Bisa Butler creates vibrant quilted portraits that celebrate African American life and history. Inspired by family scrapbooks, American folk traditions, and AfriCOBRA philosophies, she uses layered fabrics and quilting to create compositions with psychological depth. Her work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the High Museum of Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, among others. Butler has exhibited internationally and received the inaugural Faith in the Arts Award in 2024. She lives and works in New Jersey.

Chicago-based artist Yvette Mayorga transforms sugar-pink palettes and rococo-inspired textures into confectionary-based explorations of belonging, consumer culture, femme power, and the American Dream. As a first-generation Latinx, she draws from personal experience to inform her art. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Museo de Arte de Zapopan, and The Momentary at Crystal Bridges, as well as in group shows at LACMA, El Museo del Barrio, and beyond. Her art is held in major collections including the Smithsonian Renwick Gallery, Crystal Bridges, and the City of Chicago’s permanent public art collection at O’Hare International Airport. She is currently developing her largest public artwork to date for New York’s Times Square Arts.

Jeffrey Gibson is an interdisciplinary artist known for his bold synthesis of Indigenous and Western traditions across painting, installation, video, and performance. A citizen of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, he represented the United States at the 2024 Venice Biennale with his solo exhibition the space in which to place me, later shown at The Broad in Los Angeles. Gibson’s work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, and the National Gallery of Art. He is the 2025 Metropolitan Museum Genesis Facade Commission artist and lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he is artist-in-residence at Bard College.