Trenton Doyle Hancock is an artist living and working in Houston, Texas, who has had an impressive career trajectory. Before completing his MFA at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Hancock's work was chosen for the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and his mysterious narrative-based paintings, drawings, and installations have been in demand ever since. The Modern is proud to own a number of the artist's etching portfolios and his impressive large-scale, mixed-media work And The Branches Became As Storm Clouds, 2003.

Stefan Kalmár, Executive Director/Curator, and Richard Birkett, Curator of Artists Space, a nonprofit art gallery and arts organization founded in New York by arts administrator Trudie Grace and critic Irving Sandler in 1972, share their insights into the history and current life of this alternative space that continues to set the bar.

Rosson Crow lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She was raised in North Dallas, attended the School of Visual Arts in New York for her undergraduate degree, then Yale University for her master's degree before settling in L.A. In 2009, Crow had her first solo exhibition in the United States here at the Modern, titled Focus: Rosson Crow, from which the museum acquired Sharp's Rifle Shop, 2009.

Robyn O'Neil is a Los Angeles-based artist with Texas roots whose labor-intensive narrative drawings have a cinematic flair with Shakespearean-like titles that add to their mystery and intrigue. O'Neil is a consummate learner, having begun her education in British Studies, British Art, and British Architecture at Kings College in London before settling on art. After a BFA at Texas A&M University, Commerce, O'Neil entered the graduate program at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Richard Phillips is a New York-based artist known for his strikingly distinctive paintings, such as the early Girl Child, 1996-97in the Modern's permanent collection. Using found imagery, Phillips's work addresses the marketability of man and his wishes, ideas, actions, identity, sexuality, politics, and desires. He translates these images into both drawings and paintings, and, in doing so, he makes use of the iconic quality of pictures, which the media and art use daily-each according to its own agenda.

Philip Van Keuren, professor of art and director of the Pollock Gallery for the Division of Art at SMU

An internationally recognized photographer, Nicholas Nixon has helped shape the dialogue of photographic discourse for over four decades. His work gained broad attention when it was included in one of the most influential exhibitions of the 1970s, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House in 1975. His first solo museum exhibition in 1976 was curated by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Michael Petry presents “Nature Morte: Contemporary artists reinvigorate the Still-Life tradition” in conjunction with the publication of his new book by the same title. Dr. Michael Petry was born in Texas, but has lived in London since 1981. With a PhD in Arts from Middlesex University, Petry has diligently investigated art from various angles as an artist, author, co-founder of the Museum of Installation in London, and Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), London.

Matthew Collings, the British artist and writer, has been recognized throughout a diverse and emphatic career for his wit and brilliant perspective on art and the culture that surrounds it.