Vinnie Bagwell was born in Yonkers, and raised in the Town of Greenburgh, in New York. An alumna of Morgan State University, Vinnie began sculpting in 1993. Her first public artwork, “The First Lady of Jazz Ella Fitzgerald”, at Yonkers Metro-North/Amtrak train station, is the first sculpture of a contemporary African-American woman to be commissioned by a municipality in the United States. Vinnie Bagwell became the inaugural recipient of Americans for the Arts “Jorge and Darlene Perez Award” for civic engagement in 2020, in addition to having won many others, and has won 20 public-art commissions around the US:

Presently, Vinnie Bagwell’s “Enslaved Africans’ Rain Garden”– an urban-heritage, public-art project for Yonkers – is slated to be installed in spring 2021. She is also developing the conceptual design for “The Sacred Place of My Ancestors” (the second-largest African Burial Ground in New York State), located in the Town of Montgomery, NY. The City of New York just released the $1M funding to commence “Victory…” to replace the J. Marion Sims sculpture on Fifth Avenue for Central Park. Most recently, Vinnie has become a finalist for “Harriet Tubman” public-art commission for Newark, New Jersey.