Derrick Adams is a multidisciplinary New York–based artist with practices rooted in Deconstructivist philosophies and the formation and perception of ideals attached to objects, colors, textures, symbols and ideologies. Focus is on fragmentation and manipulation of structure and surface – exploring shape-shifting forces of popular culture and its counter balances in our lives. The collage works on paper create minimal geometric constructions of angular human figures that seemingly live both in a state of deconstruction at the same time as if in the process of being built.

Adams received his MFA from Columbia University and BFA from Pratt Institute and is a Skowhegan and Marie Walsh Sharpe alumnus. He is a recipient of a 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and is an honored finalist for the 2011 William H. Johnson Prize. Exhibition and performance highlights include: MoMA PS1 Greater New York 2005, PERFORMA 05, Brooklyn Museum Open House, The Kitchen NYC 2010, The Bearden Project at the Studio Museum in Harlem 2011/12, a four-night solo performance in BAM’s new Fisher Theater in September 2012, and a solo exhibition at Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris, 2013.

Queen of Spades Press Release - October 13th, 2015

Michael Steinberg and Eminence Grise Editions proudly announce the forthcoming publication of two new works by Derrick Adams.

Created in response to Alexander Pushkin’s story, "The Queen of Spades", the images enter into a dialogue raised by issues of the author’s African ancestry as well as the fascination of the story itself. Entitled Holding Court and Countess N and Lizaveta Ivanovna, Adams’ new prints reference the two female characters in Pushkin’s magical tale.

Editioned by master printer Andre Ribuoli, the works are available in two formats: Edition A, which are large in scale and Edition B, consisting of the two prints smaller in format contained in a portfolio accompanied by the text of the story*. These editions will be introduced at the 2015 Editions / Artists’ Book Fair, November 5th – 8th.

Derrick Adams is a multidisciplinary New York–based artist with practices rooted in Deconstructivist philosophies and the formation and perception of ideals attached to objects, colors, textures, symbols and ideologies. Focus is on fragmentation and manipulation of structure and surface – exploring shape-shifting forces of popular culture and its counter balances in our lives. His collage works create minimal geometric constructions of angular human figures that seemingly live both in a state of deconstruction at the same time as if in the process of being built.

Adams received his MFA from Columbia University and BFA from Pratt Institute and is a Skowhegan and Marie Walsh Sharpe alumnus. He is a recipient of a 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. Performance highlights include: MoMA PS1 Greater New York, PERFORMA 05, Brooklyn Museum Open House, The Kitchen NYC, The Bearden Project at the Studio Museum in Harlem, a solo performance in BAM. Solo exhibitions include Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris, 2013, Hales Gallery, London, 2014 and Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, 2014.

Eminence Grise Editions is the publishing division of Michael Steinberg Fine Art. This new venture will continue Michael Steinberg’s long-term commitment to innovative editions by contemporary artists.  Among the recent publications are works by Derrick Adams, Ok Hyun Ahn, Lauren Comito, Yevgeniy Fiks, and Sandrine Guerin.

* Text courtesty of Robert Chandler, Editor, Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida

Ghada Amer was born 1963 in Cairo, Egypt. She is a contemporary artist living and working in New York City. She emigrated from Egypt to the US at age 11 and was educated in Paris and Nice. Much of her work deals with issues of gender and sexuality, particularly the representation of female nudes in art history as ideal objects rather than human beings with a sexuality and eroticism of their own. Her most notable body of work involves highly-layered embroidered paintings of women's bodies referencing pornographic imagery. 

Amer's work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions at such venues as Cheim & Read, New York, Deitch Projects, New York; the 2000 Whitney Biennial, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; the 2000 Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; SITE Santa Fe, NM; the 1999 Venice Biennale; the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale; Gagosian Gallery, London and Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills. She is the first Arab artist to have a one-person exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. 

Georg Baselitz (b. 1938, Deutschbaselitz, Saxony) lives and works outside Munich, Germany, and Imperia, Italy. Major retrospectives of his work have been held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, Centre Pompidou, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Royal Academy of Arts, London. Baselitz has represented Germany at the Venice Biennale (1980) and participated in Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany (1982).

