Black Queer Role Models: Painting for Unity and Exceptional Female Musicians
A portrait that smiles back — a smile that lifts the heart each time your gaze meets hers. This work, part of the ongoing series Black Queer Role Models, does more than capture likeness; it offers recognition, honouring lives too often unrecorded in the grand narrative of art history.
It is vital — now more than ever — that these cultural icons, particularly those from Black queer communities, find their rightful place on gallery walls, in private collections, and in the public imagination. For too long, these lives and legacies have been overlooked, their influence omitted from the canon. To collect such works is not only to invest in fine art, but to actively participate in a necessary act of cultural redress — amplifying stories that must be seen, felt, and understood by generations to come.
This particular portrait holds personal resonance, painted in the artist’s favoured medium of oil, with every brushstroke a tender act of tribute. It depicts Nina Simone, a woman of towering talent and immense complexity — bisexual, Black, brilliant. Her struggles with mental health, abusive relationships, and the weight of being a truth-teller in a divided world shaped her music and her life. Each note she sang was an offering; each moment of her public life, a defiant act of presence.
Art, at its best, elevates the unseen and insists on recognition. To own this work — or to support its presence in institutional collections — is to align with that principle, to become part of a growing movement of conscious collectors and philanthropic patrons using their influence to rewrite the story of who gets remembered.
This portrait is not simply a painting; it is a window into a life, a smile that holds both joy and resistance, and an invitation to see — truly see — a woman who shaped the sound of freedom.
