Angela Pilgrim (b. 1991, New Jersey) is an artist whose work has been featured in publications such as Pressing Matters, The Creative Independent, and The Getty Archives. Her work is part of private and special collections at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, and the Newark Public Library. Pilgrim has exhibited in Black Histories, Black Futures at the Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Printmakers North American Print Biennial, and the Gadsden Museum of Art. She has also had solo exhibitions, including Rooted in Spirit at Sarasota Art Center and New Growth at The Center for Contemporary Art in 2024. In 2024, Pilgrim was a finalist in the printmaking category for the New Jersey Council of the Arts Fellowship Award. She serves as a board member of Frontline Arts (formerly the Printmaking Center of New Jersey) in Branchburg, New Jersey. Pilgrim has received several grants and awards, including the 2020 Newark Artist Accelerator Grant, a grant from Peters Valley School of Craft through The New Jersey Arts and Culture Renewal Fund of the Princeton Area Community Foundation, the Newark Arts Community Grant (NACG), and the 2023 and 2024 Creative Catalyst Grants from The City of Newark. Pilgrim divides her time between New Jersey and North Carolina.
Artist Statement
My work explores Black subjectivity through the Black female gaze, positioning the body as a convergence point for personal experience, cultural memory, and emotional complexity. Through portraiture, printmaking, pattern-making, and mixed media, I examine the constructions of beauty, spirituality, self-reflection, and the dynamics of desire, vulnerability, and power within Black diasporic identities. Drawing from histories of the African diaspora, I embrace hybridity—connecting inherited visual languages, contemporary material approaches, and the expressed knowledge of Black womanhood. This work documents lived experiences, creating intersections between diaspora, hybridity, and subjectivity. By centering the Black body as both subject and author, I cultivate new modes of seeing and being seen. Ultimately, this approach reframes their presence as self-defined, nuanced, and expansive—acknowledging its emotional and physical reality while challenging conventional representations.