Graphic artists African-American Art
Minnie Eva Evans was an African American artist who worked in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s. Evans used different types of media in her work such as oils and graphite, but started with using wax and crayon. She was inspired to start drawing due to visions and dreams that she had all throughout her life, starting when she was a young girl. She is known as a southern folk artist and outsider artist as well as a surrealist and visionary artist.
Nellie Mae Rowe was an African-American artist from Fayette County, Georgia. Although she is best known today for her colorful works on paper, Rowe worked across mediums, creating drawings, collages, altered photographs, hand-sewn dolls, home installations and sculptural environments. She was said to have an "instinctive understanding of the relation between color and form." Her work focuses on race, gender, domesticity, African-American folklore, and spiritual traditions.
Henry Speller was an American artist and blues musician working in Memphis, Tennessee. His style of drawing and painting is characterized by ornate, colorful, intimidating figures which he likened to "characters from Dallas".
Speller is best known for his drawings of detailed houses, modes of transportation (trains, cars, riverboats, and planes), and adorned figures, particularly women. His figures are often white women with angular faces, round breasts made of concentric circles, and exposed genitals with common southern white names, like "Katie Mae" and "Lisa Jean". Through these characters, Speller creates a metaphor for mobility and freedom in the Jim Crow South, which white women, and even some black women, can attain, but are inaccessible to him.
