Candida Alvarez is widely regarded as one of her generation’s most highly innovative and experimental painters. Her work has been collected by the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Whitney Museum, El Museo del Barrio, among others. She has been granted the Trellis Art Fund Award, Arts and Letters Award in Art by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Mellon Foundation Latinx Artist Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painter and Sculptors Grant, and more. Alvarez is an alum of Yale School of Art, and held the F.H. Sellers Professorship in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is now Professor Emerit. In Fall 2024 Alvarez was the Alex Katz Chair in Painting at The Cooper Union. She is represented by moniquemeloche, Chicago.

Carla Acevedo-Yates, born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, is a curator and researcher working across the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States. She is the Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives at MCA Chicago, where she curated Carolina Caycedo: From the Bottom of the River, Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora 1990s – Today, the MCA presentation of Duane Linklater: mymothersside, and entre horizontes: Art and Activism Between Chicago and Puerto Rico, among other exhibitions. She previously was Associate Curator at the Broad Art Museum at MSU, where she curated various solo presentations as well as the group exhibition The Edge of Things: Dissident Art Under Repressive Regimes. She is the inaugural recipient of the CCS Bard Alumni Award.