Dindga McCannon is a Harlem artist who works in virtually every medium of interest to her.  As a young girl, McCannon’s mother pressed her to pursue an education in fashion design rather than fine art.   In the early to mid-1960s, while teaching arts and crafts to children for the Red Cross, her supervisor suggested she contact a group of professional artists known as the 20th Century Art Creators (now known as the Weusi Artists Collective).  In 1966, she exhibited with the Art Creators in the First Annual Harlem Outdoor Show.  She met Faith Ringgold in 1970, and contributed to several murals.  In 1971, she was a founding member of the Where We At, Black Women Artists, Inc., which was a showcase for black women artists.  This group was reacting to neglect from black male artists and white feminist artists.  McCannon, Ringgold, Kay Brown and several others organized an exhibition in 1971 at the Acts of Art Gallery, the Greenwich Village gallery directed by Nigel L. Jackson, who also hosted the Rebuttal To Whitney Museum Exhibition the same year.  McCannon had a solo exhibition there earlier that year.

McCannon’s work was included in two recent exhibitions paying homage to these early shows:  Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971, Hunter College Art Galleries and We Wanted a Revolution, Black Radical Women 1965-85, Brooklyn Museum.

McCannon opened a boutique on the Lower East Side in the 1960s, making and selling African-inspired clothing and jewelry.  She later began incorporating her skills with fabric design in her fine art, adding elements of collage to paintings, as seen in this work, Festival in Harlem.  Early in her career, she did some informal work at Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop and later studied privately with Charles Alston, Richard Mayhew, and Al Hollingsworth.

Her work, Day in the Life of a Black Woman Artist (1978) is in the collection of the Schomburg Center (see: Black Artists the 20th Century, Selections from the Schomburg Center Collections, p. 50.)

In 2021, a solo show of her work was exhibited at Fridman Gallery, NY.  McCannon’s work, Revolutionary Sister, 1971, was included in the exhibition Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection at the Brooklyn Museum held in 2020/2021.