Cynthia Hawkins (b. 1950, Queens, New York) has exhibited widely in New York and the United States throughout her career. She has presented one-person exhibitions at Just Above Midtown, New York (1981); Frances Wolfson Art Gallery, Miami (1986); Cinque Gallery, New York (1989); Queens College Art Center (1997); Buffalo Museum of Science, Buffalo (2009); STARS, Los Angeles (2022); and Ortuzar Projects, New York (2023). She was included in the survey exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022). Hawkins’ work is in numerous public collections, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Kenkeleba Gallery, New York; the La Grange Art Museum, Georgia; and the U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC. She has received numerous awards, including the Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting (2023); the Black Metropolis Research Consortium Fellowship (2009); The Herbert and Irene Wheeler Foundation Grant (1995); and the Brooklyn Museum Art School Scholarship (1972). CARA presented Hawkins with its annual Legacy Award in October 2024. She received her doctorate in American Studies from the University of Buffalo, SUNY, with a dissertation titled African American Agency and the Art Object, 1868–1917, and until recently was the gallery director and curator at the Bertha V.B. Lederer Gallery, SUNY Geneseo, New York.