Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally acclaimed for her large-scale multimedia installations, public projects, and performance collaborations. Her site-responsive process works with common materials to invoke particular places, collective voices, and communities of labor. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her ephemeral environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites. From 1985 to 1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Hamilton has served on the faculty of The Ohio State University since 2001, where she is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Art.

Michael Mercil lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he teaches in the Department of Art at The Ohio State University. His art explores realms of “the near, the low, the common” in two and three dimensions as well as in landscape architecture, film, performance, and farming. Mercil has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the United States. His recently opened Art Market™, is an ongoing, studio-based project located in a southside Columbus neighborhood. Mercil’s writings have appeared in Anthropocene, PLACES, Post Road, Public Art Review, and TriQuarterly. His essay, co-authored with Amanda Gluibizzi, on Lucy Lippard’s, “Dematerialization of the Art Object …” is included in the Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature, published in 2016.