In the 1960s Georg Baselitz emerged as a pioneer of German Neo-Expressionist painting. His work evokes disquieting subjects rendered feverishly as a means of confronting the realities of the modern age and explores what it is to be German and a German artist in a postwar world. In the late 1970s his iconic "upside-down" paintings, in which bodies, landscapes, and buildings are inverted within the picture plane, ignoring the realities of the physical world, make obvious the artifice of painting. Drawing upon a dynamic and myriad pool of influences, including art of the Mannerist period, African sculptures, and Soviet era illustration art, Baselitz developed a distinct painting language.

Jane Benson is a sculptor and installation artist whose work explores the transition and transformation of both physical materials and aesthetic identity. She was born in England and now lives and works in Brooklyn. She received her BFA from Edinburgh College of Art (1994) and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1997).

She had exhibited in national and international venues including PS1 MoMA; Sculpture Center; Socrates Sculpture Park; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Solo shows include The Mews, at Thierry Goldberg Projects, New York; Chronicles of Narcissism, Black & White Gallery, New York and Underbush, Roebling Hall, New York. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including the Pollack-Krasner, the Fulbright Scholarship and the New Views: World Financial Center Residency, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

Fascinated by patterns and drawing influence from sources high and low—including lottery tickets, painted fingernails, landscape painting, and ukiyo-e prints—Melissa Brown explores form and perception in her lushly layered prints, paintings, and mixed-media works. Her training as a printmaker, working primarily with woodcuts (which she describes as “the most archaic form of printmaking”), informs her interest in repetition and its meaning. As she describes: “I’m interested in using and thinking about repeats. What it means to make a repeated image. Or, use that to some sort of advantage, or meaning, or significance.” Brown is particularly focused on the repetitive patterns found in natural and urban environments. Skillfully combining abstraction and representation, she produces landscape scenes touched with surrealism, full of floating rocks, undulating waves, radiant skies, and trees covered with bark composed of expressive faces.

Brown was born in 1966, Washington, DC and currently live and works in New York City. She received her MFA from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT in 2002. Brown uses her large-scale acrylic paintings to wryly comment on the ductile and ever-changing essence of cultural identity, most often by creating visual mash-ups of two disparate but in fact subtly harmonious subcultures: the samurai and geishas depicted in traditional Japanese ukiyo-e printmaking and the contemporary world of hip-hop. Trained in the art of ukiyo-e herself, Brown pursues a transcultural aesthetic in both her imagery and her technique, mixing the racial, gender, and class issues in her subject matter with the deftness of a DJ. The artist's paintings have been widely exhibited, and she received a solo show at Cleveland's Museum of Contemporary Art in 2010. In 2011 she was commissioned to create a performance for the Performa biennial.

Close was born in 1940 in Monroe, WA. He is renowned for his highly inventive techniques of painting the human face, and is best known for his large-scale, photo-based portrait paintings. In 1988, Close was paralyzed following a rare spinal artery collapse; he continues to paint using a brush-holding device strapped to his wrist and forearm. His practice extends beyond painting to encompass printmaking, photography, and, most recently, tapestries based on Polaroids. In 2000, Close was presented with the prestigious National Medal of Arts by President Clinton. Close is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, has served on the board of many arts organizations, and was recently appointed by President Obama to serve on The President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Close joined Pace Gallery in 1977.

This body of work is inspired by the correlation between the world of advertising and memory, in particular Edward Bernays’ development of public relations. Employing Sigmund Freud’s writings on psychoanalysis, Bernays paved the way for the world of marketing and advertising through his use of focus groups, which investigated people’s emotional connections to products. Comito mines her own archive of personal digital photography of places she has lived, pairing different packaging containers that came from goods or consumables she associated with that place. Her work alternates between traditional art marking techniques and digital processes. These incorporate barcodes and QR codes that transport the viewer back into the digital realm.

Lauren Comito currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her Masters of Fine Arts in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design. Recent exhibitions include a two- person exhibition at Projekt 722, Brooklyn and a solo exhibition at Slag Gallery, Brooklyn.

