About BWMA

Image credits: Sonya Clark (top left), Sungi Mlengeya (top right),
Juana Valdez (bottom right), Frida Orupado (bottom center) and Billie Zangewa (corner right).

I grew up on the white male artist cannon—Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, the Ninja Turtles (Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Rafael), Chagall, and countless others. There are thousands of books, documents, films, and other media dedicated to immortalizing their contributions to the art world.
However, to find other visual artists who looked like me— a Black woman— were limiting. It was like searching through mountains of sugary cereal to find the prize. I ate and ate and ate more until at last finding what was needed to enrich my mind— researching close to 400 Black women visual artists from across the globe.
It had to be shared.
The purpose of the Black Women Make Art (BWMA) Database is to open up eyes and minds to the rich vastness of Black women visual artists from the past to present, working in all disciplines-- painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, photography, digital art, performance, etc. These Black women visual artists work diligently, incorporating the African diaspora in uniquely instrumental ways, influenced by daily life, ancestral heritage, travels, pattern, shape, everything around them. They remix traditional techniques or continue carrying indigenous methods using visual ideas of figurative exploration, abstraction, technology, science, history, and other subjects— their visions are multifaceted, endlessly inspiring.
It is now time to share these Black women’s stories, share their work in this one safe cyber space.
Thank you for reading, visiting, and spreading the word.

Writer Bio:

Janyce Denise Glasper is a Dayton, Ohio based multidisciplinary artist, writer, independent scholar, focusing on highlighting past and present underrepresented, marginalized voices through text. Her essays and short stories have appeared in ÆQAI Journal, Belt Magazine, RaceBaitr, Black Youth Project, and other publications. She received an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Art Writer Grant for Short Form Writing, a fiction fellowship from Roots, Wounds, & Words: Words of Resistance + Restoration, and additional support from Authors League Fund and Lampblack Direct Aid. 

           Currently, she is a contributing arts writer for the Philadelphia based publication artblog.