Contemporary Black Artists and Public Art

Henry McGee (AB 1974, magna cum laude, MBA 1979) is the former President of HBO Home Entertainment, the digital and DVD program distribution division of Home Box Office. He joined the HBS faculty in 2013 and he co-designed and teaches the courses Arts and Cultural Entrepreneurship, and Scaling Minority Businesses. McGee serves as faculty co-advisor for the Entertainment & Media Club, the Black Investment Club, and the African American Student Union; he is a two-time recipient of the Robert F. Greenhill Award for Outstanding Service to the HBS Community. McGee has extensive corporate and nonprofit board experience. He serves as chair of the Governance, Sustainability, and Corporate Responsibility Committee of AmerisourceBergen. In 2018, the National Association of Corporate Directors named McGee to the Directorship 100, the organization’s annual recognition of the country’s most influential boardroom members. He has served as president of both the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater Foundation, the nation’s largest modern dance organization, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. He has also been a board member of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Sundance Institute, and The Public Theater.

Raymond J. McGuire (AB, cum laude, 1979; MBA 1983; JD 1984) is the former Vice Chairman of Citi and Chairman of the Banking, Capital Markets and Advisory business. For thirteen years, McGuire was Citi’s Global Head of Corporate and Investment Banking. McGuire has advised on transactions valued at over $750 billion. He formerly was the Global Co-Head of Mergers & Acquisitions at Morgan Stanley; Managing Director in the Mergers & Acquisitions Group of Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc.; and one of the original members of the Wasserstein Perella & Co. McGuire has done extensive board service on both corporate and not-for-profit boards. He presently serves on the boards of the Hess Corporation, Vornado Realty Trust, and KKR & Co.,Inc. In addition, he serves on the boards of the American Museum of Natural History, the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums, the Hotchkiss School, the New York City Police Foundation, the New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the New York Public Library (Vice Chairman), the Regional Plan Association (Chairman), the Studio Museum in Harlem (Chairman), the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the WNET Group. 
 

Thaddeus Mosley is a Pittsburgh-based, self-taught artist whose monumental sculptures are crafted with the felled trees of Pittsburgh’s urban canopy, via the city’s Forestry Division. Using only a mallet and chisel, Mosley reworks salvaged timber into biomorphic forms. These “sculptural improvisations,” as he calls them, take cues from the modernist traditions of jazz. “The only way you can really achieve something is if you’re not working so much from a pattern. That’s also the essence of good jazz,” Mosley says of his method. Mosley had his first Karma solo exhibition in 2020, and was commissioned for the 2020 edition of Frieze Sculpture at Rockefeller Center, New York. Mosley is the recipient of the 2022 Isamu Noguchi Award. His work is held in a number of public collections, including the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine. His traveling solo exhibition, Forest, will open at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, in May 2023. Mosley is represented by Karma.

Yinka Shonibare CBE RA was born in London and moved to Lagos, Nigeria, at the age of three. He returned to the UK to study Fine Art at Byam Shaw School of Art, London, and Goldsmiths College, London, where he received his Masters in Fine Art. Shonibare’s interdisciplinary practice explores colonialism and postcolonialism within the context of globalization. Through examining race, class, and the construction of cultural identity, Shonibare’s works comment on the tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe, and their respective economic and political histories. In 2004, he was nominated for the Turner Prize and in 2010, his first public art commission, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, was displayed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. His work is included in notable museum collections including the Tate, London; the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; the Moderna Museet/Modern Art Museum, Stockholm; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. He is represented by James Cohan, New York. 

Carrie Mae Weems recently created, through her nonprofit organization Social Studies 101, RESIST COVID / TAKE 6!—a public art campaign in response to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities and activated by museums across the nation and the globe. Weems has received a multitude of awards, grants, and fellowships including the MacArthur Award and the National Endowment of the Arts. Major solo exhibitions include Carrie Mae Weems: The Museum Series, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2014); and Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2013–14. Her work is in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Four of Weems’s works, including two from the Kitchen Table Series (1990) and one from The Louisiana Project (2003), are in the Schwartz Art Collection  at Harvard Business School. She is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery and is currently the Artist in Residence at Syracuse University.