Place

Barry McGee was born in 1966 in San Francisco, California, where he currently lives and works. He received his BFA in painting and printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991.  Taking inspiration from his upbringing in the Bay Area, folk and craft art, Mexican Muralists, geometric abstraction, and cartoons, McGee’s work balances the formal concerns of fine art with populist representations and communal modes of working. In doing so, he creates a body of work that combines the disparate worlds of street art and fine art. Through his drawings, paintings, and mixed-media installations, the artist creates a visual lexicon that addresses the struggles of contemporary urban life, looking toward his local community while building a world of his own characters, monikers, and motifs.

Laurie Anderson creates large-scale theatrical works that combine a variety of media—music, video, storytelling, projected imagery, sculpture—in which she is an electrifying performer. As a visual artist, her work has been shown at the Guggenheim Museum, SoHo; as well as extensively in Europe, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. She has also released seven albums for Warner Brothers, including Big Science, featuring the song “O Superman,” which rose to number 2 on the British pop charts. In 1999, she staged Songs and Stories From Moby Dick, an interpretation of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel. She lives in New York.

Margaret Kilgallen was born in 1967 in Washington, D.C., and received her BA in printmaking from Colorado College in 1989. Shortly afterward, the artist moved to San Francisco, where she took up surfing and immersed herself in the Mission District street scene. Kilgallen was influenced by the hand-painted signs and colorful murals she saw while biking around her Mission District neighborhood. Additionally, her early experiences as a librarian and bookbinder in the San Francisco Public Library helped the artist develop an encyclopedic knowledge of American folk signs, printmaking, and letterforms. Working on found and salvaged material and graffiti, Kilgallen created works that highlighted the beauty of everyday life.

Pepón Osorio was born in 1955 in Santurce, Puerto Rico, and currently lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1975, Osorio left Puerto Rico and moved to the South Bronx in New York City, where he received a degree in sociology from Lehmann College and began working as a social worker in the Human Resources Administration. He later received an MA in sociology from Columbia University in 1985. Influenced by his experiences as a social worker in The Bronx, Osorio builds a participatory model of art that reflects the lives and stories of his communuities. Through his installations and sculptures, the artist calls attention to issues of race, violence, and gender prevalent in the Latinx community.

Richard Serra was born in 1938 in San Francisco, California. He graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a BA in English Literature in 1961, working at different steel mills to support himself during college. The artist later went on to receive a BFA in 1962 and an MFA in 1964, both from Yale University. In his work, Serra investigated the relationship between space, material, and movement. Through large-scale sculptures and site-specific installations, the artist manipulated mediums such as lead and steel to construct immersive geometric artworks that emphasize materiality and the relationship between the viewer and the spaces in which his works are installed.

Sally Mann was born in 1951 in Lexington, Virginia, where she currently lives and works. She graduated from Hollins College where she received her BA in 1974 and her MA in 1975. Best known for her black-and-white photography, Mann looks to her surroundings for inspiration. Whether documenting the everyday activities of her children or the beauty of the American landscape, Mann’s photographs, ethereal and haunting, touch on themes of loss, intimacy, freedom, and innocence.