CREATE.

Gabriel Orozco was born in Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, in 1962 and studied at the Escuela Nacional de Arte Plasticas in Mexico City, and at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain. An avid traveler, Gabriel Orozco uses the urban landscape and the everyday objects found within it to twist conventional notions of reality and engage the imagination of the viewer. Orozco’s interest in complex geometry and mapping find expression in works like the patterned human skull of Black Kites, the curvilinear logic of Oval Billiard Table, and the extended playing field of the chessboard in Horses Running Endlessly.

Jeff Wall was born in Vancouver in 1946. Attentive to the accidental encounters that can inspire an image, he recreates flashes of inspiration obtained from sources as varied as personal recollections to something noticed on the street, to daydreams, and encounters with paintings or photographs. With an idea in mind, Wall goes to exacting lengths to produce the picture, which may include constructing a scene from scratch, factoring in the position of the sun over several weeks, and improvisational rehearsals with performers. Wall’s pictures include both fantastical scenes—a picnic with vampires, dead troops conversing, a grave flooded by the ocean—and vernacular images of people on the margins of society or in moments of exchange and quiet contemplation.

Adams’ professional breakthrough followed the publication of his first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, which included his famous image “Monolith, the Face of Half Dome.” The portfolio was a success, leading to a number of commercial assignments.

Between 1929 and 1942, Adams’ work and reputation developed. Adams expanded his repertoire, focusing on detailed close-ups as well as large forms, from mountains to factories. He spent time in New Mexico with artists including Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe and Paul Strand. He began to publish essays and instructional books on photography.

During this period, Adams joined photographers Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans in their commitment to affecting social and political change through art. Adams’ first cause was the protection of wilderness areas, including Yosemite. After the internment of Japanese people during World War II, Adams photographed life in the camps for a photo essay on wartime injustice.

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, filmmaker and activist. Her work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s, after the military coup against elected president Salvador Allende. Vicuña began creating "precarious works" and quipus in the mid 1960s in Chile, as a way of "hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard." Her multi-dimensional works begin as a poem, an image that morphs into a film, a song, a sculpture, or a collective performance. These ephemeral, site-specific installations in nature, streets, and museums combine ritual and assemblage. She calls this impermanent, participatory work “lo precario” (the precarious): transformative acts that bridge the gap between art and life, the ancestral and the avant-garde. Her paintings of early 1970s de-colonized the art of the conquerors and the "saints" inherited from the Catholic Church, to create irreverent images of the heroes of the revolution.

Gonçalo Mabunda is interested in the collective memory of his country, Mozambique, which has only recently emerged from a long and terrible civil war. He works with arms recovered in 1992 at the end of the sixteen-year conflict that divided the region.

In his sculpture, he gives anthropomorphic forms to AK47s, rocket launchers, pistols and other objects of destruction. While the masks could be said to draw on a local history of traditional African art, Mabunda's work takes on a striking Modernist edge akin to imagery by Braque and Picasso. The deactivated weapons of war carry strong political connotations, yet the beautiful objects he creates also convey a positive reflection on the transformative power of art and the resilience and creativity of African civilian societies.

Albert Namatjira was an Australian Arrente artist largely credited with pioneering contemporary indigenous Australian art and popularizing it worldwide. Namatjira was born on July 28, 1902 in Alice Springs, Australia and adopted Christianity at an early age, dividing his cultural upbringing between a Western and Aboriginal one. He was taught to paint by Rex Batterbee while he guided the artist around Central Australia and had his first solo show two years later in Melbourne, becoming an overnight sensation. His paintings often depict color-contrasted landscapes: purple rolling mountains in the background and bright white trees in the foreground, such as Ghost Gum, Glen Helen (1949) and Alice Springs Country (1955). Namatjira's work drew the attention of Queen Elizabeth II, who awarded him the Queen's Coronation Medal in 1953. Despite his fame, Namatjira gave most of his newfound wealth away to his Arrente family and found himself living in extreme poverty. He was later incarcerated for the murder of an Aboriginal woman, and Namatjira died soon after charges were dropped on August 8, 1958 in Alice Springs, Australia at the age of 57.

Abigail DeVille was born in 1981 in New York, where she lives and works. Maintaining a long-standing interest in marginalized people and places, DeVille creates site-specific immersive installations designed to bring attention to these forgotten stories, such as with the sculpture she built on the site of a former African American burial ground in Harlem.

Tracey Emin is often called the "bad girl of British art" for her raucous public appearances and self-righteous art which are quite contrary to societal norms in England, and previous notions of femininity. She is best known for her deeply personal and confessional artwork that she promotes through her celebrity and use of the popular media. Personal traumatic events such as unreported rape, public humiliation, sexism, botched abortions, alcoholism, and promiscuity have been her topics. The quality of Emin's artwork is often contested, from the critique of expressionism, to the politics of female representation. However, it is this collapse of the identity of the artist and her work that begs for rigorous thought.

Asger Jorn was one of the most talented painters of the 1950s, and one of the most talented abstract artists of any era. Training under such luminaries as Wassily Kandinsky and Fernand Léger, he went on to fundamentally influence the development of Abstraction in the post-war period as a fellow traveler of European movements such as Art Informel. He was also a cofounder of both the CoBrA and Situationist International groups, both of which were central to the emergence of a new, politically radical artistic credo during the 1960s. As such, Jorn's work represents a vital bridge between the advances of the early twentieth century and the re-emergence of avant-garde sensibilities in the later decades of the twentieth century.

