TONY BECHARA (b. 1942, San Juan, Puerto Rico) received his BA from Georgetown University and did postgraduate studies at New York University’s School of International Relations, the Sorbonne in Paris, and the School of Visual Arts. As a painter and printmaker, he has participated in many group shows, including the Whitney Biennial, and exhibitions at Bard College; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and other institutions. He has had one-person shows at galleries in Lima, Miami, Munich, New York City, San Juan, and Washington, D.C., and major solo exhibits at the Alternative Museum and El Museo del Barrio in New York and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan. His paintings and prints are in collections in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Bechara has been a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

ROSS BLECKNER (b. 1949, New York, NY) became a prominent artistic voice in New York during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. To this day, he is the youngest artist to receive a midcareer retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, at the age of 45. His most recent solo presentation was at the Neues Museum Nürnberg in 2019. Previous exhibitions include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Reina Sofia, Madrid; L.A. County Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Luzern; and Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. His paintings can be found in several major museum collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art and in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Bleckner lives and works in New York City.

NANETTE CARTER (b. 1954, Columbus, OH) attended Oberlin College and received her BA in 1976; she studied as well at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Perugia, Italy. She received her MFA from Pratt Institute in 1978, and then taught drawing there for twenty years. She has exhibited across the country and around the globe, in Bermuda, Brazil, England, Germany, Senegal, Spain, and Togo, with solo shows in Cuba, Italy, Japan, and Syria. Carter’s works are in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Cuba in Havana, among other museums, and in a number of corporate collections. She has received grants from Anonymous Was A Woman, the Gottlieb Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Carter, who has served on the board of directors for the Harlem School of the Arts and on the artistic board of New York’s Cinque Gallery, cofounded by Romare Bearden, was recently inducted into Guild Hall’s Academy of the Arts in East Hampton, New York. She resides in New York City.

PAMELA COUNCIL (b. 1986, Southampton, NY) lives and works in New York and Newark is an interdisciplinary artist who uses sculpture, architecture, writing, and performance to create multisensory dedications that both provide relief and prompt exuberance. These dedications – including Council’s iconic “fountains for Black joy” – upend the praxis of the static monument that demands the allegiance of passersby to, instead, serve as sites of deep care: their forms’ “high maintenance” calls viewers to an equally rigorous and cathartic tending of memory. Council coined the term BLAXIDERMY to describe their distinctive Afro-Americana camp aesthetic, which marries humor and horror in the exploration of material, cultural, and metaphysical inquiry.

JEREMY DENNIS (b. 1990, Southampton, NY) is a contemporary fine art photographer, an enrolled tribal member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, and lead artist and founder of the nonprofit Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio Inc. In his work, he explores Indigenous identity, culture, and assimilation. Dennis was one of ten recipients of a 2016 Dreamstarter grant from the national nonprofit Running Strong for American Indian Youth; he was awarded $10,000 to pursue his project, On This Site: Indigenous Long Island, which uses photography and an interactive online map to showcase culturally significant Native American sites on Long Island, a topic of special meaning for him, as he was raised on the Shinnecock Reservation. He developed a book and an exhibition from this project. More recently, Dennis received an Artist2Artist Fellowship from the Art Matter Foundation.

In 2013, Dennis began working on the series Stories: Oral Stories, Dreams, and Experiences. Inspired by North American Indigenous tales, the artist staged supernatural scenes to transform myths and legends into photographic depictions. Dennis holds a BA in studio art from Stony Brook University and an MFA from Pennsylvania State University. He lives and works in Southampton on the Shinnecock Reservation, home also to the Ma’s House residency program.

ERIC FISCHL (b. 1948, New York City, NY) grew up in the suburbs of Long Island and began his art education in Phoenix, where his family moved in 1967. He attended Phoenix College and earned his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1972. In 1974, he moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to teach painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. His first solo show, curated by Bruce W. Ferguson, was held at Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax the next year. Fischl moved to New York City in 1978.

His paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints have been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions, and his work is represented in museums, and private and corporate collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modem Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; the Musée Beaubourg, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Saint Louis Art Museum; and the PaineWebber art collection. Fischl, who has collaborated with E. L. Doctorow, Allen Ginsberg, Jamaica Kincaid, Jerry Saltz, and Frederic Tuten, among other artists and writers, is the founder, president, and lead curator for America: Now and Here. This multidisciplinary exhibition presenting more than 150 of America’s most celebrated visual artists, musicians, poets, playwrights, and filmmakers was designed to spark a national conversation about American identity through the arts. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fischl lives and works in Sag Harbor, New York, with his wife, the painter April Gornik.

