William Lamson is a Brooklyn-based artist recognized for an inventive body of work that, as described on National Public Radio, uses “inexpensive materials and simple structures” to create “visuals that are mesmerizing and, in a word, playful.” Addressing issues of masculinity, amateurism, science, play, and the quixotic quest for personal heroism, Lamson speaks to the spirit of ingenuity in sculptures, photographs, and performances that broaden horizons and entertain the imagination.

Tony Scherman is a Canadian artist renowned for his encaustic paintings found in collections throughout North America and Europe. Erudite and passionate, Scherman brings a wealth of research and a tremendous facility for painting to his melancholic portraits that press hard into the space of the viewer. As Lilly Wei explains in the exhibition catalogue About 1865, “Scherman has an impulse to destabilize precedents, to seek transformations and to view ideologies with skepticism, to be conceptually vigilant.

Joseph D. Ketner II is currently the Henry and Lois Foster Chair in Contemporary Art, Distinguished Curator-in-Residence, at Emerson College, a position that follows his post as the chief curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum where he organized Andy Warhol the Last Decade. As a preview to the exhibition's opening on February 14, Ketner shares insight and expertise on the subject in his presentation Who is Andy Warhol. He explains that, “Warhol is as misunderstood as he is famous.

Peruvian-born artist Gabriel Acevedo Velarde recently embarked on a gradual move from Lima, Peru, to Mexico City to São Paolo, Brazil, and then to New York and Berlin. He uses experiences from his travels to inform his multimedia installations as featured in the Modern’s second FOCUS exhibition of 2010.

John Smith is a British filmmaker living and working in London, where he also teaches part-time as Professor of Fine Art at the University of London. Smith has received notoriety and praise for films that are strongly influenced by the Structural Materialist ideas that dominated British filmmaking during his formative years. Also fascinated by the immersive power of narrative and the spoken word, Smith has developed a body of work that deftly subverts the boundaries between documentary and fiction, representation and abstraction.

Amy Blakemore has been described as an artist who “takes photographs in order to explore the ways in which memory both records and transforms visual information.” (Amy Blakemore: Photographs 1988–2008, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) Blakemore, trained in the documentary tradition, is known for her small-scale photographs that suggest random snapshots while evoking something personal and poetic, something that puzzles and lingers.

Liam Gillick is an artist living and working in London and New York, and a lecturer at Columbia University, New York, as well as a writer and theorist. Gillick’s sculptures, installations, public projects, film scores, theoretical writing, design objects, and videos often center on social, economic, and political systems, and society's relationships and reactions to such structures.

New York-based artist R. H. Quaytman and art historian Rhea Anastas recount the three-year run of Orchard, a Lower East Side gallery operated by a collective of artists, writers, and film and video makers in their presentation titled, May I Help You? A Short History of Orchard, 2005–2008 and a Spreadsheet.

Kenneth Goldsmith, a New York-based poet whose writing has been described as, “some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry” by Publishers Weekly, is founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (ubu.com), and among other endeavors, is also the editor of I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was the basis for the opera, “Trans-Warhol”, that premiered in Geneva in 2007.

Dr. Michael Corris is an artist, art historian, and writer on art. He is a member of the Conceptual art group Art & Language, a founding editor of The Fox and Red-Herring, and an editor of Transmission Annual.