Carey Young is a visual artist whose work is often inspired by law, politics and economics. The tools, language and architectures of these fields act as material for her videos, text works, performances and photographs, often developing from the professional cultures she explores. In her early video works, she donned attire appropriate to the business and legal worlds, enacting scenarios which examine and question each institution's power to shape society and individual identity. Since 2002, Young developed a large body of work addressing and critiquing law in relation to ideas of site, gender and performance. Young teaches at the Slade School of Fine Art in London where she is an Associate Professor in Fine Art.
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders is an American documentary filmmaker and portrait photographer based in New York City. The majority of his work is shot in large format.
Linda Connor is an American photographer living in San Francisco, California. She is known for her landscape photography.
David Hilliard is an American photographer. A fine arts photographer who works mainly with panoramic photographs, he draws inspiration from his personal life and those around him for his subject matter. Many of the scenes are staged, evoking a performative quality, a middle ground between fact and fiction.
Barkley L. Hendricks was a contemporary American painter who made pioneering contributions to Black portraiture and conceptualism. While he worked in a variety of media and genres throughout his career, Hendricks' best known work took the form of life-sized painted oil portraits of Black Americans.
Laura L. Letinsky is an artist and a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.[1] She is currently based in Chicago, Illinois where she lives and works. Letinsky’s works contend with what and how a photograph “means” while engaging and challenging the notions of domesticity, gender, and consumption. She was included in the 2019 PHotoEspaña and is a Guggenheim fellow.
Laurie Simmons is an American artist best known for her photographic and film work. Art historians consider her a key figure of The Pictures Generation and a group of late-1970s women artists that emerged as a counterpoint to the male-dominated and formalist fields of painting and sculpture. The group introduced new approaches to photography, such as staged setups, narrative, and appropriations of pop culture and everyday objects that pushed the medium toward the center of contemporary art. Simmons's elaborately constructed images employ psychologically charged human proxies—dolls, ventriloquist dummies, mannequins, props, miniatures and interiors—and also depict people as dolls. Often noted for its humor and pathos, her art explores boundaries such as between artifice and truth or private and public, while raising questions about the construction of identity, tropes of prosperity, consumerism and domesticity, and practices of self-presentation and image-making. In a review of Simmons's 2019 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, critic Steve Johnson wrote, "Collectively—and with a sly but barbed sense of humor—[her works] challenge you to think about what, if anything, is real: in our gender roles, and our cultural assumptions, and our perceptions of others."
Zanele Muholi is a South African artist and visual activist working in photography, video, and installation. Muholi's work focuses on race, gender and sexuality with a body of work that dates back to the early 2000s, documenting and celebrating the lives of South Africa's Black Lesbian, Gay, transgender, and intersex communities. Muholi is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, explaining that "I'm just human".
Alex Prager is an American artist, director, and screenwriter based in Los Angeles.
Dorit Cypis is a Canadian-American artist, mediator and educator based in Los Angeles. Her work has collectively explored themes of identity, history and social relations through installation art, photography, performance and social practice. After graduating from California Institute for the Arts (CalArts), she attracted attention in the 1980s and 1990s for her investigations of the female body, presented in immersive installation-performances at the Whitney Museum, International Center of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. Counter to much feminist work of the time, Cypis focused on interiority and personal mythologies rather than exterior political realms, and according to art historian Elizabeth Armstrong, made a significant contribution to discourse about the representation of women and female sexuality.
Ken Gonzales-Day is a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist best known for interdisciplinary projects that examine the historical construction of race, identity, and systems of representation including lynching photographs, museum display and street art. His widely exhibited "Erased Lynching" photographic series and book, Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (2006), document the absence in historical accounts of the lynching of Latinos, Native Americans and Asians in California's early history. The series has toured in traveling exhibitions staged by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Smithsonian Institution and Minnesota Museum of American Art, and appeared at the Tamayo Museum, Generali Foundation (Vienna) and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, among other venues.