Chéri Samba or Samba wa Mbimba N’zingo Nuni Masi Ndo Mbasi (born December 30, 1956 in Kinto M’Vuila) is a
painter from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is one of the most famous contemporary African artists, with his
works being included in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in
New York. He has been invited to participate in the 2007 Venice Biennale. His paintings almost always include text
in French and Lingala, commenting on life in Africa and the modern world. Chéri Samba lives in Kinshasa and
Paris.
Chéri Samba was born in Kinto M’Vuila as the elder son of a family of ten children. His father was a blacksmith and
his mother a farmer. In 1972, at the age of 16 he left the village to find work as a sign painter in the capital Kinshasa.

Frank Buffalo Hyde, a Southwestern born artist who traces his heritage to the Nez Perce and Onondaga people, has been recognized for breaking through the boundaries that many place around what they think Native American art should look like. He is defining himself as a Native American without being a stereotype dealing with what he calls the "fragmented contemporary life" of a Native U.S. citizen.

Hyde grew up in central New York, and then returned to New Mexico to study at the Santa Fe Fine Arts Institute and the Institute of American Indian Arts. He's been exhibiting his work for over 15 years -- since he was 18 -- showing in many Santa Fe galleries as well as in Chicago, New York and San Francisco. Having established himself in the competitive Santa Fe art market, he felt comfortable moving away and keeping up his career there from a distance.

"From Buenos Aires, Argentina. I’m a Fashion photographer and Art Director. My work is a search of the Self, an exercise to eliminate imposed histories, cultures and ideas. The experience of migrating from my country has become a fertile ground for creativity and exploration, making me think about the idea of selfhood, identity and home in a foreign space. Being a woman in this generation also have me the strength to embrace beauty in its more profound way. My eyes are guided by all these attitudes and state of mind, which are depicted when the camera is lifted to the eye. The invisible moment that an image reveals your thoughts it is what defines photography for me."

Barbara Kruger is an American Conceptual artist known for her combination of type and image that conveys a direct feminist cultural critique. Her works examine stereotypes and the behaviors of consumerism with text layered over mass-media images. Rendered with black-and-white, red accented, Futura Bold Oblique font, inspired by the Constructivist Alexander Rodechenko, her works offer up short phrases such as “Thinking of You,” “You are a captive audience,” and “I shop therefore I am.” Like multimedia artist Jenny Holzer, Kruger uses language to broadcast her ideas in a myriad of ways, including prints, T-shirts, posters, photographs, electronic signs, and billboards. “I'm fascinated with the difference between supposedly private and supposedly public and I try to engage the issue of what it means to live in a society that's seemingly shock-proof, yet still is compelled to exercise secrecy,” she explained of her work. Born on January 26, 1945 in Newark, NJ, Kruger worked as a graphic designer and art director after studying at both Syracuse University and Parsons School of Design (where she studied under Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel) in the 1960s. Her early career path directly influenced the style her art would eventually take. She currently lives and works between New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA.

The visionary lone painter, Remedios Varo, typically portrays herself sitting at a desk engaged in magical work, embarking on a journey to unlock true meaning, or dissolving completely into the environment that surrounds her. As a well-studied alchemist, seeker, and naturalist, however dreamlike her imagery may appear, it is in fact reality observed more clearly; Varo painted deep, intuitive, and multi-sensory pictures in hope to inspire learning and promote better individual balance in an interconnected universe. Interestingly, and understandably, it was not until the last 13 years of the artist's life, having fled war-torn Europe, found home in Mexico (amongst a community of other displaced Surrealists) and finally become free of ongoing financial constraints that she was able to paint prolifically. Every work completed by Varo demonstrates profound technical skill and an extraordinary insight into human nature.

Nan Goldin is an American photographer known for her deeply personal and candid portraiture. Goldin’s intimate images act as a visual autobiography documenting herself and those closest to her, especially in the LGBTQ community and the heroin-addicted subculture. Her opus The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1980–1986) is a 40-minute slideshow of 700 photographs set to music that chronicled her life in New York during the 1980s. The Ballad was first exhibited at the 1985 Whitney Biennial, and was made into a photobook the following year. “For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It's a way of touching somebody—it's a caress,” she said of the medium. “I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.” Born Nancy Goldin on September 12, 1953 in Washington, D.C., the artist began taking photographs as a teenager to cherish her relationships with those she photographed, as well as a political tool to inform the public of issues that were important to her.

Nnenna Okore was born in Australia, though raised in Nigeria. In her long career as an artist-researcher-teacher, she has focused on exploring art processes that are connected to learning, artistic experiences, environmental awareness and sustainable practices through participation.

Over the years, as a Chicago art practitioner, she has been involved in numerous socially engaged art projects and exhibitions designed to produce dialogue, artmaking and an awareness of current environmental issues. In her most recent art projects, she used bioplastic and environmentally friendly materials from food waste to create new works. Okore is passionate about bringing people together to dialogue on environmental issues and is currently involved in collaborative environmental projects in Australia.

Cuban-born artist Alexandre Arrechea's broad, multimedia practice examines social conditions. He explores themes relating to socio-economic realities, power, secrecy, social control, and surveillance in public and domestic spaces. From large public sculptures to paintings, drawings, video, interactive installations, and arrangements of found objects, the artist has exhibited work in a variety of formats in exhibitions that include biennials in Havana, Johannesburg, São Paulo, Shanghai, Taipei, Moscow, Thessaloniki, Gwangju, and Venice. His art features in the collections of major institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Caja de Burgos; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana.