Margaret Kilgallen was born in 1967 in Washington, D.C., and received her BA in printmaking from Colorado College in 1989. Shortly afterward, the artist moved to San Francisco, where she took up surfing and immersed herself in the Mission District street scene. Kilgallen was influenced by the hand-painted signs and colorful murals she saw while biking around her Mission District neighborhood. Additionally, her early experiences as a librarian and bookbinder in the San Francisco Public Library helped the artist develop an encyclopedic knowledge of American folk signs, printmaking, and letterforms. Working on found and salvaged material and graffiti, Kilgallen created works that highlighted the beauty of everyday life.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby was born in 1983 in Enugu, Nigeria, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. The artist received her BA from Swarthmore College in 2004 and her MFA from Yale University in 2011. Akunyili Crosby uses painting, drawing, printmaking, and collage to reflect the complex construction of her own identity and those around her. Layering paintings with material from her ever-growing personal archive of Nigerian magazines, album covers, traditional Igbo patterns, and personal photographs, the artist creates a visual language that celebrates the evolving cultural, social, and individual dynamics of diaspora. 

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. 

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.

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.

Heidi Lau was born in 1987 and grew up in Macau, China, and currently lives and works in New York City. Lau received her BFA from New York University in 2008, where she primarily studied printmaking and drawing. Dissatisfied with these mediums, the artist taught herself to make ceramics, creating works that evoke miniature architectures, funerary vessels, and creatures drawn from Taoist mythology. Building her works by hand, Lau channels and fuses her interests and influences into otherworldly objects that perforate the boundaries between the human and the spiritual.