Dr. Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta artist, academic, and composer. She received a BFA in Fine Art and Composition from the California Institute of the Arts in 2013, an MFA in Fine Art and Music/Sound from the Milton Avery Graduate School of Fine Arts at Bard College in 2018, and is currently a PhD candidate in Fine Art at Concordia University. Fusing scholarship with creative practice, Kite explores Lakȟóta mythologies, ontologies, and philosophies, alongside computational systems, machine learning, and AI—investigating the complex dynamics between the individual and technology through sound, video, sculpture, performance, installation, writing, and countless other modes of expression.

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Kite has had recent solo exhibitions and film retrospectives at CARA, New York; the Fisher Center, Bard University; LightWorks, Syracuse University; the Vera List Center, New York; Broadway Gallery, New York; and Anthology Film Archives, New York; among others.

Candice Lin is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Altadena, California. She received a BA in Visual Arts and Semiotics from Brown University in 2001 and an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. Working with a vast array of organic and synthetic materials, Lin creates elaborate installations that probe subjects ranging from the consequences of colonization to fictions of authenticity and value systems established by global trade.

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Lin has had recent exhibitions at Canal Projects, New York; Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan; the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive; Spike Island, Bristol; the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Harvard University; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; among others. Her work is in public collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Walker Art Center.

Joe Minter is an artist and cultural historian living in the Titusville neighborhood of Birmingham, surrounded by his magnum opus, a sprawling didactic artwork that he has dubbed the African Village in America. Built on land adjacent to both his home and the Shadow Lawn Memorial Gardens, a historically Black cemetery, the environment is constructed almost entirely from discarded elements, a direct symbolic gesture reflecting his belief that African Americans have themselves been discarded throughout American history.

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Minter began work on the African Village in America in the summer of 1989, in response to an announcement that the city of Birmingham was planning to build a civil rights museum. He worried that the “foot soldiers” would be left out of the official narrative and got to work making a literal place for them. Individual artworks document the Civil Rights Movement, the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, American participation in various wars and conflicts, terrorist attacks, and the legacies of slavery.

There are, of course, moments of respite from the turmoil of the modern world with an implicit honoring of ancestors, loved ones, faith, and an essential acknowledgement of the power of love. Minter’s artistic education was obtained through years spent doing metal work and construction which afforded him the knowledge and practical experience needed to create the thousands of artworks that populate his environment’s ever-expanding site and increasingly, museums across the globe including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., among others.

Rose B. Simpson is a mixed-media artist living and working in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico. She received a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2007, an MFA in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2011, and an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2018. Creating ceramic sculpture, metalwork, performance, music, installation, writing, and car design, Simpson expresses the individual and socio-political impacts of a postmodern and postcolonial world.

Through her work, she conjures the multigenerational, matrilineal, and Indigenous realms of her experience to explore self, family, gender, and the intersection of the organic and manufactured.

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Simpson has had recent solo exhibitions at Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; John Micahel Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan; the Fabric Workshop Museum, Philadelphia; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; among others. Her work is in public collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.