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.

Callum Innes, an artist living and working in Edinburgh, Scotland, is known for his meditative process of applying and removing paint until he achieves the perfect balance of give-and-take in his monochrome works. Short-listed for the 1995 Turner Prize and similarly recognized throughout his career, Innes’s paintings are pure in their approach while complex in their effect. The Modern’s collection includes Exposed Painting: Mars Black, 2002, part of a series for which Innes has become known.

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.