Gil Batle was born and raised in San Francisco to Filipino parents, was in and out of five different California prisons over 20 years for fraud and forgery, and is now living on a small island in the Philippines. Batle’s self-taught drawing ability evolved behind bars into sophisticated and clandestine tattooing skills that protected him from murderous gang violence in prisons such as San Quentin, Chuckawalla, and Jamestown— the “Gladiator School.” Where Bloods, Crips, and Aryan Brotherhood gang-bangers in racially segregated cell-blocks rule with intimidation and threat, Batle’s facility for drawing was considered magic by the murderers, drug dealers, and armed robbers whose stories he now recounts in minutely carved detail on fragile ostrich eggshells.

Raymond Materson is a self-taught artist known for miniature pictures that he sews from threads of unraveled socks. He came upon this approach to making art while serving 7 years in prison. He remembered his childhood and how he watched his Grandmother sewing peacefully for hours. His initial sewing efforts required colored threads that he got from pulling apart his socks. He began by sewing sports patches for himself and other inmates. He has continued creating art since his release from prison over 25 years ago. Materson’s story was published in 2002 in Sins and Needles: A Story of Spiritual Mending. Materson has had numerous gallery shows as well as being exhibited in museums and most recently at Christie’s in New York.

Writer and curator Nicole R. Fleetwood is a professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University. She is co-editor of Aperture’s “Prison Nation,” as well as co-curator of Aperture’s touring "Prison Nation" exhibition. She has co-curated exhibitions and programs on art and mass incarceration at the Andrew Freedman Home, Aperture Foundation, Cleveland Public Library, Mural Arts Philadelphia, and Zimmerli Art Museum. Her work has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, NYPL, ACLS, Whiting Foundation, Denniston Hill Residency, Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the NEH.

American art dealer Frank Maresca is co-founder of Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York City. A long-term advocate of Self-Taught, Folk, and Outsider Art, he has championed and showcased the work of artists creating on the margins of the art-historical mainstream for over 35 years. Through many gallery exhibits, museum collaborations, philanthropic work, and key publications (including American Primitive, 1988, Bill Traylor: His Art, His Life, 1991, American Self-Taught, 1993, and American Vernacular, 2002), Maresca has sought to blur the lines that have traditionally separated conventional categories in visual art and vernacular art. He is currently on the advisory board of Raw Vision Magazine, Fountain House Gallery, Intuit in Chicago, and the Art Dealers Association of America.

Curator and art historian Choghakate Kazarian was formerly a curator at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and taught at the École du Louvre. She has curated exhibitions on artists such as Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Karel Appel, and Henry Darger, and she has edited various exhibition catalogues and published on postwar art, outsider art, Marcel Duchamp, and Louis Michel Eilshemius. She is Editor-at-Large at the Brooklyn Rail and is a ph.d. candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she is writing a dissertation on Albert Pinkham Ryder. She is currently a Terra Foundation fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.