Fritz Chesnut received his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1995 and his MFA from Rutgers University in 1997. Starstruck, his first solo exhibition, was presented at Bellwether in 2002. His paintings have appeared in exhibitions in New York City at White Columns, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Arena Gallery, the Dumbo Arts Center, in Buffalo at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, and in Milan, Italy at Marella Arte Contemporanea. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time Out New York, and Flash Art, among others.

SunTek Chung received his BFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1999 and went on to receive his MFA in Sculpture in 2002 from Yale University. After graduate school he was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

SunTek Chung has exhibited his work nationally and internationally since 1997. He has participated in group shows at Stiftung Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, Germany; Mouri Gallery, Tokyo; Massimo Audeillo, and Art in General, New York. He has had solo exhibition at Samson Projects, Boston and a project room at the MoMA’s P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. SunTek Chung is represented by Collette Blanchard Gallery in New York and Samson Projects in Boston.

Stephen Hannock is an American luminist painter known for his atmospheric landscapes and incendiary nocturnes. He has demonstrated a keen appreciation for the quality of light and for the limitations of conventional materials and techniques for capturing it. His experiments with machine-polishing the surfaces of his paintings give a trademark luminous quality to his work. The larger vistas also incorporate diaristic text that weaves throughout the composition.

His design of visual effects for the 1998 film What Dreams May Come won an Academy Award. His works are in collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. This spring Hannock will receive an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Bowdoin College.

Kalup Linzy is an interdisciplinary artist who is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from Creative Capital, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Jerome Foundation, and Art Matters. His work has been featured in major exhibitions, among them Frequency, Thelma Golden's 2005 survey of emerging African American artists at The Studio Museum in Harlem; Prospect .1 New Orleans, curated by Dan Cameron, and 30 Americans from the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, Florida. His work is also in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Robert Mangold received his BFA and MFA degrees from Yale University and held his first solo exhibition in 1964. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Visual Arts Fellowship (1967), the Skowhegan Medal for Painting (1993), and the Alexej von Jawlensky-Preis der Stadt Wiesbaden Award. In 2000, Phaidon Press published the 300-plus-page monograph Robert Mangold. His work can be found in more than 100 public collections in the United States and abroad, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Collection, London; the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, Netherlands; Fundació "la Caixa," Barcelona; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum Wiesbaden, Germany; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Clifford Ross began his career as a painter and sculptor after graduating from Yale in 1974 with a BA in both art and art history. In 1995, he turned his attention toward photography and other media. Frustrated by the lack of detail available with existing cameras, Clifford invented and patented the "R1" camera in 2002 and made some of the highest resolution large-scale landscapes in the world. His work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. Outside Realism: Clifford Ross Photography, a 10-year survey of his work, is currently at the Austin Museum of Art and Clifford Ross: Mountains and Sea will open in May of this year at the MADRE/Museo Archeologico in Naples, Italy. His work will be the subject of exhibitions this year at Robilant +Voena Galleries/London and Milan, the Alain Noirhomme Gallery/Brussels, and Sonnabend Gallery/New York. He is currently creating a stained-glass wall for the new Federal Courthouse in Austin, Texas, has been shooting his first new Hurricane photographs in eight years, and is developing Harmonium Mountain: A Photographic Opera, an imaginary landscape video based on one still image.

David Salle's work helped define the postmodern sensibility by combining figuration with an extremely varied pictorial language. Major exhibitions of his work have taken place at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Stedelijk Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Castello di Rivoli, and the Guggenheim Bilbao. A group of 15 paintings showed at the Kestnergesellschaft Museum in Hannover, Germany in March of this year.

In 1986 Salle received a Guggenheim fellowship for theater design, and in 1995 he directed the feature film Search & Destroy, starring Griffin Dunne and Christopher Walken. He is a long-time collaborator with the choreographer Karole Armitage, designing sets and costumes for many of her ballets.
 

Tom Slaughter was born in New York City in 1955. He has had more than 30 solo exhibitions in New York, LA, Miami, Vancouver, Germany, and Japan. He has worked as a printmaker in collaboration with Durham Press for 20 years, and his editions are included in the collections of MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has illustrated seven children’s books—including 123, Over Under, and Eats—that have been translated into five languages. His most recent book, entitled Same Same, was just released by Tundra Books. He also works with The New Victory Theater designing the posters for their productions. His poster “Yes We Can” for the Obama campaign was widely seen and exhibited in the exhibition Manifest Hope in Washington, DC, during the inauguration.
 

Hank Willis Thomas, winner of the first ever Aperture West Book Prize for his monograph Pitch Blackness (November 2008), received his BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and his MFA in photography—along with an MA in visual criticism—from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. His work was featured in the exhibition and accompanying catalog, 25 under 25: Up-and-Coming American.

He has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the US and abroad, including the Studio Museum in Harlem; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; Artists Space, New York; The High Museum, Atlanta; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Oakland Museum of California; and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC. His most recent solo show opened at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, February 2009.

Mickalene Thomas is best known for her elaborate paintings composed of rhinestones, enamel, and acrylic paint. Thomas earned her MFA from Yale University in 2002 and, in 2002-2003, participated in the Artist-in-Residence program at the Studio Museum in Harlem. She was included in the recent and critically acclaimed exhibitions 30 Americans at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami; Black Is, Black Ain’t at the Renaissance Society in Chicago; and Greater New York 2005 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City. Her work may also be seen in prestigious public collections, such as the Brooklyn Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, and the Art Institute of Chicago. She shows with Lehmann Maupin, New York; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; and Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles.