Tim Rollins is an artist, activist, and teacher based in South Bronx, New York, who is known for what might be understood as “art activism,” and specifically his collaborative work with a group of at-risk students who call themselves Kids of Survival (K.O.S.). Beginning his career in 1980 as cofounder of Group Material—a collective of young New York artists pooling resources to launch exhibitions that address social themes—Rollins laid the ground work for what has become an art-world phenomenon known as Tim Rollins and K.O.S.

Jill Magid, a New York-based artist and writer, seeks platforms for working inside and outside of institutions, responding to their imposition, negotiation, and at times, capitulation of power.

Ingrid Calame, a Los Angeles–based artist, is known for her brightly colored, abstract paintings and drawings featuring complex configurations of traced stains and graffiti from the embankments of the Los Angeles River and the streets and sidewalks of New York, Las Vegas, and Seoul, Korea. Calame’s most recent body of work highlights the skid marks, Pit marks, and Victory Donuts she traced in 2006 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Katie Paterson is a young British artist receiving a great deal of attention as a cross-medium, multidisciplinary, and conceptually driven artist who focuses on nature, ecology, geology, and cosmology in her work, using her skill and knowledge as an artist together with her limitless curiosity and tireless research to probe matters often left to science. Her devotion and hard work have been rewarded.

Brooklyn-based artist Byron Kim is known for his monochrome paintings, born out of representation, that seemingly challenge their relationship to abstraction. Faye Hirsch describes his work in an interview with the artist for Art in America, “You see subtle variations of color within the fields.

In conjunction with Glenn Ligon: America, a distinguished panel of scholars from various fields and art disciplines will discuss ideas presented in José Esteban Muñoz's 1996 book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, described by the University of Minnesota Press as "an important perspective on the ways outsiders negotiate mainstream culture." As a member of the panel, Mr.

Gary Rough is a Scottish conceptual artist based in New York who represented his homeland in the 2003 Venice Biennale.

Andrea Fraser is an artist currently based in Los Angeles, California, where she is a professor at UCLA in the department of art. She also serves as visiting faculty for the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. Fraser has used performance, video, and a range of other media to explore the motivations that drive artists, collectors, art dealers, corporate sponsors, museum trustees, and museum visitors from the pursuit of prestige to that of financial investment, to sexual fantasy and self-realization.

Lucy Lippard is a distinguished writer, curator, editor, lecturer, and activist who has long been appreciated for her expansive scholarship and insight, having been one of the first to recognize the dematerialization of the work in art’s movement toward conceptualism as well as an early champion of feminist art. The author of 21 books, curator of 50 exhibitions, cofounder of Printed Matter Inc., the Heresies Collective, Political Art Documentation/Distribution, Artists Call Against U.S.