ROBERT GOBER (b. 1954, Wallingford, CT) studied at Middlebury College in Vermont and the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Rome and moved to New York in 1976. He began showing his sculpture regularly in 1984 and curating exhibitions in 1986. He has had numerous one-person shows nationally and internationally, notably at the Dia Center for the Arts and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Schaulager, Basel; and the Serpentine Gallery, London. He represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2001. Gober’s curatorial projects have been shown at the Cable Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Menil Collection, Houston. Gober’s three-story permanent installation in the Haunted House at the Fondazione Prada, Milan, opened in 2015. His work was included in the 2016 Artangel exhibition Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison, held at that Victorian-era prison in England. Glenstone in Potomac, Maryland, opened a long-term pavilion of his work in 2018. Gober lives in New York and Maine with his partner, the artist Donald Moffett, and their dog.

MARY HEILMAN (b. 1940, San Francisco, CA) earned a BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1962), and an MA from the University of California, Berkeley (1967). She moved to New York the following year, in 1968. Since then, Heilmann’s work has appeared in three Whitney Biennial exhibitions (1972, 1989, 2008) and is included in the permanent collections of many museums worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco MoMA, National Gallery of Art, the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, Netherlands, and the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2017), was a United States Artists Oliver Fellow (2014), has received the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award (2006) and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Mary Heilmann lives and works in Bridgehampton, New York and New York City. Heilmann is represented by Hauser & Wirth and 303 Gallery, New York.

CLAUDE LAWRENCE (b. 1944, Chicago, IL) moved to New York City from Chicago in the mid-1960s, and for the next twenty years toured the United States as a saxophonist. He was drawn to visual expression from a young age, and was inspired by the work of Norman Lewis, who frequently responded to jazz in his abstract compositions. Lawrence’s focus eventually shifted to painting. From growing up in Chicago—where he attended an arts and music school with composer Anthony Braxton and drummer Jack DeJohnette—to spending long periods of time in New York City—where he became part of the downtown loft jazz scene, taking lessons with Ornette Coleman, and encountered artists Frank Bowling and Edvins Strautmanis, and forged longtime friendships with painters Jack Whitten and Joe Overstreet.

This crossover between jazz and abstraction can be seen in Lawrence’s energized compositions of bold colors and impassioned brushstrokes, where graffiti-like marks jostle alongside energetic but deliberate scrawl and more meditative fluid works hum with frenetic movement. Art historian Andrianna Campbell attests to the depth of influence that Lawrence’s musical career had on his painting, and has noted that his work often operates “as a fusion of improvisation and subject matter governed by memory akin to the way that a jazz musician follows the established chord progressions and recycles it to render it continually new.” Lawrence’s recent body of work, completed in France and in residency at The Church, in Sag Harbor, New York, includes his most monumental paintings yet, in both scale and ambition. Lawrence currently resides in Sag Harbor.

ROBERT LONGO (b. 1953, Brooklyn, NY) is a New York–based artist, filmmaker, and musician. He was a protagonist of the Pictures Generation, working across drawing, photography, painting, sculpture, performance, and film to make provocative critiques of the anesthetizing and seductive effects of capitalism, mediatized wars, and the cult of history in the United States. Through his labor-intensive, large-scale charcoal drawings, Longo has attempted to “slow down” the viewer’s consumption of what he refers to as a surrounding “image storm,” a daily flow of images across our screens. His work is represented in numerous major museums and private collections around the world, including the collections of the Broad, Los Angeles; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Tate Museum, London. Longo lives and works in New York and is represented by Pace Gallery and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. The Albertina Museum in Vienna will present a retrospective of his career in fall 2024.

EDDIE MARTINEZ (b. 1977, Groton, CT) spent his adolescent years making graffiti, and now creates paintings on canvas that retain the rough, expressionistic lines and bold colors of street art. Working between representation and abstraction, he uses oil, enamel, and spray paint and often incorporates found objects, in a fast-paced practice that could be compared to automatism. Noted for his deft draftsmanship, Martinez produces large-scale works that maintain the feeling of drawings. His most apparent visual references are the CoBrA group and Abstract Expressionism; Barry McGee has also been an important figure for him. In addition to paintings, Martinez produces found-object sculptures and works on paper. He lives and works in Brooklyn.

