Artist Sam Messer received a BFA. from Cooper Union in 1976 and an MFA. from Yale University in 1982. Mr. Messer has received awards including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant in 1984, the Engelhard Award in 1985, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 1993, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996. He most recently collaborated with the poet Sharon Olds on a print project, and past collaborations include working with Paul Auster on The Story of My Typewriter, and with Denis Johnson on Cloud of Chalk. Sam’s recent solo exhibition I Sing To You was on view in Athens, Greece at the Allouche-Benias Gallery.

Danielle Mckinney (b. 1981, Montgomery, Alabama) creates narrative paintings that often focus on the solitary female protagonist. Engaging with themes of spirituality and self, her paintings uncover hidden narratives and conjure dreamlike spaces, often within the interior domestic sphere. Mckinney’s work is in private and public collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Dallas Museum of Art; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL, among others. Her work has been included in the exhibitions Heroic Bodies at the Rudolph Tegners Museum, Dronningmølle, Denmark, IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY at The Contemporary Austin, and Black Melancholia at Hessel Museum of Art, among others.

Ridley Howard makes paintings that blend vastly different visual languages, among them American Scene Painting, Italian Renaissance, Pop Art and Geometric Abstraction. Subtle and deceptively straightforward, the paintings invoke a sense of monumentality while retaining a lingering intimacy and stillness. He earned his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1999 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2000. He has recently shown at Marinaro Gallery, NY; Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Paris; and elsewhere. His work has been exhibited at numerous institutions, including The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; among others. He lives and works between Athens, Georgia and Brooklyn, NY.

Distinguished Chair and Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College Jason Rosenfeld, Ph.D., has curated the exhibitions John Everett Millais (Tate Britain, Van Gogh Museum), Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate Britain and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), and River Crossings (Olana and Cedar Grove, Hudson and Catskill, New York). He is a co-author of the monograph Cecily Brown (Phaidon, 2020), and a Senior Writer and Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail.