Curator: Lydia Myrick

Lydia Myrick is a student at the University of Toledo studying in the visual arts field. At the moment, they work as a consulting curator at the Toledo Museum of Art. They are the President of the MADD Poets Society and have served in the community for many years. They have done many performances in the city of Toledo for different organizations. Lydia is an artist with a focus on fashion design. They have worked in the fashion field for six years and will continue to pursue it down the line.

Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) was born at Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, DC. Both her maternal and paternal grandparents were born enslaved, a family legacy that influenced her art. Catlett knew from a young age that she wanted to be an artist. After Carnegie Mellon rescinded her acceptance due to her race, she attended Howard University, graduating in 1935 with a BS in Art. In 1939, she began graduate studies in art at the University of Iowa, where she shifted her focus from painting to sculpture, and became the first woman to receive an MFA in sculpture from the University of Iowa. Her work often centered Black women. In 1946 Catlett moved to Mexico, where she was a guest artist at the printmaking collective, Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP, People's Graphic Arts Workshop). Inspired by the artistic activism within her circle of Mexican artists including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and David Siqueiros, Catlett continued creating images that showed the constant struggle and surprising strength of women, African Americans, those experiencing poverty, and disadvantaged social classes. From https://nmaahc.si.edu/latinx/elizabeth-catlett (National Museum of African American History and Culture)

Los Angeles native and New York based visual artist Kehinde Wiley (born 1977) has firmly situated himself within art history’s portrait painting tradition. As a contemporary descendent of a long line of portraitists, including Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, Ingres, among others, Wiley engages the signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic and the sublime in his representation of urban, Black and Brown men found throughout the world. […] Wiley’s larger than life figures disturb and interrupt tropes of portrait painting, often blurring the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation and the critical portrayal of masculinity and physicality as it pertains to the view of Black and brown young men. […] Without shying away from the complicated socio-political histories relevant to the world, Wiley’s figurative paintings and sculptures “quote historical sources and position young Black men within the field of power.” From https://kehindewiley.com/