SAM MOYER (b. 1983, Chicago, IL) received her BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design and her MFA from Yale University. Her first solo exhibition, in 2008 at Cleopatra’s Gallery in Brooklyn, included work that incorporated moving blankets extended like paintings onto stretcher bars. After a residency in Switzerland, Moyer shifted her focus to “poetics in the found object,” and began making book sculptures. She then started working with fabric distorted with dye and bleach, as well as stone sourced from local marble yards and warehouses. Moyer’s practice has evolved from more conceptual and process-based origins to address formal and theoretical questions about the construct of painting. In all her production, scale and space are critical, and she is particularly interested in the way architecture functions in tandem with her objects to create dynamic visual experiences.

Moyer’s first solo public art installation, Doors for Doris, was on view at the entrance to New York’s Central Park at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in 2020–2021. Her works are featured in prominent public collections, including the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Massachusetts; the Morgan Library & Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; and the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris. Moyer has exhibited her work at the Bass Museum of Art, Miami; the Contemporary Art Museum and White Flag Projects, St. Louis; The Drawing Center and through the Public Art Fund, New York; LAND, Los Angeles; the University Art Museum, University of Albany; and Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm. Among the important group exhibitions in which she has participated are Greater New York and Between Spaces at MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), Queens, New York; Inherent Structure, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and Painting/Object, FLAG Art Foundation, New York. In 2018 she was the subject of a large-scale solo presentation at Art Basel Unlimited. Moyer lives and works in Brooklyn.

ENOC PEREZ (b. 1967, San Juan, Puerto Rico) moved to New York from Puerto Rico in 1986 and received a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Hunter College. His works are in the collections of major institutions, including the British Museum, London; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Perez has had solo exhibitions at Dallas Contemporary, the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, and UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles. He has been featured in such group exhibitions as Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Queens Museum of Art, and El Museo del Barrio, New York; City Self at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Dear Painter, Paint Me…, at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Undiscovered Country at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Variable Dimensions: Artists and Architecture at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal, Paris. He lives and works in Brooklyn.

UGO RONDINONE (b. 1964, Brunnen, Switzerland) studied at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna before moving in 1997 to New York, where he lives and works to this day. His multidisciplinary works, which borrow from ancient and modern cultural sources alike, exude pathos and humor, going straight to the heart of the most pressing issues of our time, where modernist achievement and archaic expression intersect. Rondinone’s work has been the subject of solo presentations at the Art Institute of Chicago; the Bass Museum of Art, Miami; the Berkeley Art Museum, California; the Carré d’Art, Nîmes; the Centre Pompidou and the Petit Palais, Paris; the Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati; the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva; the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma; the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; the Palais de Tokyo; the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; the Secession and the Belvedere, Vienna; the Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista, Venice; the Tamayo Museum, Mexico City; and the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Rondinone represented Switzerland at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Future exhibitions will be held at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Städel Museum, Frankfurt; and Storm King Art Center, New York.

CINDY SHERMAN (b. 1954, Glen Ridge, NJ) is a photographer whose groundbreaking work has for more than four decades interrogated themes around representation and identity in contemporary media. Before coming to prominence in the late 1970s with the Pictures Generation, alongside artists such as Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Louise Lawler, Sherman studied art at Buffalo State College, where she turned her attention to photography. In 1977, shortly after moving to New York City, she began her critically acclaimed Untitled Film Stills. In this suite of sixty-nine black-and-white portraits, Sherman impersonates an array of stereotyped female characters and caricatures inspired by Hollywood, film noir, and B movies. Using a range of costumes, props, and backdrops to manipulate her own appearance in photographs resembling promotional film images, the series explores the tension between artifice and identity in consumer culture, which has preoccupied the artist’s practice ever since.

From the early 2000s, Sherman has used digital technology to further manipulate her roster of characters. For the Clown series she added psychedelic backdrops that are at once playful and menacing, to examine the disparity between the exterior persona and interior psychology of her subject. In Society Portraits she used a green screen to create grandiose environments for women of the upper echelons of society. These CGI backdrops add to the veneer-like charm of the characters Sherman portrays, heavily made up and absorbed by societal status in the face of aging. Her later works continue to offer a satirical view of the modern obsession with youth and beauty that has been projected onto women for decades. In 2017, the artist began employing Instagram to upload portraits that rely on a number of face-tuning apps, morphing her into a plethora of protagonists in kaleidoscopic settings. Disorienting and uncanny, the posts highlight the dissociative nature of Instagram in regard to reality and the fractured sense of self in modern society that she has uniquely encapsulated from the outset of her career. Sherman lives and works in New York City.

