Rhea Anastas (born March 11, 1969, in Gloucester, Massachusetts) is an art historian, critic, curator and an associate professor at the Department of Art, University of California, Irvine. [1] She was also one of the founding members of Orchard, [2] an experimental artist-run gallery in the Lower East Side in New York.
Previously Anastas has taught at the Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere program at the Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California, The Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture at Bard College, and was a lecturer at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. [3]
Anastas received her B.A. and M.A. in Art History from Columbia University in 1990 and 1995 respectively, and her PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2004. Her dissertation was titled The Whole Artist: Dan Graham and Robert Smithson, Works and Writings, 1965–69. [4]
Robert Smithson was an American artist known for sculpture and land art who often used drawing and photography in relation to the spatial arts. His work has been internationally exhibited in galleries and museums and is held in public collections. He was one of the founders of the land art movement whose best known work is the Spiral Jetty (1970).
Sean Landers is an American artist. He is best known for using his personal experience as public subject matter and for utilizing diverse styles and media in a performative manner, and is especially known for his word art. His work encompasses many media: painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, writing, video and audio, and he uses humor and confession, gravity and pathos in it, blurring the lines between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, sincerity and insincerity.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was an American novelist, producer, director, and artist of South Korean origin, best known for her 1982 novel, Dictée. Considered an avant-garde artist, Cha was fluent in Korean, English, and French. The main body of Cha's work is "looking for the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue." Cha's practice experiments with language through repetition, manipulation, reduction, and isolation, exploring the ways in which language marks one's identity, in unstable and multiple expressions. Cha's interdisciplinary background was clearly evident in Dictée, which experiments with juxtaposition and hypertext of both print and visual media. Cha's Dictée is frequently taught in contemporary literature classes including women's literature.
Liam Gillick is a British artist who lives and works in New York City. Gillick deploys multiple forms to make visible the aesthetics of the constructed world and examine the ideological control systems that have emerged along with globalization and neoliberalism. He utilizes materials that resemble everyday built environments, transforming them into minimalist abstractions that deliver commentaries on social constructs, while also exploring notions of modernism.
Jens Hoffmann Mesén is a writer, editor, educator, and exhibition maker. His work has attempted to expand the definition and context of exhibition making. From 2003 to 2007 Hoffmann was director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London. He is the former director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art from 2007 to 2016 and deputy director for exhibitions and programs at The Jewish Museum from 2012 to 2017, a role from which he was terminated following an investigation into sexual harassment allegations brought forth by staff members. Hoffmann has held several teaching positions including California College of the Arts, the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti and Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as others.
Lynne Cooke is an Australian-born art scholar. Since August 2014 she has been the Senior Curator, Special Projects in Modern Art, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
David Askevold was an experimental Canadian artist who lived in Nova Scotia.
K8 Hardy is an American artist and filmmaker. Hardy's work spans painting, sculpture, video, and photography and her work has been exhibited internationally at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, Tensta Konsthalle, Karma International, and the Dallas Contemporary. Hardy's work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. She is a founding member of the queer feminist artist collective and journal LTTR. She lives and works in New York, New York.
Walead Beshty is a Los Angeles–based artist and writer.
JRP|Ringier, formerly JRP Editions, is a Swiss publisher of high-quality books on contemporary art.
Virginia Dwan was an American art collector, art patron, philanthropist, and founder of the Dwan Light Sanctuary in Montezuma, New Mexico. She was the former owner and executive director of Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles (1959–1967) and Dwan Gallery New York (1965–1971), a contemporary art gallery closely identified with the American movements of Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and Earthworks.
Barbara Kasten is an American artist from Chicago Illinois. Her work involves the use of abstract video and photograph projections.
John Miller is an artist, writer, and musician based in New York and Berlin. He received a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1977. He attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in 1978 and received an M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts in 1979. Miller worked as a gallery attendant at Dia:Chelsea. He is currently Professor of Professional Practice in Art History at Barnard College
Cynthia Daignault is an American painter. Her work is often described as rigorous and intense. Daignault is also a writer and musician and curator. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Mai-Thu Perret is a Swiss artist of Franco-Vietnamese origin. Perret's work is multidisciplinary, installation-based, and performative, combining feminist politics with literary texts, homemade crafts and 20th century avant-garde aesthetics.
Clive Phillpot is a specialist on artists' books, essayist, art writer, curator, and a librarian. Phillpot started his library career at the Charing Cross Public Library in London.
Helen Elizabeth Marten is an English artist based in London who works in sculpture, video, and installation art. Marten studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford (2005–2008) and Central Saint Martins (2004). Her work has been included in the 56th Venice Biennale and the 20th Biennale of Sydney. She has won the 2012 LUMA Award, the Prix Lafayette in 2011, the inaugural Hepworth Prize and the Turner Prize, both in 2016. Marten is represented by Greene Naftali Gallery in New York.
Peggy Gale is an independent Canadian curator, writer, and editor. Gale studied Art History and received her Honours Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History from the University of Toronto in 1967. Gale has published extensively on time-based works by contemporary artists in numerous magazines and exhibition catalogues. She was editor of Artists Talk 1969-1977, from The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax (2004) and in 2006, she was awarded the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. Gale was the co-curator for Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection in 2012 and later for the Biennale de Montréal 2014, L’avenir , at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Gale is a member of IKT, AICA, The Writers' Union of Canada, and has been a contributing editor of Canadian Art since 1986.
Orchard was an artist-run exhibition and event space located at 47 Orchard Street in New York's Lower East Side from 2005-2008. The gallery was run as a for-profit limited liability corporation founded for the project. The partners included artists, filmmakers, critics, art historians, and curators. Orchard was among early contemporary art projects and galleries that moved onto Orchard and generally the Lower East Side below Delancey Street along with Miguel Abreu Gallery, Reena Spaulings, and Scorched Earth. Brandon Joseph noted, "the Orchard 'project' treaded a fine—and perhaps ultimately impossible—line between self-reflexivity and self-complicity, which could veer at times into self-promotion."
Krist Gruijthuijsen is a Dutch curator and art critic who has been serving as Director of KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Germany, since July 2016. At KW, he has curated exhibitions with, among others, Hanne Lippard, Ian Wilson, Adam Pendleton, Ronald Jones, Hiwa K, Willem de Rooij, Beatriz González, David Wojnarowicz, Hreinn Friðfinnsson, and Hassan Sharif.