Phong H. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, Publisher and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, the River Rail, Rail Editions, and Rail Curatorial Projects. Bui has organized over seventy exhibitions since 2000, including Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, an ongoing curatorial project that was exhibited in 2019 as an official Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale, at Colby Museum in Waterville, Maine, and most recently at seven venues across New York in 2022. He is a trustee of Studio in a School, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Fountain House, Floating Forest Residency Program, Mildred’s Lane, Denniston Hill, Anthology Film Archives, the Third Rail, the Miami Rail, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Second Shift Studio Space of Saint Paul, AICA (2007-2020), and is co-founder of the Monira Foundation at Mana Contemporary. He was a senior critic at Yale MFA, Columbia University MFA, and University of Pennsylvania MFA, and has taught graduate seminars in MFA Writing and Criticism and MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts. In addition to numerous other awards, Bui was the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from University of the Arts in 2020 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts in 2021. Bui lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Marilyn Minter (b. 1948, USA) is an artist based in New York. Her work has been the subject of many solo exhibitions, including a recent exhibition, All Wet, at MOCO Montpellier, France in 2021. From 2015 through 2017, her retrospective, Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, traveled to the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (TX); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (CO); the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (CA); and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn (NY). Her video Green Pink Caviar was on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from 2010-2011.

Minter is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant (2006) and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1998). Minter’s work is in the collections of many museums globally, including the MIT List Center, Cambridge (MA); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (CA); the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MA); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (NY); the Perez Art Museum, Miami (FL); the Tate Modern, London (U.K); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (NY); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (NY), among many others.

Minter is represented by LGDR, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong/Seoul, and Baldwin Gallery, Aspen.

Derrick Adams (b. 1970, Baltimore, MD) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He received his BFA from Pratt University, New York, in 1996 and graduated with an MFA from Columbia University, New York, in 2003. Adams has held numerous teaching positions and is currently a tenured assistant professor in the School of Visual, Media and Performing Arts at CUNY Brooklyn College. He also holds an honorary doctorate from Maryland Institute College of Art.

Adams celebrates and expands the dialogue around contemporary Black life and culture through scenes of normalcy and perseverance. He has developed an iconography of joy, leisure, and the pursuit of happiness within a practice that encompasses paintings, sculptures, collages, performances, videos, and public projects. Adams synthesizes representational imagery with planar Cubist geometry to produce multifaceted figures and faces that address the richness of the Black experience.

In 2022, Adams established Charm City Cultural Cultivation, an organization to support and encourage underserved communities in the city of Baltimore through events conducted by three entities: The Last Resort Artist Retreat, a residency program that subscribes to the concept of leisure as therapy for the Black creative; The Black Baltimore Digital Database, a collaborative counter-institutional space for collecting, storing, and safekeeping the data of local archival initiatives; and Zora’s Den, an online community of Black women writers started in January 2017, which has since expanded into in-person writing workshops, a writers’ circle, and a monthly reading series that strive to promote instruction, support, and social engagement.

Adams has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions such as The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland (2022); The Momentary, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2021); Hudson River Museum, Yonkers (2020); and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2018). The artist has mounted public installations commissioned through Art at Amtrak at NYC Penn Station, New York (2023); MTA Arts & Design at the Nostrand Avenue LIRR Station, Brooklyn (2020–ongoing); and RxART at NYC Health + Hospitals/Harlem (2019–ongoing). His work has been featured in notable group exhibitions including The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore (2023); Packaged Black: Derrick Adams & Barbara Earl Thomas, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2022); Textures: The History and Art of Black Hair, Kent State University Museum (2021–2022); and Performa, New York (2015, 2013, 2005). His art resides in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and the Birmingham Museum of Art, among many others.