Represented Artists
These represented artists form the core of BAIA's gallery program and are distinct from the broader range of works offered through the online catalog. BAIA supports their careers and legacies through sustained partnerships that include solo and group exhibitions, national art fairs, institutional placements, museum acquisitions, commissions, scholarship, publications, media, and long-term collector development.
For collectors, museums, curators, scholars, and art advisors, this page is the primary place to explore these practices. Representation is selective and relationship-driven, grounded in each artist's cultural and historical significance and in building the exhibitions, collections, scholarship, and lasting record through which the work will be understood and valued.
Traci Mims is an Atlanta-based multidisciplinary artist and printmaker working within the tradition of socially engaged Black image-making. Across printmaking, drawing, painting, quilting, and mixed media, she draws on social realism, cultural allegory, and personal history to examine Black identity, Black womanhood, family, historical memory, resilience, and resistance. Her direct yet layered images connect everyday experience to larger cultural and political forces.
Full biography
Mims earned a B.A. in Visual Art from Florida A&M University and an M.F.A. in Graphics and Printmaking from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. She received the 2023 Atlanta Biennial McCain Award for Printmaking. BAIA has presented her work at the SCOPE Art Show and organized Give Us the Sun, her first solo exhibition in Atlanta. Her work Middle Passage was included in BAIA's 2026 gift to the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum. Through exclusive representation, BAIA is expanding the institutional, scholarly, and collector context around a practice deserving sustained national recognition.
Najee Dorsey is an Arkansas-born, Atlanta-based multidisciplinary artist who combines photographic elements, found textures, symbolic references, digital collage, painting, and assemblage to build layered narratives of Black Southern life. In bodies of work including Resistance, Crossroads, Lived Interiors, and Return to Eden, he considers migration, labor, family, music, political struggle, and ancestral presence. Vintage and contemporary imagery meet imagined environments to recover histories often left outside the dominant record, guided by his principle, “Stories untold are stories forgotten.”
Full biography
Dorsey's work has been presented by The Columbus Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Houston Museum of African American Culture, The Bo Bartlett Center, and the New York Academy of Art. His work is also held in numerous public, corporate, and private collections.
Lynthia Edwards is a Charlotte, North Carolina-based multidisciplinary artist whose collage practice explores Black girlhood, Southern memory, faith, play, and the emotional complexities of growing up in rural Alabama. Drawing from personal experience and cultural memory, she combines acrylic, graphite, hand-painted papers, vintage textiles, clothing, packaging, and other found materials to create layered portraits of identity, resilience, and joy.
Full biography
Born in Alexander City, Alabama, Edwards studied graphic design at the Art Institute of Atlanta and earned degrees in art education from Auburn University at Montgomery and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She received the 2021 Alabama State Council for the Arts Fellowship. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, including that of the late Congressman John Lewis.
April W. Harrison is a Greenville, South Carolina-based mixed-media artist and award-winning illustrator whose richly layered figurative work explores faith, family, memory, healing, and spiritual inheritance. She works with acrylic, watercolor, pencil, collage, specialty papers, and found materials to create tactile, quilt-like compositions inspired by her grandmothers' quilts and grounded in traditions of Black storytelling.
Full biography
Harrison's work has been exhibited at the Morris Museum of Art, Hampton University Museum, Greenville County Museum of Art, and the Mint Museum. Her career as a children's book illustrator has earned her the Coretta Scott King-John Steptoe New Talent Illustrator Award and two Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honors.
Cedric Michael Cox is a Cincinnati-based painter and muralist whose vibrant compositions move between surrealism and representational abstraction. Inspired by music, architecture, art history, and the natural world, he brings geometric structures, curving forms, cityscapes, landscapes, and floral motifs together in rhythmic environments charged with color, movement, and emotion.
Full biography
Cox earned a B.F.A. in Painting from the University of Cincinnati and studied at the Glasgow School of Art. His work has been exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Center, Taft Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, Dayton Art Institute, Five Myles Gallery, and Museum of Science and Industry. His public commissions include major projects for Cincinnati Children's Hospital, Dayton Metro Library, and the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden.
