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.
Robert L. Williams, often styled Robt. Williams, is an American painter, cartoonist, and founder of Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine. Williams was one of the group of artists who produced Zap Comix, along with other underground cartoonists, such as Robert Crumb, Rick Griffin, S. Clay Wilson, and Gilbert Shelton. His mix of California car culture, cinematic apocalypticism, and film noir helped to create a new genre of psychedelic imagery.
Amy Sillman is a New York-based visual artist, known for process-based paintings that move between abstraction and figuration, and engage nontraditional media including animation, zines and installation. Her work draws upon art historical tropes, particularly postwar American gestural painting, as both influences and foils; she engages feminist critiques of the discourses of mastery, genius and power in order to introduce qualities such as humor, awkwardness, self-deprecation, affect and doubt into her practice. Profiles in The New York Times, ARTnews, Frieze, and Interview, characterize Sillman as championing "the relevance of painting" and "a reinvigorated mode of abstraction reclaiming the potency of active brushwork and visible gestures." Critic Phyllis Tuchman described Sillman as "an inventive abstractionist" whose "messy, multivalent, lively" art "reframes long-held notions regarding the look and emotional character of abstraction."
Lynn Hershman Leeson is an American multimedia artist and filmmaker. Her work with technology and in media-based practices is credited with helping to legitimize digital art forms. Her interests include feminism, race, surveillance, and artificial intelligence and identity theft through algorithms and data tracking.
Simon Martin is a British artist living and working in London. Martin is known for his video works.
Lynda Benglis is an American sculptor and visual artist known especially for her wax paintings and poured latex sculptures. She maintains residences in New York City, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kastellorizo, Greece, and Ahmedabad, India.
Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist. Wilson creates sculpture, drawings, Internet projects, photography, performance, and DVD stop motion animations employing table linens, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread and wire. Her work extends the traditional processes of fiber art to other media. Wilson is a professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is an American conceptual artist known for multidisciplinary, socially oriented sculpture, video and installations and urban community-based projects of the 1990s. His work often explores a dialectical relationships involving minimalist aesthetics, the utopian ambitions of modernism and science, and the resulting—often negative—social, geopolitical and ecological consequences of such ideologies. New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote that Manglano-Ovalle was adept in "distilling complex ideas into inviting visual metaphors," while Jody Zellen described his work as "infused with a formal elegance and sociopolitical content." Manglano-Ovalle has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, MASS MoCA, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), and participated in Documenta 12, the Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, and Bienal de São Paulo. He has been recognized with MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and his work belongs to the collections of forty major institutions. He has been a professor at Northwestern University since 2012 and lives and works in Chicago.
Michelle Lopez is an American sculptor and installation artist, whose work incorporates divergent industrial materials to critique present day cultural phenomena. She lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.
Douglas Ischar is an openly gay, American artist known for his work in documentary photography, installation art, sound art and video art addressing stereotypes of masculinity and male behavior. He currently lives and works in Chicago, where he teaches art at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ischar serves on the curatorial board of Chicago's Iceberg Projects, a not-for-profit experimental exhibition space.
Jennifer Bolande is an American postconceptual artist. Her art explores affinities and shifts of meaning among sets of objects and images across different contexts and media including sculpture, photography, film and installation. She emerged in the early 1980s with work that expanded on ideas and strategies rooted in conceptualism, Pop, Arte Povera and the so-called Pictures Generation. Her work focuses on thresholds, liminal and peripheral spaces, and transitional moments—states she enacts by the repetition, accumulation and recontextualization of found materials. She frequently selects cultural artifacts on the verge of obsolescence or in flux—and thus acquiring new meanings—and archives, studies and reframes them. Artforum critic Paula Marincola wrote, "Bolande's highly individualized amalgam of sculpture and photography proceeds obliquely but precisely toward an accumulation of possible meanings. She is a connoisseur of unlikely but evocative details, of subliminally perceived, fragmentary images and events."
Laurel Ptak is an artist, curator, writer and educator based in New York City.
Dona Nelson is an American painter, best known for immersive, gestural, primarily abstract works employing unorthodox materials, processes and formats to disrupt conventional notions of painting and viewership. A 2014 New Yorker review observed, "Nelson gives notice that she will do anything, short of burning down her house to bully painting into freshly spluttering eloquence." Since 2002, long before it became a more common practice, Nelson has produced free-standing, double-sided paintings that create a more complex, conscious viewing experience. According to New York Times critic Roberta Smith, Nelson has dodged the burden of a "superficially consistent style," sustained by "an adventuresome emphasis on materials" and an athletic approach to process that builds on the work of Jackson Pollock. Writers in Art in America and Artforum credit her experimentation with influencing a younger generation of painters exploring unconventional techniques with renewed interest. Discussing one of Nelson's visceral, process-driven works, curator Klaus Kertess wrote, the paint-soaked "muslin is at once the tool, the medium, and the made."
Paula Wilson is an African American "mixed media" artist creating works examining women's identities through a lens of cultural history. She uses sculpture, collage, painting, installation, and printmaking methods such as silkscreen, lithography, and woodblock. In 2007 Wilson moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Carrizozo, New Mexico, where she currently lives and works with her woodworking partner Mike Lagg.
Pamela Helena Wilson is an American artist. She is best known for watercolor drawings and paintings derived from photographs, largely of news events, architectural forms and landscapes. Her journalistic sources frequently portray scenes of natural and human-made calamity and the conflict, devastation and reactions that follow, often involving teeming crowds and demonstrations. Wilson's process and visual editing obscure these events, translating the images into suggestive, new visual experiences with greater urgency, universality and an open-endedness that plays against expectations. In 2013, critic Michelle Grabner wrote, "The luminosity of watercolor on white paper and the alluring atmospheric effects [Wilson] achieves in this medium creates images that are neither photographic or illustrational but seductively abstract and representational."
Shannon R. Stratton is a Canadian artist, writer and curator. She is currently executive director of Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists' Residency in Saugatuck, Michigan.
Leeza Ahmady is an Afghan-born American independent curator, author, arts administrator, dance instructor, and educator; she is known for her work within the genre of Central Asian art. She is the founder of AhmadyArts and Director of Asia Contemporary Art Week (ACAW) since 2006. Ahmady has organized large-scale festivals, exhibitions, artistic collaborations, and experimental forums revolving around contemporary art practices from across all regions of Asia. Ahmady is New York based and was born and raised in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Anna Conway is an American visual artist based in New York City and known for enigmatic oil paintings that depict uneasy, absurdist moments descending on isolated, ordinary individuals. She combines a style identified as precise and methodical with detailed observation, "an air of surrealist suspension," and a narrative sense that critics characterize as elusive, metaphysical and "imbued with cinematic suggestion." Conway has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at MoMA PS1, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, University Art Museum at Albany, Fralin Museum of Art, and Collezione Maramotti (Italy), among other venues. She has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014), two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Awards, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters William L. Metcalf Award (2008).
Diana Guerrero-Maciá is an American studio-based artist who has produced paintings, works on paper, prints and sculpture. She is known for her hybrid or "unpainted paintings"—works constructed with fabric cutwork, collage, stitching and dye that collapse boundaries between the fields of painting, fiber and design and challenge distinctions between "high" art and craft. Her largely abstract work samples and revises multiple materials, symbols and typography, and graphic elements such as grids, stripes and archetypal shapes to engage with color, iconography and diverse cultural movements and conventions.
Chrissie Iles is a British-American art curator, critic, and art historian. She is the Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
