicuous consumption and proximity to whiteness embraced a fundamental departure from black roots and was reflective of a collective, debilitating inferiority complex.

Frazier’s controversial insights shook the consciousness of black America and served as a prophetic precursor to the Black Liberation Movement which gained momentum a decade later in the late 60’s and 1970’s where racial self-determination, ancestral pride and centering the black perspective took hold as ideas critical to achieving true equality. In E. Franklin Frazier’s legacy, we celebrate the expression of unpopular, yet independent thinking which represents the lonely and perilous leadership required to move society forward.

Mary Church Terrell

Mary Church Terrell was born in Memphis, Tennessee to freed enslaved people of mixed-race ancestry. At the age of 8, Terrell was sent to Yellow Spring, Ohio to attend Antioch College Model School for four years before moving to Oberlin, Ohio to attend high school. When Terrell graduated high school in 1879, she began her college career at Oberlin College, the first college in the United States to accept African American and female students. At Oberlin, Terrell opted to take the four-year “gentleman’s course” instead of the two-year course typically reserved for women. She received her Bachelor's degree in Classics in 1884 and her Master’s degree in Education 1888, making her the first black woman in the United States (along with Anna J. Cooper) to earn a four year college degree and a master’s degree.

Terrell began her career as a teacher, first at Wiberforce University and then later as M Street School in Washington D.C. She took a leave of absence from teaching to travel and study in Europe for a few years where she became fluent in French, German and Italian. Upon returning to the U.S., Terrell shifted her focus from education to activism where she distinguished herself as a skilled organizer. In 1892, Terrell formed the Colored Women’s League with a goal of promoting unity, social progress and the best interests of the African American community.

The Colored Women’s League launched a training and kindergarten program, which ended up being so successful that it led to the appointment of Terrell to the District of Columbia Board of Education, becoming the first black woman in the United States to be appointed to a school board. In order to expand their reach and capacity, the Colored Women’s League joined forces with the Federation of Afro-American women to form the National Association of Colored Women whose motto was “Lifting as We Climb”. Terrell served as the group’s inaugural president, serving two terms. She became active in the suffragist movement and leveraged her access as one of a few black women allowed to attend meetings of the National American Women Suffrage Association, led by Susan B. Anthony, to urge unity and also call attention to the “double burden” that African-American women faced.

Terrell helped found Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Incorporated and worked successfully to integrate the American Association of University Women. Her activism was amplified by her prolific writing to promote the African-American Women’s Club movement. Her articles were broadly picked up by newspapers in major cities from Chicago, to Baltimore, to New York. In 1909, Terrell was one of two black women who were signatories to “the call” at the inaugural organizational meeting of the NAACP, making her a founding member. In Mary Church Terrell’s legacy, we celebrate the collective power of communities as a means to achieve lasting change.