LESLEE STRADFORD (b. 1950, Chicago, IL) grew up in Hyde Park, one of Chicago’s most diverse neighborhoods, home to the University of Chicago, the Museum of Science and Industry, the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, and President Barack Obama. After earning her BFA and BA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Stradford was selected for the artist-in-residence program of the City of Chicago, one of twenty visual artists chosen to create art for the city’s permanent collection. Upon completing her MFA from the School of the Art Institute, she earned her doctorate in Art Education and Educational Administration from Illinois State University.

Stradford taught at the American Language Center in Casablanca and has lectured in England at Oxford. Her studies and practices have taken her to the Studio Arts Center International in Florence and to a prestigious artist-in-residence position at Red Gate Gallery in Beijing. She has developed a style of making art that includes social, cultural, and historical documentation and that is sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract, sometimes a mix. Using new technology, drawing, and photographic research, she creates digital images, painted canvases, and printed silks.

MICHELLE STUART (b. 1933, Los Angeles, CA) has created a multifaceted body of work, shifting among large-scale earthworks, collage, drawings, photography, and sculpture. She has devoted her decades-long practice to recording and studying traces upon the earth, whether by nature or by human hand, as imprints of identity. She maps the passage of time and space, retrieving histories as much as she makes us aware of their irretrievability. She often uses organic materials such as earth, beeswax, and plants, rubbing them against paper or transforming them into new objects with a talismanic aura. Even when working with photography, she perceives it as an imprinting process, frequently researching and rephotographing old prints to recall forgotten moments in history.

Stuart has exhibited internationally over the past forty years. Notable solo exhibitions include the long-term view of Sayreville Strata Quartet, Dia, Beacon, New York; Place and Time, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Theatre of Memory: Photographic Works, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; and Drawn from Nature, which opened at the University of Nottingham, England, and traveled to the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Her work is featured in public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tate Gallery, England.

HANK WILLIS THOMAS (b. 1976, Plainfield, NJ) is a conceptual artist who works primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. He holds a BFA from New York University and an MA/MFA from the California College of the Arts, and has received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. Thomas’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad, at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; the Hong Kong Arts Centre; the International Center of Photography, New York; the Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac, Paris; and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (now Kunstinstituut Melly), Rotterdam.

His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males; In Search of the Truth (The Truth Booth); The Writing on the Wall; and the For Freedoms initiative, winner of the ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform. Thomas is a recipient of Gordon Parks Foundation and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, a Soros Equality fellowship and a Renew Media Arts fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, an AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize, an Aperture West Book Prize, and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award. He is a member of the Public Design Commission for the City of New York. His projects Love over Rules in San Francisco and All Power to All People in Opa-locka, Florida, were unveiled in 2017, and his permanent work Unity in Brooklyn was installed in 2019. He lives and works in Brooklyn.

NINA YANKOWITZ (b. 1946, Newark, NJ) has for the past six decades created works of abstraction imbued with her formal and social justice concerns. A founding member of the iconic feminist collective Heresies, since the 1960s she has worked across and beyond traditional art forms. Whether taking radical approaches to painting or mounting ambitious multimedia installations, she has probed the material, political, and even sonic nature of abstract art. Yankowitz studied at Temple University and the New School for Social Research before graduating in fine art from the School of Visual Arts.

A few years after graduating from the School of Visual Arts, Yankowitz was invited to participate in the inaugural 1973 Whitney Biennial. During the mid-1970s, she began attending meetings with a group of feminist artists and writers. They would become the Heresies Collective, which from 1977 to 1993 issued the journal Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. The group sought to challenge patriarchal art institutions and systems. Yankowitz has been a fixture in the booming postwar art scene on the East End of Long Island, spending long periods in Southampton with artist friends Hermine Freed, Marjorie Strider, and architect James Ingo Freed. Yankowitz lives and works in Sag Harbor and New York City.​

JOE ZUCKER (b. 1941, Chicago, IL) has experimented with what has become his signature technique: canvases featuring cotton balls rolled in paint, since the 1970s. Resulting in a highly textured surface reminiscent of mosaic, this technique radically transforms the canvas and challenges flatness. Zucker, like Robert Ryman, was and remains acutely focused on building a painting out of the medium’s most basic means and materials: the visible interaction of the painting tool, the application of paint, the materiality and shape of the support. Throughout his extensive career, Zucker has exhibited alongside artists such as Agnes Martin and Brice Marden at New York City’s pioneering Bykert Gallery in the 1960s, and later with dealer Holly Solomon, who was well known for her support of new and experimental mediums.

Zucker’s work is in many public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Tel Aviv Museum.