Will Cotton is an American painter who was born 1965 in Melrose, Massachusetts. Cotton lives and works in New York City. His work primarily features landscapes composed of sweets, often inhabited by human subjects. Cotton's works depict pop icons sourced from contemporary advertisements such as the Nestlé Quick bunny - directly referencing visual modes aimed at evoking desire. He has also created an iconography in which the landscape itself became an object of desire. The paintings often feature scenery made up entirely of pastries, candy and melting ice cream. Pinup-style models have occasionally populated these candy-land scenes. As in the past, the works project a tactile indulgence in fanciful glut. The female characters are icons of indulgence and languor, reflecting the feel of the landscape itself.

Born 1949 in New Haven, Connecticut. Lives in New York City. Working since the late 1970s, Dunham’s career reached critical renown in the 1980s, a period during which many artists returned to painting. He is known for his conceptual approach to painting and drawing and his interest in exploring the relationship between abstraction and figuration.

Dunham has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions, including a mid-career retrospective at the New Museum in New York and an exhibition of paintings and sculptures at Millesgården in Stockholm. His work has been included in several Whitney Biennials and in “Disparaties and Deformations: Our Grotesque,” SITE Santa Fe’s fifth biennial curated by Robert Storr. He has participated in exhibitions at major institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.

His work is included in a number of public collections, including, amongst others, the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Tate Gallery, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of Art, New York.

Born in 1969 and lives and works in New York. Inka Essenhigh's paintings draw on an astute awareness of contemporary culture and her immediate environment. They are infused with a dreamlike, surreal sensibility - often directly related to a particular perception or the atmosphere of an encounter, individual or scene.

She has exhibited at Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville (2012); Dayton Art Institute (2011); Center for Maine Contemporaray Art, Rockport (2011); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007); The Royal Academy of Art, London (2006); Domus Artium 2, Salamanca (2005); São Paulo Biennal (2004); Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2003) and the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2003). Her work is in the collections of major museums including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Denver Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Museum of Modern Art / P.S.1 Center for Contemporary Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum; Tate, London; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Yevgeniy Fiks was born in Moscow in 1972 and has been living and working in New York since 1994. Fiks has produced many projects on the subject of the Post-Soviet dialog in the West, among them: “Lenin for Your Library?” in which he mailed V.I. Lenin’s text "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism” to one hundred global corporations as a donation for their corporate libraries; “Communist Party USA,” a series of portraits of current members of Communist Party USA, painted from life in the Party’s national headquarters in New York City; and “Communist Guide to New York City,” a series of photographs of buildings and public places in New York City that are connected to the history of the American Communist movement.

Fiks’ work has been shown internationally. This includes exhibitions in the United States at Winkleman and Postmasters galleries (both in New York) Mass MoCA, and the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art; the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and Marat Guelman Gallery in Moscow; Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City, and the Museu Colecção Berardo in Lisbon. His work has been included in the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011, 2009, 2007 and 2005), Biennale of Sydney (2008) and Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (2007).

Allison Gildersleeve’s work is a commitment to painting as both a representational tool and a coded language of mark and gesture. Using the genre of landscape as a structural framework, Gildersleeve twists space and color to upend the notion of nature as a quiet escape.

Gildersleeve produces painterly renderings of dense forests and other natural scenes found on the edge of cultivated or domesticated spaces. Thick layers of colorful paint squeezed directly from a tube and moved around with a palette knife intentionally evoke the styles and methods of Abstract Expressionism. Considering her work “experiential landscapes,” Gildersleeve aims for viewers to recognize the subject, only to have it dissolve before their eyes into a vocabulary of abstract shapes and lines, and then reappear. Her affinity for nature stems from time spent in the woods near her New England home as a child, photographs of which form the basis for her compositions. “When I paint these woods, I want it to feel as if all the stories that took place there are unfolding simultaneously,” she says.

Leo de Goede was born in Rotterdam and lives and works in New York. Some recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Konsortium, Dusseldorf in 2007, a solo exhibition at Galerie Kienzle & Gmeiner, Berlin in 2006 and a solo exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York in 2003. 

Since 1980 Leo de Goede has been collecting printed images - reproductions of photo's from magazines, newspapers, books, auction catalogues etc. His interest and intention is concerned with the creation of visual analogies. De Goede wishes to emphasize connections and to project a sense of wonder at this picture world and with it at the world at large. HORIZON features a suite of five prints that represent a sample of this project.

