Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a contemporary British painter and 2013 Turner Prize finalist. Though she predominantly depicts a black cast of characters, her oil paintings focus on fictional figures that exist outside of specific times and places. As a black artist of Ghanian descent, Yiadom-Boakye has said that “race is something that I can completely manipulate or reinvent or use as I want to,” and notes that the material and historical aspects of paint as essential to her practice. Her works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. among others.

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