New York–based artist Nate Lowman (b. 1979) deftly mines mass-produced images culled from art history, the news, and popular media, transforming visual signifiers from these distinct sources into a diverse body of paintings, sculptures, collages, prints, and installations. Since the early 2000s, Lowman has continually pushed the boundaries of language and object making with works that are at turns political, humorous, and poetic. Through his art—which dynamically explores themes of representation, celebrity, obsession, and violence—Lowman stages an encounter with commonplace, universally recognizable motifs, questioning and revisiting their intended meanings while creating new narratives in the process. He lives and works in New York.

Lynne Tillman writes novels, stories, and essays. Her most recent work is Mothercare (2022), an autobiographical book-length essay. Tillman’s essays and stories are published in Frieze, Aperture, Tank, and N+1; her essays on contemporary artists, such as Dana Schutz, Steve Locke, Dennis Cooper, Amy Sillman, Robert Gober, and On Kawara, have appeared in monographs and exhibition catalogues. Tillman is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and, in recognition of her contribution to literature, the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York with the bass player David Hofstra.

Jim Lewis is the author of four novels, which have been translated into many languages: Sister (1993), Why the Tree Loves the Ax (1998), The King Is Dead (2003), and Ghosts of New York (2021). He has written extensively on the visual arts, including contributions to some thirty museum and gallery monographs, and he has published criticism, essays, and all manner of reportage for Granta, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and Wired, among other outlets.