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Artist Maria de Los Ángeles documents the personal, psychological, and emotional experience of being an immigrant. Having crossed the border dividing Mexico and the United States with her five siblings when she was just 11 years old, de Los Ángeles has spent most of her life in the United States. Her undocumented status was never a concern until she had to apply for college—being an undocumented immigrant made her ineligible to receive scholarship. That all changed under the California Dream Act. The law enabled her to attend Pratt Institute under the condition that she match a $20,000 scholarship. De Los Ángeles spent that following summer working hard to sell her artwork, and with the support of the Santa Rosa community, was able to raise the funds necessary to move to New York. Since then, de Los Ángeles has received her MFA from Yale and has founded One City Arts, a two-week program providing art lessons to the Santa Rosa community. As a DACA recipient, de Los Ángeles has been able to work and teach as a visiting professor at Pratt Insitute. With the looming threat of DACA's repeal, the complexities of identity, anxiety, and the overriding beauty in de Los Ángeles's work are all the more salient to understand and empathize with. 

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Camille Henrot

Henrot's diverse practice combines film, drawing, and sculpture. Taking inspiration from subjects as varied as literature, mythology, cinema, anthropology, evolutionary biology, religion and the banality of everyday life, Henrot’s work acutely reconsiders the typologies of objects and established systems of knowledge.

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Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford’s abstractions unite high art and popular culture as unorthodox tableaux of unequivocal beauty. Working in both paint and collage, Bradford incorporates elements from his daily life into his canvases: remnants of found posters and billboards, graffitied stencils and logos, and hairdresser’s permanent endpapers he’s collected from his other profession as a stylist. In The Devil is Beating His Wife, Bradford consolidates all these materials into a pixelised eruption of cultural cross-referencing. Built up on plywood in sensuous layers ranging from silky and skin-like to oily and singed, Bradford offers abstraction with an urban flair that’s explosively contemporary

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Carolee Schneemann

Throughout her career Carolee Schneemann has used her body to examine the role of female sensuality in connection to the possibilities of political and personal liberation from predominantly oppressive social and aesthetic conventions. Drawing on the expressive possibilities of film, performance, photography, and installation, among other media, she has explored themes of generation and goddess imagery, sexuality, and everyday erotics, as well as personal biography and loss. Although renowned for her work in performance and other media, Schneemann began her career as a painter, stating, "I'm a painter. I'm still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas." She continues to perform, film, and record through the present day, and has been acknowledged by many as progenitor of Feminist art, as well as performance and multimedia art.

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Pierre Huyghe

He creates porous and contingent environments, complex systems in which living and non-living, real and symbolic agents evolve.

Although Huyghe intentionally alters the sites in which he works, events and growth are often encouraged to occur without his control. The exhibition is therefore changed irrevocably and unpredictably over the course of the time in which it exists.

For his exhibition at the Serpentine, Huyghe began by selecting a set of images and descriptions and gave them to an individual. As this person recreated these images in their mind, their brain activity was captured by an fMRI scanner, and the data produced was given to a deep neural network, which attempted to reconstruct them, collaging together elements from its own bank of images.

The thousands of attempts of the deep neural network to construct visual representations of a human thought are presented here on large LED screens distributed throughout the gallery. The rhythms and pauses within the succession of images are endlessly modified by conditions in the gallery; sensors detecting light, temperature and humidity levels, the presence of insects, and the gaze of visitors produce a feedback loop.

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Alex Da Corte is a rising star on the international art scene. He works with objects and materials that are detached from their original function to give them new potential both symbolically and formally. In working with these objects, Da Corte tries to put aside his own touch in order to reveal and locate the previous touches, the objects own story. In Alex Da Corte’s artwork objects can even act as stand-ins for people: they represent another kind of language that we can pair together to create these sentences that turn into poetry.

   Da Corte’s works belongs to a state of delusion where logic is put aside in order to access the stranger parts of our brains. In this state, the detached objects may seem to be destroying their own icon but Da Corte reminds us, commonly through the American diners never-changing inventory, the bottle of ketchup and the black cup of coffee, that in believing we can undo the icon, we are setting ourselves up for failure. Alex Da Corte works with large scale installations that often include both wall based works, floor pieces, sculptures, lights, colours and scents as well as works from other artists. Da Corte has roots in the pop-art tradition and an incredible love and feeling for colours as well as a sense of how the high-aesthetic may also contain a sense of humour. However,  the ‘comedy’ is well balanced with more sincere aspects as some of the works turn mournful or macabre or just plain heart breaking.