Born in New York City. In 2000, she received a B.A. in math and a B.A. in visual arts from Brown University. In 2001, she was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. Greenfield-Sanders has had solo exhibitions at Baldwin Gallery in Aspen Colorado, Goff and Rosenthal in New York, John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, Galerie Kluser in Munich, Bjorn Wetterling Gallery in Stockholm and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Currently, she works with Haunch of Venison Gallery in New York, Baldwin Gallery in Aspen, Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco and Kluser Gallery in Munich. Her work is in public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Museum Morsbroich in Leverkusen and the Progressive Collection in Ohio.

Derived from the artist’s rewriting of a 700 page CIA document known as “the Family Jewels," these images continue Guérin’s practice of uncovering the transformative potential of the everyday. Drawing on her background in sociology and linguistics, she explores meaning and the structures, constructs and codes that govern systems of representation.

Sandrine Guérin was born in Neuilly sur Marne, France. She lives and works in New York, NY. She received her MA in Sociology from the University of Paris-X, France (1995), and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York (1998). She participated in several group shows at museums and galleries including The New York Public Library, Baron/Boisanté Gallery, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects in New York, Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; French Institute, Berlin, Germany; Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, Switzerland. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, Rhode Island School of Design Art Museum, The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England, as well as corporate and private collections.

Alex Haas was born in New York in 1963 but grew up in Europe. He returned to the US in 1980 to study music and built a career as an award winning recording engineer, producer and musician. He has worked with such seminal artists as U2, Eric Clapton and Brian Eno to name a few. As the son of world-renowned photographer Ernst Haas he was imbued with the arts as well as music. His predilection for minimalist art and ambient music inspired him to apply electronic music techniques to visual media thereby creating a new form of expression he calls Histograms. He also blends the two mediums in videos which are shown in galleries and festivals world wide.

The "Sleeping Beauties" series explores the impact of virtual globalization on human interaction. 

Mahmoud Hamadani's drawings represent a beautiful fusion of nature, abstraction and chance in poetic black and white forms. In the artist's own words, his drawings illustrate the principle of "doing as much as possible and as little as necessary," finding a graceful balance of line and negative space. Hamadani predominantly works in series, drawn from inspirations ranging from the mathematical Fibonacci sequence to Chinese poetry.

Mahmoud Hamadani was born 1958 in Rasht, Iran and has had several gallery and museum exhibitions, including at the Cheryl Hazan Gallery and at the DB Fine Arts. Other solo exhibitions include 7 Bedford Row, London in 2006 and Michael Steinberg Fine Art in 2004. In 2005 Hamadani received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. He also attended the Ucross Foundation Residency Program in Wyoming and the Santa Fe Art Institute Artist Residency in New Mexico. 

Hamadani attend the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University and received a Master in Public Administration in 1992. He also attended the State University of New York where he received his BA in Mathematics in 1981.

Born in New York City, Harris spent his formative years in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. He currently lives and works in New York City and is an Associate Professor at New York University.  Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photographic media, collage, installation and performance. His work explores intersections between the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the 52nd Venice Biennale.

His work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Kunsthalle Basel, and the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva. During 2000 and 2001, Harris was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He has received numerous awards for his photography and is currently represented by CRG Gallery in New York. Harris' photographs have also appeared in international magazines, including The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek and Vibe.

 Brad Kahlhamer is an artist who lives and works in New York City. He was born in Tucson, Arizona in 1956 and received a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Brad Kahlhamer fuses an exuberant embrace of expressionist painting with the visionary tradition of Native American art. Drawing from country western and the Native American rock music scene, the artist’s visionary landscapes swirl with an atavistic energy; the paintings seem to have a sound that accompanies their visual rhythm. The great American bald eagle sweeps though the paintings almost as a surrogate for the artist, representing his immersion into his personal American landscape. Kahlhamer has created his own world in these paintings mixing representations of the real into a visionary “third place,” as the artist describes it.

His work has been collected by institutions such as: the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Brad Kahlhamer works in a range of media from painting and sculpture to performance art and music. Abstract Expressionism and Native American Art both have influenced Brad Kahlhamer's work. The artist has also contributed album artwork for musical groups such as The Kills, and Man Man. Brad Kahlhamer's combines his experience in the music and art worlds and also has created videos that utilize his visual and audio work. Kahlhamer is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery. 

