D. Jabari Anderson is a founding member of Otabenga Jones & Associates and an artist who creates mixed media drawings on handmade paper. He is a graduate of Texas Southern University and has exhibited extensively in and around Houston.

Otabenga Jones & Associates is a Houston-based educational art organization founded in 2002 by artist and educator Otabenga Jones in collaboration with members Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Jamal Cyrus, Kenya Evans and Robert A. Pruitt, among others. The group’s pedagogical mission—manifested in the form of actions, writings and installations—is threefold: to underscore the challenging intricacies of representation across the African Diaspora; to establish a cross generational progression emanating from the transatlantic experience; and, as they write in their mission statement, quoting from Sam Greenlee’s 1969 classic satirical novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door, “to mess wit’ whitey.”

Jamal Cyrus is a visual artist who lives and works in Houston. He received his BFA from the University of Houston in 2004 and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. In 2005 he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He was an Artist in Residence at Artpace San Antonio and has won several awards, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Artadia Houston Award and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. He has participated in national and international exhibitions, including Day for Night, the 2006 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and shows at the Station Museum in Houston; The Office Baroque Gallery in Antwerp; the Menil Collection in Houston; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington DC; The California African American Museum, Los Angeles; The Kitchen in New York; the Museum of London Docklands, London; The New Museum, New York; The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; and the Studio Museum, Harlem. His work has been reviewed in Artlies, The Houston Chronicle, Houston Magazine, and The New York Times.

A native of North Carolina, Kenya Evans works in the media of painting, drawing, sculpture, and audio installations. He is a founding member of Otabenga Jones & Associates, with whom he works regularly on exhibitions, radio broadcasts, and curatorial projects.

Robert Pruitt (b. 1975) is a Native of Houston Texas. He earned his BA from Texas Southern University and a MFAfrom the University of Texas in Austin, with a focus on painting and drawing. Pruitt works in a variety of materials but his practice is chiefly centered on rendering portraits of the human body, specifically the black body. He projects onto these bodies a juxtaposing series of experiences and material references, denoting a diverse and radical black experience and future. Although Pruitt leads a steady solo practice he also pursues an active collaborative impulse. He is a founding member of a number of artist groups including Otabenga Jones & Associates, MF Problem (with his girlfriend and artist Autumn Knight) and a loose collective of local Houston artists sometimes working under the name STACKS collective. He is Co-Director of Houston Open Studio Tours.

He has exhibited his work locally, nationally and internationally, notably at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum of Art, the 2006 Whitney Biennial and most recently a solo exhibition at the Studio Museum of Harlem.