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Keiichi Tanaami

Keiichi Tanaami’s childhood was marked by the chaos brought about by the Second World War. He was only nine during the Tokyo Air Raid of 1945 and his family relocated from their Tokyo home to Meguro, a suburban residential district, from where he observed over a hundred firebombing attacks on his native city. Images of roaring American airplanes, searchlights, bombs and fleeing masses were deeply lodged in his memory, later becoming his core iconography – a blur of his nightmares and real memories. Other childhood influences included kamishibai – children’s picture card shows performed on the streets of war-torn Tokyo – as well as Tanaami’s obsessive daily cinema visits, where he was particularly drawn to popular monster movies starring glamorous actresses, who also later became motifs in his work. A talented draughtsman, Tanaami graduated in graphic design from the Musashino Art University in 1960. 

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Initially a cartoonist for men's magazines, Tom Wesselmann reduced the classical female nude to her essential components: lips, nips and pubes. His Venuses have tan lines. Cigarettes dangle from their rocket-red mouths. Their crisp outlines resonate with the immediacy of a neon sign. Like the nudes of Titian, Velasquez, or Rubens, Wesselmann's mid-century modern nudes sprawl across furniture in suggestive poses, awaiting a lover the viewer naturally assumes is him. Wesselmann's chief interest was not to draw attention to the subject, but "to make figurative art as exciting as abstract art." He succeeded brilliantly at this, and his work engages our senses - as Jim Dine told him before Wesselmann's first show in New York, "You may be one of America's great painters."

With its fetishistic isolation of erogenous zones (hair, lips, nipples, teeth, etc) Wesselmann's imagery reintroduces the ideal female form to art. Wesselmann's is a post-Abstract-Expressionist incarnation of the ideal body for the consumer age, something to be consumed like a bottle of beer, a tabloid, or a comic book. The most blatantly erotic of the Pop artists, Wesselmann connected commercialism and voyeurism with unprecedented force.

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Keith Sonnier constructs his distinctive abstract and semi-figurative light installations out of neon tubing. Often labeled a Minimalist, Sonnier places bright colors and sparse lines together in ways that heighten the lights’ reflective qualities in a given space. Inspired by both his birthplace of Louisiana and the cultures and geographies he encounters in his travels, Sonnier’s sculptures combine hi-tech industrial materials with organic or corporeal themes. For his “Herd” series (2009), Sonnier used lights and curved steel supports to create free-standing animal sculptures resembling the wildlife found in Africa.

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Anselm Reyle

In the late 1990s, Anselm Reyle began to produce large-scale abstract paintings, found-objects sculptures, and installations with radiating neon colors. Exploring unconventional materials such as Mylar foil or mirrors, Reyle expands upon the prevailing aesthetics of painting and sculpture. With the help of assistants, each composition, whether a stripe painting or crumpled foil composition, can be made in any number of sizes, ranging in scale from the domestic to the monumental. Frequently utilizing motifs that have become trademarks of the modernist canon, Reyle reworks them to invest new meaning and context. “I’m interested in something that has the quality of being a cliché,” says Reyle, “I attempt to grasp the crux and to reinscribe it so that it really gets moving again.”

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Joel Otterson received his BFA at Parson’s School of Design in New York in 1982, and the following year he had his first exhibition at the Gallery Nature Morte, a hub of the late 20th-century avant-garde arts scene. Otterson is an artist at the forefront of the ever-changing field of sculpture. His assemblages deconstruct the domestic environment, calling to question the relationship of the object to the viewer and its environs. Otterson has a deep-seated interest in the forms of Greek vessels and, in his words, how “their genetics have been spread throughout the history of the world.” At times his vessels disappear entirely so that only the decoration remains— call it assemblage through disassemblage.

Copper pipe, pottery and glass, cast metal and bronze, and lacework are the materials that often constitute Otterson’s work. The artist blurs the line between the seemingly disparate spheres of learned and vernacular culture, art, and craft to create both utilitarian and deconstructed, sculptural objects.

Across the arc of his career, Otterson has exhibited at MoMA and the Whitney Biennial in New York, The Broad and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Venice Biennale. His approach to artwork helps him to apprehend the nature of material and visual culture.

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Mai-Thu Perret (b. 1976, Geneva, Switzerland) is known for her multidisciplinary practice that engages feminist politics, literary texts and homemade crafts, alongside a range of 20th century avant-garde and radical art movements, from Constructivism and Dada to Bauhaus design. Demonstrating an interest in Eastern religions, the occult and the natural world, Perret has described her practice as ‘more like a symphony than a single voice’, a notion supported by her fictional narrative, The Crystal Frontier, first realised by the artist in 1999. This ongoing chronicle follows the progress of a group of women who form an autonomous commune in the remote desert of South Western New Mexico in an attempt to escape the shackles of capitalism and patriarchal convention.