Born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1974, Kao received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

With a background in Continental philosophy, Amy Kao's work speaks to experiences of nature as markers of history and culture. Her work has been exhibited in many public venues, such as the Busan Biennale, Korea; Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, NY; Asian American Art Centre, NY and Apexart, NY. Solo exhibitions include Michael Steinberg Fine Art, NY and Venetia Kapernekas Gallery, NY.  Kao is a recipient of residency fellowships at Yaddo, NY; MacDowell Colony, NH; Art Omi, NY and the Lower East Side Printshop, NY. Reviews of her work have appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the Financial Times and Art News.

Sean Mellyn was born 1965 in Providence, Rhode Island. He received his BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Sean Mellyn’s work has been shown in numerous U.S. and international exhibitions and is included in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art the Whitney Museum of American Art, Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art among others. His most recent solo exhibition took place in 2013 at Underline Gallery. He teaches painting at the School of Visual Arts, lives and works in New York City.

In his mixed-media sculptures, paintings, prints, and drawings, Sean Mellyn sends up Americana, drawing largely from 1950s advertising imagery to present a twisted vision of American ideals. He is particularly interested in the saccharine vision of the American national character reflected in kitschy objects and advertisements, which he both mimics and mocks. Through deliberate oversimplification, airbrushed surfaces, and a Technicolor palette, Mellyn produces works that look like relics from the 1950s. Apple-cheeked children, cartoon characters, ham hocks, and decorative plates are among the subjects he disturbingly alters. In Nose Jobs (1998), for example, he paints two smiling, raven-haired girls against a crimson background—perfect in every way except for their heavily, absurdly bandaged post-op noses.

Ester Partegàs was born in 1972 in Barcelona, Spain and is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received an MFA from the Universitat de Barcelona, has completed postgraduate studies at Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, and participated in the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York in 1999.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including The Aldrich Museum, CT; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; 2nd Moscow Bienniale; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro NC; Walker's Point Center for the Arts, Milwaukee WI; Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond VA; Cercle Cultural Caja Madrid, Barcelona; Sculpture Center, New York; Rice University Art Gallery, Houston TX; Queens Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York.

Partegàs' work features in a number of public collections, including MoMA, New York; The Dikeou Collection, Denver; Coca-Cola Espana Foundation, Madrid; Instituto de la Juventud, Madrid; CajaMadrid, Madrid. Her work also features in numerous private collections in the US and Europe. She is represented by Foxy Production, New York.

Dario Robleto (born 1972) is an American conceptual artist who lives and works in Houston, Texas. Robleto received his BFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1997 and has subsequently served as an artist in residence at several institutions including the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia and Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles. He is currently represented by D’Amelio Terras in New York, ACME in Los Angeles and Inman Gallery in Houston.

Robleto employs a variety of media in his artworks, creating intricately handcrafted objects that reflect his passionate exploration of music, popular culture, science, war and American history. Most often incorporating everyday, found objects, Robleto transforms artifacts from a vast inventory of our collective past into delicately layered objects that are sincere and personal meditations on love, death, spirituality and healing. A great appreciator of hip-hop music and DJ culture, Robleto views his work as a mixtape or sampling of humanity, recycling old items and reconstructing them into new artistic forms, as a means to viewing the future through the past.

Robleto has also held solo exhibitions at the New Orleans Museum of Art (2012), the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2010); The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina (2006); The Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York (2003); The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2003); and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2001).

Born in Seoul, South Korea and raised in the United States, Shin attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1999 and received a BFA and MS from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She lives and works in New York City.

Jean Shin is nationally recognized for her monumental installations that transform everyday objects into elegant expressions of identity and community. For each project, she amasses vast collections of a particular object—prescription pill bottles, sports trophies, sweaters—which are often sourced through donations from individuals in a participating community. These intimate objects then become the materials for her conceptually rich sculptures, videos and site-specific installations. Distinguished by her meticulous, labor-intensive process, and her engagement of community, Shin's arresting installations reflect individuals' personal lives as well as collective issues that we face as a society.

