Category: Black Excellence

https://www.tandafrancis.com/statment-new

Tanda Francis is a Brooklyn based artist with a primary focus of creating public art including monumental African heads. Her work addresses diasporic African people who are too often underrepresented in public art. She sees the rituals and customs rooted in a spiritual and ancestral past as a significant means of understanding and addressing the contemporary and future condition facing humanity. She uses her work to activate a dialog of universal origin to cross cultural barriers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonnie_Bunch

Lonnie Griffith Bunch III (born November 18, 1952) is an American educator and historian. Bunch is the fourteenth secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, the first African American and first historian to serve as head of the Smithsonian. He has spent most of his career as a history museum curator and administrator.

Bunch served as the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) from 2005 to 2019. He previously served as president and director of the Chicago History Museum (Chicago Historical Society) from 2000 to 2005.^[1] In the 1980s, he was the first curator at the California African American Museum, and then a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where, in the 1990s, he rose to head curatorial affairs. In 2020, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.^[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunde_Adebimpe

Babatunde Omoroga Adebimpe (pronunciation^ⓘ; born February 25, 1975) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and actor. He is best known as a founding member and co-lead vocalist of the Brooklyn-based band TV on the Radio, with whom he has recorded five studio albums. In April 2025, Adebimpe released his debut solo album, Thee Black Boltz.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Yolande_Daniels

J. Yolande Daniels (born 1962) is an American architect, designer and educator. She is a founding principal of studioSUMO, an architecture firm that speaks to socio-cultural landscapes through design.^[2]

Daniels came to find her voice as a black woman, the figure she often found “objectified or negated in the approach to architecture.”^[5] The highlights of her earlier works and personal research focus on the critiques on the techniques of power – gender, sexuality and race – and how these social structures shape the built environment in the form of architecture.^{[citation neede}

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernesta_G._Procope

Ernesta Gertrude Procope (née Forster) (2 September 1923 – 30 November 2021) was an American investment banker and insurance executive who was the head of the largest insurance agency run by a Black woman.^[1] Ernesta Gertrude Forster was born on Feb. 9, 1923, in Brooklyn and was raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant. As a child, she played the piano and performed once at Carnegie Hall.^[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mama_Thornton

Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton (December 11, 1926 – July 25, 1984),^[1] was an American singer and songwriter of blues and R&B.

The Encyclopedia of Pop, Rock and Soul described Thornton by saying: “Her booming voice, sometimes 200-pound frame, and exuberant stage manner had audiences stomping their feet and shouting encouragement in R&B theaters from coast to coast from the early 1950s on”.^[2]

https://www.wcvb.com/article/these-new-england-chefs-are-semifinalists-for-a-james-beard-award/63703946

On a trip to Comfort Kitchen, your palate is your passport. Partners Biplaw Rai and Kwasi Kwaa say the restaurant’s global food concept extends beyond the plates. Their goal is to not only tantalate taste buds, but also track the history behind their ingredients and celebrate spices and culture from the African diaspora. Kwaa has been listed as a semifinalist for a James Beard Award under the best chef in the Northeast category.

https://www.starchefs.com/on-the-ground/kwasi-kwaa

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/29/nx-s1-5415596/ngugi-wa-thiongo-kenyan-writer-dead

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan writer and novelist who critiqued colonial rule as well as the post-colonial Kenyan government, died Wednesday in a hospital in Buford, Georgia. He was 87 years old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Gaynor

Gloria Fowles (born September 7, 1943),^[1][2][3] known professionally as Gloria Gaynor, is an American singer, best known for the disco era hits “I Will Survive” (1978), “Let Me Know (I Have a Right)” (1979), “I Am What I Am” (1983), and her version of “Never Can Say Goodbye” (1974).^[4][5]