Barry McGee was born in 1966 in San Francisco, California, where he currently lives and works. He received his BFA in painting and printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991.  Taking inspiration from his upbringing in the Bay Area, folk and craft art, Mexican Muralists, geometric abstraction, and cartoons, McGee’s work balances the formal concerns of fine art with populist representations and communal modes of working. In doing so, he creates a body of work that combines the disparate worlds of street art and fine art. Through his drawings, paintings, and mixed-media installations, the artist creates a visual lexicon that addresses the struggles of contemporary urban life, looking toward his local community while building a world of his own characters, monikers, and motifs. 

In the 1980s, Kiki Smith literally turned the figurative tradition in sculpture inside out, creating objects and drawings based on organs, cellular forms, and the human nervous system. This body of work evolved to incorporate animals, domestic objects, and narrative tropes from classical mythology and folk tales. Life, death, and resurrection are thematic signposts in many of Smith’s installations and sculptures. The recurrent subject matter in Smith’s work has been the body as a receptacle for knowledge, belief, and storytelling.

Xu Bing was born in 1955 in Chongqing, China, and grew up in Beijing. Fascinated with visual and written languages, Xu builds mixed-media installations that simultaneously evoke and subvert centuries-old Chinese cultural traditions, such as calligraphy, wood-block printing, and landscape painting scrolls. The artist asks viewers to consider how our cultural backgrounds, especially those shaped by language, fundamentally color our worldviews.

Vija Celmins received international attention early on for her renditions of natural scenes—often copied from photographs that lack a point of reference, horizon, or discernable depth of field. Armed with a nuanced palette of blacks and grays, Celmins renders these limitless spaces—seascapes, night skies, and the barren desert floor—with an uncanny accuracy, working for months on a single image. Celmins has a highly attuned sense for organic detail and the elegance of imperfection. A master of several mediums, including oil painting, charcoal, and multiple printmaking processes, Celmins matches a tangible sense of space with sensuous detail in each work.