Her work has been widely exhibited in major national and international museums, including in solo exhibitions at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona (2010), Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC (2009), the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia (2006), and Projects at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2004).

Shahzia Sikander was born in 1969 in Lahore, Pakistan. She is a Pakistani-American artist who works in drawing, painting, animation, large-scale installation, performance and video. Sikander was traditionally taught the discipline of Indo-Persian miniature painting, where she studied at The National College of Lahore in Pakistan. Sikander received her MFA from Rhode Island School of Art and Design in 1995.

Sikander explores the integration of Hindu and Muslim culture by combining allegories from both societies and exploring imagery that communicates the hybridity of her experiences including, her personal history, politics and sexuality. Religion is a significant element in her art as well as her personal life, as an artist and practicing Muslim. Sikander explores in particular, the role of Muslim women and challenges the view Westerners have of associating Islam only with terrorism and the oppression of women.

Sikander has held solo exhibitions throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, Australia and Hong Kong. She has had solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.

Los Angeles native and New York-based visual artist Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated himself within art history's portrait painting tradition. As a contemporary descendent of a long line of portraitists--including Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, Ingres, and others-- Wiley engages the signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic, and sublime in his representation of urban black and brown men found throughout the world.

By applying the visual vocabulary and conventions of glorification, wealth, prestige, and history to subject matter drawn from the urban fabric, Wiley makes his subjects and their stylistic references juxtaposed inversions of each other, forcing ambiguity and provocative perplexity to pervade his imagery. Wiley's larger-than-life figures disturb and interrupt tropes of portrait painting, often blurring the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation and the critical portrayal of masculinity and physicality as it pertains to the view of black and brown young men.

Kehinde Wiley received his MFA from Yale University in 2001. Shortly after, he became an Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Wiley’s work has been the subject of exhibitions worldwide and is in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Denver Art Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the High Museum, Atlanta; the Columbus Museum of Art; the Phoenix Art Museum; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Jewish Museum, New York; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York. Wiley will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2015.

Heeseop Yoon was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Yoon received a BFA from Chung-ang University, Seoul, Korea and a MFA from City College of New York. She has had solo and two person shows at Triple Candie, NY; March Gallery, NY; Bose Pacia, NY, and Arario Gallery, Seoul, Korea. She has exhibited in museums and art centers internationally, including MASS MOCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; The Bronx Museum, NY; Seoul Arts Center, Seoul, Korea; CAST, Australia; and Median Art Center, Beijing, China. Yoon has participated in artist residencies such as the Marie Walsh Sharpe, Skowhegan School of Painting, and Sculpture, Artist Alliance Inc., NY and Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, Germany.

Though her intricate installations are often so large that they spread over walls onto ceilings and floors, Heeseop Yoon thinks of her work as freehand drawings. All of Yoon's works are based on real spaces with vast messes, such as basements, workshops, storage spaces, or "places where everything is jumbled and time becomes ambiguous without the presence of people." With only photographs as reference, Yoon uses black tape to create her enlarged wall drawings, working additively such that her mistakes and miscalculations are visible in the final installation. Yoon's interested in how memory and perception constantly adjust both for herself and for her viewer, and the paradox that the more she corrects her work, the less legible the drawing becomes.

Fred Wilson (born 1954, the Bronx) has created site-specific installations in collaboration with museums and cultural institutions throughout North America, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. His work encourages viewers to reconsider social and historical narratives and raises critical questions about the politics of erasure and exclusion. Beginning with the groundbreaking and critically acclaimed exhibition Mining the Museum(1992-93) at the Maryland Historical Society, Fred Wilson has juxtaposed and re-contextualized existing objects to create new installations, which alter their traditional meanings or interpretations. In 2003, Wilson represented the United States at the 50th Venice Biennale with the solo exhibition Fred Wilson: Speak of Me as I Am. His many accolades include the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant (1999), amongst others.

Wilson's unique artist approach is to examine, question, and deconstruct the traditional display of art and artifacts in museums. With the use of new wall labels, sounds, lighting, and non-traditional pairings of objects, he leads viewers to recognize that changes in context create changes in meaning. Wilson's juxtaposition of evocative objects forces the viewer to question the biases and limitations of cultural institutions and how they have shaped the interpretation of historical truth, artistic value, and the language of display.