Since its inception, Perret’s unique project has evolved across installation, performance, sculpture, textiles and the written word, all produced from the perspective of the commune’s members. The artist’s interest in ancient civilisations and their ‘new age’ interpretation has seen the creation of invented relics, blending traditional, artisanal and spiritual practices with a postmodern aesthetic. Set within a context that is as much motivated by social and political principles, as it is by formal modes of art making, The Crystal Frontier gives rise to a critical questioning of personal and communal identities. Perret’s continually expanding fiction explores how both personalities and objects function within the cultural and social systems they inhabit, the nature of utopia, and the compelling power of revolution and ritual.

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Jenny Holzer

The text-based art of Jenny Holzer appears in places one wouldn't expect to find it. On t-shirts, billboards, parking meters and LED signs (Holzer's signature medium), her stark one-liners call attention to social injustice and shed light on dark corners of the human psyche. "PRIVATE PROPERTY CREATED CRIME," "ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE," and "PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT" are intended to generate debate and make us think critically. A political activist as well as an artist, Holzer's aim is to disrupt the passive reception of information from damaging sources. As her reputation has grown, so has the ambition and scope of her work, which has traveled to public spaces in much of the world. In her profound skepticism toward power, Holzer joins the ranks of anti-authoritarians in art from the birth of modernism (which is itself a rebellion against tradition) through the 21st century.

Both message and medium are equally important in Holzer's work. Her iconic LED signs use the same technology that transmits dates, speeds, temperatures and other impersonal information in public places. This allows her to launch a sneak attack on the urban environment, short-circuiting the system when, in place of the impersonal signage we expect to encounter, we find private, personal, or politically sensitive information.

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Swiss-born artist Nicolas Party works across a wide range of different media. Primarily known for his colour-saturated paintings and murals, he also makes painted sculptures, pastels, installations, prints and drawings, and works as a curator. Party often paints portraits and still lifes of everyday objects, which he strips of all extraneous detail. Rather than creating faithful depictions from nature, he uses these seemingly innocuous subjects as springboards for an exploration into the art of painting itself. His concerns lie, therefore, less in the accurate depiction of nature, and more in its translation and transformation through colour, materials and composition. The challenge is to capture the essence of these subjects in new and revelatory ways, and in so doing to heighten their physical and emotional resonance. Clear forms, painterly precision, a vibrant colour palette and a keen eye for composition coalesce into works that are accessible and seductive but, at the same time, continue a long standing art-historical dialogue between representation and abstraction, and observation and the imagination. Party is also interested in the power of paint to alter our perception of the built environment and, within a gallery context, how we experience art. To this end, he regularly paints murals, either as stand-alone works or as carefully orchestrated settings for his paintings.

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Atsuko Tanaka was known best for her experimental clothing and performances. She made her early paintings by using commercially purchased cloth stretched into canvases. After she joined the Gutai Art Group in 1955, Tanaka became influenced by the group’s preoccupations with chance, time, and space. During that time, Tanaka came to see her body as a malleable artwork, and her entire oeuvre as a form of painting. In one of her best-known works, Electric Dress (1956), she wore and moved around in a garment made from incandescent light bulbs. Other performances involved changing outfits that emphasized constraint or transformation, presented everyday objects for aesthetic consideration, and made engravings on sand.

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David Wojnarowicz's multimedia practice viscerally expressed childhood experiences of abuse, homelessness and prostitution, the struggles of his early adulthood, and later, the horrors of the AIDS crisis. His expansive body of work included painting, installation and collage, film, music, performance and searing prose and memoir. Maturing as an artist in the downtown New York of the 1980s he is associated with multiple artistic and cultural movements, including the East Village Art scene, the Cinema of Transgression, ACT-UP and Gran Fury. His forthright engagement with his own sexuality and the political fury that bubbled beneath much of his work led to several clashes with the forces of censorship and repression. Wojnarowicz's later work is now widely recognized as one of the most articulate and righteously angry responses to the AIDS crisis in the US. Since his death in 1992 of AIDS related illness his work has become an important touchstone for still wounded communities and new generations unfamiliar with the horrors of the time. But the threat of censorship still falls over his work, with right-wing politicians and religious groups still calling for its removal from federally funded institutions.

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"Finding beauty in the commonplace — some may even say banal — is one of artist Willie Cole’s strengths. His ability to rejigger the consumer world around us into something more fantastic creates the illusion that his art springs from the mystical intersection of folk culture, utility, design, contemporary art, and mythology." – Hrag Vartanian, HYPERALLERGIC

Willie Cole's work has been the subject of several one-person museum exhibitions