Featured Artists
Celebrating Black Artists in Philadelphia & Beyond
If you are interested in engaging these artists for paid work, creative consulting, teaching artist gigs , press requests, or inventive ways to be in community, The Museum of Black Joy™ is happy to make introductions. Respectful Inquiries Only.
Follow @365Ken
Ken McFarlane
“I’m interested in Black triumph, not Black trauma. We have the power to shape our own collective image in our own authentic reality. We can amplify our voices using images of strength, dignity, pride, and success to drown out the cacophony of negative imagery surrounding the black body.”
Ken McFarlane is a West Philadelphia based documentary and portrait photographer. He has over 20 years experience in commercial, editorial, documentary photography and filmmaking. His current body of work focuses on producing visual and audio histories of Philadelphians in the present as a means of documentation to preserve collective memory while encouraging future generations to remember, re-examine and realize their own potential.
Follow @_oroori_
Charlyn Magdalene Griffith Oro
“As a Socially Engaged Interdisciplinary Artist, I am examining ways that the dead (ancestors) communicate with the living (progeny). My performance, objects & imagery are rituals for strengthening the potency of Black & Indigenous memory & imagination.”
Tryna Keep A Straight Face | 2021 | Digital Quilt
Follow @wit_lopez
Wit López
Wit López is a Brooklyn-bred and Philadelphia-based disabled, gender non-conforming/nonbinary trans mixed media creator, performer, and independent curator of African American and Boricua descent. With two visual artists for parents, creating has always been a part of López’s world. Their work combines the skills their parents taught them: fiber art, painting, collage, and photography. The work also contains elements of their formal training in theatre and classical music, including costuming, staging, and props.
Mz. ICAR
Mz. Icar is an anonymous interdisciplinary artist. Her name is a semordnilap and is a reversal of racism. Her colorful visual narratives celebrate Women, Global Blackness, and Play. She creates art in the form of murals, mixed-media, textile, and photography, often combining the mediums. Her work explores histories and imagines the best case scenario future from the perspective of women and people of color.
muthi reed
video and sound mixer
I assemble and approach things with an embodied Black Queer practice and praxis. I make work that remembers and imagines past present future sensibilities for a culture of care. With collaborators we listen and perform how we be and how we be together with intention through complex variations.
From the artist’s personal archive.
