Félix González-Torres (1957–1996) was one of the most significant artists in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In its reduced formal vocabulary, conceptual rigor, and evocative use of everyday materials, the artist’s work resonates with meaning that is at once specific and mutable, rigorous and generous, poetic and political. Born in Cuba, the artist studied and lived in the U.S., ultimately dying from AIDS-related causes in 1996.

Kim Sajet is the first woman to serve as director of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. She has been exploring new ways to place personal experience and creativity at the center of learning and civic awareness.

Charlotte Ickes is the Curator of time-based media art and special projects at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery since 2019. Prior to joining the NPG, Ickes was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at MCA Chicago. She has organized exhibitions and public programs at venues including Anthology Film Archives, ICA Philadelphia, MCA Chicago, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Slought, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago.

Josh T Franco is an artist and art historian from West Texas who believes that art history is made by hand. He has presented scholarly and critical work in venues including Stanford University, College Art Association, The Frick Collection, Joan Mitchell Foundation, OCTOBER, Independent Curators International, Gulf Coast, and The Journal of Feminist Scholarship. He has written exhibition-related text for Theaster Gates, Charlotte Hallberg, Zoe Leonard, and Joshua Saunders, among others.

Julie Ault is an artist and curator activating and preserving art’s capacity to effect social change. In art-making that takes the form of exhibition making, art criticism and theory, and historical chronicles, Ault explores how art shapes and is shaped by the political, social, economic, and aesthetic circumstances of a given moment.

Joshua Chambers-Letson is a writer and performance theorist who researches and teaches courses in performance studies, critical race theory, political theory, and queer of color critique. His books and essays ask two central questions: How do black, brown, Asian, queer, and trans people use performance both to survive the destruction and devaluation of their (our) lives and lifeworlds? And how does performance become a means for rehearsing and enacting new worlds and new ways of being in the world together?

Teresita Fernández’s work is characterized by an expansive rethinking of what constitutes landscape: from the subterranean to the cosmic, from national borders, to the more elusive psychic landscapes we carry within. Questions of power, visibility, and erasure are important tenets of Fernández’s work, and she confronts these themes in subtle ways, insisting on intertwining beauty, the socio-political, the intimate, and the immense. Of her conceptual practice, she says, “You look at the landscape, but the landscape also looks back at you; landscape is more about what you don’t see than what you do see.”