Forrest Gander is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. The A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for Be With and is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Alison Saar is a Los Angeles, California based sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist. Her artwork focuses on the African diaspora and black female identity and is influenced by African, Caribbean, and Latin American folk art and spirituality. Saar is well known for "transforming found objects to reflect themes of cultural and social identity, history, and religion."
Judy Pfaff is an American artist known mainly for installation art and sculptures, though she also produces paintings and prints. Pfaff has received numerous awards for her work, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004 and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts. Major exhibitions of her work have been held at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Denver Art Museum and Saint Louis Art Museum. In 2013 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Video interviews can be found on Art 21, Miles McEnery Gallery, MoMa, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and other sources.
Judith Shea is an American sculptor and artist, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1948. She received a degree in fashion design at Parsons School of Design in 1969 and a BFA in 1975. This dual education formed the basis for her figure based works. Her career has three distinct phases: The use of cloth and clothing forms from 1974 to 1981; Hollow cast metal clothing-figure forms from 1982 until 1991; and carved full-figure statues made of wood, cloth, clay, foam and hair beginning in 1990 to present.
Jeanne Silverthorne is an American sculptor, known for cast-rubber sculptures and installations that explore the artist's studio as a metaphor for artistic practice, the human body and psyche, and mortality. She gained prominence in New York City in the 1990s, as one of several material-focused sculptors who critiqued the austere, male-dominated Minimalist movement by embracing humble, unorthodox media and hand-made, personal and ephemeral qualities championed by artists such as Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. She treats the studio as a physical and conceptual site to be excavated, documented and inventoried, examining in the words of Sculpture's Jan Riley "the end of studio arts … and the impossibility of this mode of expression regaining its former creative validity and vitality in today’s world." Art in America critic Raphael Rubinstein wrote that, like the late studio paintings of Philip Guston, Silverthorne examines "deeply melancholic realms, enlivened by the occasional mordant joke, in which lowly objects are relentlessly and lovingly queried for a meaning they never seem quite ready to yield."
Hema Upadhyay was an Indian artist based in Mumbai. She was known for photography and sculptural installations. She was active from 1998 until her death in 2015.
Rachel Lachowicz is an American artist based in Los Angeles, California. She is primarily recognized for appropriating canonical works by modern and contemporary male artists such as Carl Andre and Richard Serra and recreating them using red lipstick.
May Sun is a Los Angeles–based artist known primarily for her public art projects. Sun works in the mediums of sculpture, mixed media, photography and installation. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She was born in Shanghai, China, moved to Hong Kong at the age of two with her family and immigrated to the United States in 1971 to attend the University of San Diego. "May Sun often refers to aspects of her Chinese heritage in her work, which consistently crosses cultural and political boundaries as well as the boundaries traditionally separating art forms and disciplines."
Michal Rovner, also known as Michal Rovner Hammer, is an Israeli contemporary artist, she is known for her video, photo, and cinema artwork. Rovner is internationally known with exhibitions at major museums, including the Louvre (2011) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2002).
Sheila Klein is a sculptor and public artist living and working in Bow, Washington and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her practice straddles the worlds of architecture, sculpture, installation and traditional women's crafts. She is particularly noted for her monumental projects dressing public buildings with hand crocheted and knitted steel. She lives on a farm in the Skagit Valley near Seattle, Washington with her artist husband Ries Niemi, and sons Rebar and Torque. Sheila has created numerous public art projects across the USA, and maintains a parallel studio practice as a sculptor and installation artist.
Nalini Malani is an Indian artist, among the country's first generation of video artists.
Virginia Maksymowicz is an American artist whose sculptural installations incorporate a variety of media. She lives in Philadelphia, PA and is married to artist-photographer, Blaise Tobia.
Julia Couzens is a California-based, American artist known for a diverse body of work that embraces unconventional materials and methods and includes drawing, sculpture, installation art, and writing. Critic David Roth identifies as a connecting thread in her evolving work, her "decidedly surrealist-symbolist sensibility, in which eroticism, the grotesque and the gothic mix in equal parts." Her work has been shown internationally and throughout the United States, including solo exhibitions at the Christopher Grimes Gallery and California State University, Stanislaus (2009), in surveys at the University of California, Davis and Sonoma Museum of Visual Art (1999), and group shows at the Crocker Art Museum, P•P•O•W, Orange County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, and BAMPFA, among others. Her art has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Flash Art, New Art Examiner, and Art Practical, among other publications, and collected by institutions including the Crocker Art Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Oakland Museum of California and Butler Institute of American Art, among many. In addition to working as an artist, Couzens has taught at several Southern California universities and writes about contemporary art for The Sacramento Bee and Squarecylinder. She lives and works on Merritt Island in the Sacramento River delta community of Clarksburg and maintains a studio in downtown Los Angeles.
Elyn Zimmerman is an American sculptor known for her emphasis on large scale, site specific projects and environmental art. Along with these works, Zimmerman has exhibited drawings and photographs since graduating with an MFA in painting and photography at University of California, Los Angeles in 1972. Her teachers included Robert Heineken, Robert Irwin, and Richard Diebenkorn.
Leslie Wayne is a visual artist who lives and works in New York. Wayne is best known for her "highly dimensional paintings".
Prajakta Potnis is an Indian contemporary artist based in Mumbai working in photography, painting, sculpture and installations. Her work explores the connections between intimate and public worlds, and the topographies that influence global politics and economics.
Vibha Galhotra, born 1978 is an Indian conceptual artist based in New Delhi. Her work includes large-scale installations, sculptures, drawings, films that explore themes of ecological and environmental concerns. Her works address the shifting topography of the world under the impact of globalization and growth. She sees herself as being part of the restructuring of culture, society and geography – of New Delhi, and the world.
Lorraine Garcia-Nakata is an American artist who works with various mediums including pastel, charcoal, ceramics, printmaking, installation, sculpture, and paint. Her work surrounds themes of the daily life, portraiture, and realism and is known for her large scale artworks. She is a member of the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) artist collective since 1974.
Madeline Hollander is an American artist, choreographer, and dancer, living and working in New York City. Her work explores the evolution of human body movement and the intersection between choreography and visual art.
Max Colby is an artist known for her work in textiles, sculpture, installation, embroidery, and painting. Her work highlights precarity and vulnerability through a consistent investigation of ritual objects, most often, funereal. Touching on such ceremonial iconography, the artist constructs objects which subvert the aesthetics of patriarchal systems. To her, Colby's process is about undoing the conditioning of "inherited cultural understandings of binary gender, as well as class and taste." Colby's elaborate work in installation utilizing beads, faux flowers, sequins, ribbons, fabric and jewelry is a flamboyant celebration of self-expression through the artist's meticulous process of utopian construction of a universe.
