Laylah Ali
Laylah Ali was born in Buffalo, New York in 1968. She received a BA from Williams College and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. The precision ith which Ali creates her small figurative gouache paintings on paper is such that it takes her many months o complete a single work. In style, her paintings resemble comicbook serials, but they also contain stylistic references to hieroglyphics and American folk-art traditions. She often achieves a high level of emotional tension in her work as a result of juxtaposing brightly colored scenes with dark, often violent subject matter that speaks of political resistance, social relationships, and betrayal. She lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Ida Applebroog
Ida Applebroog was born in the Bronx, New York in 1929. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received an honorary doctorate from New School University/Parsons School of Design. Applebroog has been making pointed social commentary in the form of beguiling comic-like images for nearly half a century. Anonymous ??everyman?? figures, anthropomorphized animals, and half-human-halfcreature characters are featured players in the uncanny theatre of her work. Applebroog propels her paintings and drawings into the realm of installation by arranging and stacking canvases in space. She lives and works in New York City.
Cai GuoQiang
Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1956 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province China. He studied stage design at the Shanghai Drama Institute from 1981 to 1985. Accomplished in a variety of media, Cai began using gunpowder in his work to foster spontaneity and confront the controlled artistic tradition and social climate in China. These projects, while poetic and ambitious in their core, aim to establish an exchange between viewers and the larger universe. For his work, Cai draws on a wide variety of materials, symbols, narratives and traditions??elements of feng shui, Chinese medicine and philosophy, images of dragons and tigers, roller coasters, computers, vending machines, and gun powder.
Ellen Gallagher
Ellen Gallagher was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1965. She attended Oberlin College and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Repetition and revision are central to Gallagher??s treatment of advertisements that she appropriates from popular magazines like Ebony, Our World, and Sepia and uses in works like eXelento (2004) and DeLuxe (2004-05). Although the work has often been interpreted strictly as an examination of race, Gallagher also suggests a more formal reading with respect to materials, processes, and insistences. She lives and works in New York City and in Rotterdam.
Arturo Herrera
Arturo Herrera was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1959. He received a BA from the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Herrera??s work includes collage, work on paper, sculpture, relief, wall-painting, photography, and felt wall-hangings. His work taps into the viewer??s unconscious, often intertwining fragments of cartoon characters with abstract shapes and partially obscured images that evoke memory and recollection. For his collages he uses found images from cartoons, coloring books, and fairy tales, combining fragments of Disney-like characters with violent and sexual imagery to make work that borders between figuration and abstraction and subverts the innocence of cartoon referents with a darker psychology. Arturo Herrera lives and works in Berlin and New York City.
Oliver Herring
Oliver Herring was born in Heidelberg, Germany in 1964. He received a BFA from the Drawing and Fine Art), Oxford, England, and an MFA from Hunger College, New York. Among Herring??s early works were his woven sculptures and performance pieces in which he knitted Mylar, a transparent and reflective material, into human figures, clothing, and furniture. Since 1998, Herring has created stop0motion videos and participatory performances with ??off-the-street?? strangers. Openended and impromptu, Herring??s videos have a dreamlike stream-of-consciousness quality. Oliver Herring lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Roni Horn
Roni Horn was born in New York in 1955. She received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. Horn explores the mutable nature of art through sculptures, works on paper, photography, and books. She describes drawing as the key activity in all her work because drawing is about composing relationships. Horn crafts complex relationships between the viewer and her work by installing a single piece on opposing walls, in adjoining rooms, or throughout a series of buildings. She subverts the notion of ??identical experience??, insisting that one??s sense of self is marked by a place in the here-and-there, and by time in the now-and-then. Roni Horn lives and works in New York City.
Mike Kelley
Mike Kelley was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1954. He received a BFA from the University of Michigan, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Kelley??s work ranges from highly symbolic and ritualistic performance pieces, to arrangements of installations that restage institutional environments. A critic and curator, Kelley has organized numerous exhibitions incorporating his own work, work by fellow artists, and non-art objects that exemplify aspects of nostalgia, the grotesque, and the uncanny. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