Charles Gaines is an American visual artist, whose work interrogates the discourse of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. Taking the form of drawings, photographic series and video installations, the work consistently involves the use of systems, predominantly in the form of the grid, often in combination with photography. His work is rooted in conceptual art – in dialogue with artists such as Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and Mel Bochner – and Gaines is committed to its tenets of engaging cognition and language. As one of the only African-American conceptual artists working in the 1970s, a time when political expressionism was a prevailing concern among African-American artists, Gaines was an outlier in his pursuit of abstraction and non-didactic approach to race and politics. There is a strong musical thread running through much of Gaines' work, evident in his repeated use of musical scores as well in his engagement with the idea of indeterminacy, as similar to John Cage and Sol LeWitt. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
Erin Christovale is a Los Angeles–based curator and programmer who currently works as a curator at the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles. Together with Hammer Museum senior curator Anne Ellegood, Christovale curated the museum's fourth Made in L.A. biennial in June 2018. She also leads Black Radical Imagination, an experimental film program she co-founded with Amir George. Black Radical Imagination tours internationally and has screened at MoMA PS1; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Museo Taller Jose Clemente Orozco, among other spaces. Christovale is best known for her work on identity, race and historical legacy. Prior to her appointment at the Hammer Museum, Christovale worked as a curator at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. She has a bachelor's degree from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.
Elia Alba (1962) was born in Brooklyn, New York. She is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Queens, New York. Alba's ongoing project The Supper Club depicts contemporary artists of color in portraits, and presents dinners where a diverse array of artists, curators, historians and collectors address topics related to people of color and to women.
Anthony Hernandez is an American photographer who divides his time between Los Angeles, his birthplace, and Idaho. His photography has ranged from street photography to images of the built environment and other remains of civilization, particularly those discarded or abandoned elements that serve as evidence of human presence. He has spent most of his career photographing in Los Angeles and environs. "It is L.A.'s combination of beauty and brutality that has always intrigued Hernandez." La Biennale di Venezia said of Hernandez, "For the past three decades a prevalent question has troubled the photographer: how to picture the contemporary ruins of the city and the harsh impact of urban life on its less advantaged citizens?" His wife is the novelist Judith Freeman.
Ellen Carey is an American artist known for conceptual photography exploring non-traditional approaches involving process, exposure, and paper. Her work has ranged from painted and multiple-exposure, Polaroid 20 x 24, Neo-Geo self-portraits beginning in the late 1970s to cameraless, abstract photograms and minimal Polaroid images from the 1990s onward, which critics often compare to color-field painting. Carey's sixty one-person exhibitions have been presented at museums, such as the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, International Center of Photography (ICP) and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, alternative spaces such as Hallwalls and Real Art Ways, and many commercial galleries. Her work is in numerous museum collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, and Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2019, she was named one of the Royal Photographic Society (London) "Hundred Heroines", recognizing leading women photographers worldwide. Los Angeles Times critic Leah Ollman describes her photography as "inventive, physically involving, process-oriented work" and her recent photograms as "performative sculptures enacted in the gestational space of the darkroom" whose pure hues, shadows and color shifts deliver "optical buzz and conceptual bang". New York Times critic William Zimmer wrote that her work "aspires to be nothing less than a reinvention, or at least a reconsideration, of the roots or the essence of photography." In addition to her art career, Carey has also been a longtime educator at the Hartford Art School and a writer and researcher on the history of photography.
Gina Osterloh is a Filipino American conceptual artist who uses photography to question and investigate notions of self and identity. Best known for photographs that feature partly concealed bodies in "meticulously crafted room-sized sets," Osterloh challenges conventions of portraiture and often combines elements of performance, tableau, sculpture, installation, and drawing into photographs.
Kamau Amu Patton is a multidisciplinary American artist and educator. He makes works independently and as part of the performance collective founded by Terry Adkins, Lone Wolf Recital Corps. Patton is also an Associate Professor in the Visual & Critical Studies department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and on the Bard MFA faculty.
Malik Gaines is an American artist, writer, and professor. He is one of three members of the artist collective My Barbarian, the group formed in 2000 and includes Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade as they perform musical, theatrical and critical techniques to act out social difficulties. They have exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum, New York in 2021. Gaines's practice includes events and exhibitions, music composition, video work, scholarly research and collaboration. He is the author of the book Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible and is the co-artistic director of The Industry opera company in Los Angeles.
Cosmo Whyte is a Jamaican-born American visual artist and educator. His is known for work in sculpture, drawing, painting, and installation art, which often address his Caribbean heritage and topics such as racism, colonialism, migration, and police brutality. Whyte lives in Los Angeles, California, and teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
