Noah Simblist, a Dallas-based artist and writer, has made a significant mark on the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex in the brief four years since he arrived from New York to teach painting at Southern Methodist University. Most recently he has organized a monumental undertaking, Collecting & Collectivity, which is a year-long program including a symposium, lectures, and an exhibition. Simblist’s art shows the same rigor as his scholarly and curatorial pursuits.

David Bates is a Dallas-based artist known predominantly for his expressively rendered paintings and sculptures of landscapes, people, and objects derived from personal experience to portray universal and timeless themes, such as the compelling relationship between man and nature.

Dean Byington, a San Francisco–based artist known for creating visually packed narrative landscape paintings with varied storylines rendered in the style of nineteenth-century illustrated books, presents the ideas and processes behind his mesmerizing work in a conversation with Curator of Education Terri Thornton.

Katrina Moorhead is a Houston-based artist who was recently awarded the prestigious 2007 Arthouse Texas Prize and included in the group exhibition The Nature of Things, which represented Northern Ireland in the 2005 Venice Biennale.

John Stoney, an artist splitting his time between Austin and New York, captures the enormity of the world we inhabit in his awe-inspiring sculptures and drawings that are obsessively conceived and meticulously made. Pervasive in Stoney’s work and concurrent with his level of craft is a subtle humor and irony that results from slight shifts of perspective through juxtaposition and scale in artworks that seduce the eye and incite the imagination. For Tuesday Evenings he shares such work and related ideas in his presentation Time and the Artist.

Amelia Jones, known for her scholarship in the areas of feminism and contemporary art, is Professor and Pilkington Chair in Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester as well as an independent curator and writer.

Joshua Mosley, who opens this year’s FOCUS exhibitions with his multimedia installation A Vue, 2004, has received much-deserved recognition with awards and exhibitions of note, such as the inclusion of his intriguing installation of film and sculpture titled Dread in the 52nd Venice Biennale. Joshua Mack, in his feature on the artist for Art Review, writes, “Joshua Mosley’s deceptively simple, visually stunning short animations are complex philosophical meditations on value

Kara Walker, whose work is featured in the Modern’s current exhibition My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, presents the ideas and issues behind her compelling installations, drawings, paintings, and text-based works, which are as disturbing as they are beautiful. Walker’s unforgiving representation of the complex dynamics and ramifications of slavery has been the subject of much praise and controversy. It is work that challenges its viewer and its maker.

Hans Christ and Iris Dressler are the co-directors of the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart. The team has proven themselves to be innovators in the promotion and presentation of art with a string of endeavors and accomplishments including the founding of Hartware Medien Kunst Verein as an independent platform for the presentation of contemporary art in 1996.