February 12-Gary Simmons, artist

Jenny Holzer is internationally recognized for her daring approach to public art and her dramatic site-specific installations in galleries and museums. Since the mid-1970s, Holzer has used language as her primary means of expression, delivering various statements and stories through a wide range of media. Beginning with inexpensively printed posters, Holzer’s art has steadily evolved in sophistication, expanding into a lexicon that includes advertising billboards, radio, television, clothing, and the medium she is most associated with—the electronic sign.

Howard Rachofsky is an internationally renowned collector of contemporary art living in Dallas. He began collecting in the mid-1970s, and over the past three decades has amassed a world-class collection of paintings, sculpture, video, and installation art by many of the era’s greatest artists, including Robert Irwin, Donald Judd, Anselm Kiefer, Jeff Koons, Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, and Mark Rothko, among many others.

Bruce Nauman is one of the most influential artists working in the world today. The quintessential multi-media artist, Nauman has been a pioneer of performance and body art, conceptual photography, the use of language and sound as mediums, as well as video and site-specific installations. The Museum has recently acquired a new room-sized installation by the artist, Studio Mix, 2010. The work is inspired by a set of piano exercises that the composer Béla Bartók (1881–1945) wrote as a means of teaching children the piano.

Marlon Blackwell, FAIA, practices architecture in Fayetteville, Arkansas and serves as Distinguished Professor and Department Head in the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas. Recognized throughout his career with honors and awards, Blackwell received a 2012 AIA Institute Honor Award and the 2012 Architecture Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for a unique use of design strategies that draw upon vernaculars and contradictions of place to transgress conventional boundaries for architecture.

Brooklyn-based artist KAWS (born Brian Donnelly) has received critical acclaim for the ease with which he straddles the commercial and fine art worlds. KAWS’s paintings, sculptures, prints, editioned toys, apparel, and other products deftly reference popular culture and the history of modern painting as they reflect the chaotic nature of contemporary life. KAWS has exhibited his work widely, and his piece Where the End Starts, 2011, was chosen for acquisition from the Modern’s Focus Show series last year.

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.

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 Auping, chief curator at the Modern, worked with London’s National Portrait Gallery curator Sarah Howgate on Lucian Freud: Portraits, contributing an essay to the exhibition catalogue as well as a series of interviews with the artist, who was often described as reclusive.

David Dawson, painter and longtime assistant and friend of Lucian Freud, shares personal insights and thoughts on his 20-year relationship with the brilliant and driven artist for this Tuesday Evenings at the Modern. Photographing Freud and his studio over the years, Dawson explained to the Guardian that his photographic documentation was an "honest record" of their relationship, commenting that working with Freud was "never a burden, but certainly a commitment."