Jamele Wright Sr. is an Atlanta-based multidisciplinary artist whose tactile abstractions explore the Black American vernacular, the Great Migration, family, spirituality, and the cultural connections between Africa and the American South. Working with Georgia red clay, Dutch wax cloth, found materials, and mixed media, Wright draws on the sampling language of Hip Hop to create layered works shaped by memory, movement, and transformation.
Full biography
Wright earned a B.A. in Art History from Georgia State University and an M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in New York. His work has been presented at the Albany Museum of Art and the Gibbes Museum of Art and is held in the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art.
Akinola Taoheed Olaitan is a multidisciplinary artist, born in Lagos, Nigeria. He studies Art Education in a prestigious college in his mother land " University of Nigeria (NSUKKA)" where he majored as a painter. Akinola started drawing and painting at early stage of his life. He underwent training with Odeyemi Oluwaseun Ezekiel between 2013 to enhance his skills. He also participated in a training program at the Universal Studios of Art under Master Abiodun Olaku In the year 2019/2020.
Full biography
His work is a constant search for the best way to interpret the ideas he has about his Genesis, the world he lives in, and the spirit of age. The use of Purple patch-like-scars on the skin on his subjects depicts Bravery, Spirituality, and Wealth as well as his day-to-day struggles. Each piece he created is simultaneously an extension from his past; where he comes from and what he has learned, as well a preview of the future. Akinola work has been featured in Marika magazine, as well as some widely recognized newsletter and channels the likes of: Channel TV, Thisday, Business day and The Guardian newspaper He had participated in many group exhibitions; Four Virtual international group Exhibition "Art is Wealth" fully sponsored by Vivid Exclusive Art Gallery (2021), "What They Didn't Teach us In Art school" Explore on Artsy, International group exhibition in Pakistan 2022, October, 2022 Freedom Non-negotiable group Art Exhibition Explore on Artsy, Women Techster sponsored by Tech4dev (2021), The 40 Artist exhibit sponsored by Art in medicine, Athens Open Art which was held physically in Artnumber23 gallery, Greece. (2022).July, 2022 It's All In Me group exhibition, Curated by Wunika at Affinity art gallery, Lagos, Nigeria. His works have been collected in both local and international collections.
Jamaal Barber was born in VA and raised in Littleton, NC. At a young age, he was fascinated by the illustrations in children's books and the colorful images in comic books. He started drawing on the back of his tests in elementary school and was soon drawing on any material that he could find. He finally decided to become an artist after reading about the life of Romare Bearden in high school. In 2003, Jamaal graduated with a BA in Communication Arts from East Carolina University.
Full biography
While in school he won the 2002 JOSA award for drawing and 1st Place in Graphic Design for the Rebel Magazine, the annual ECU student art awards magazine. In 2004, Jamaal moved to Atlanta where he now resides with his wife and two children. He has worked doing graphic design work for Iota Phi Theta Fraternity, Inc. and Spoken Magazine. His fine art painting has been displayed at the Art on 5 and with the Mano-a- Mano art show. In 2013 after seeing a screen printing demo at a local art store, Barber started experimenting with printmaking and has made it his focus. His prints have been included in the Atlanta Printmaker Studio Biennial show and the Hudgens Center For The Arts.
Hailing from Augusta, GA and currently based in Atlanta, Dontanarious Kelly is a contemporary artist and storyteller whose bodies of work explore memory, sanctuary, identity, introversion, and emotional intelligence through immersive visual worlds. Working under the studio name Fable of Don, Kelly creates paintings and sculptural narratives that move between mythology, symbolism, and lived experience.
Full biography
His practice often delves into the construction of symbolic spaces — gardens, gates, figures, and sanctuaries that function as emotional architecture rather than literal environments. Through layered textures, atmospheric color, and recurring motifs of protection, transformation, and stillness, his work considers themes of vulnerability, contemplation, emotional preservation, and the quiet tension between isolation and connection. Works such as Secludovert examine introversion not as absence or withdrawal, but as a space of power, self-possession, and reflection.
Raised in the American South, Kelly’s worldview was shaped less by direct regional imagery and more by the slowness, intentionality, moral grounding, and interpersonal rhythms that defined his upbringing. Those underlying values — patience, presence, reverence, restraint, and emotional weight — quietly inform the ethos of the work and the worlds it inhabits.
Each body of work is approached as part of a larger unfolding body, where softness, beauty, restraint, and quiet power are explored as intentional forces rather than passive states.
