Artists & Designers

Exiled from her home in Iran, New York City-based artist Shirin Neshat investigates the cultural conflicts resulting from the collision of Eastern tradition and Western modernity. Her compelling photographs and poetic video work explore the role of women in Islamic society and their collective cultural identity.

Filmmaker and video artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila was born in Hameenlinna, Finland, in 1959; and lives and works in Helsinki. She attended Helsinki University from 1980-1985; and studied filmmaking at the London College of Printing (1990-1991), University of California, Los Angeles, and the American Film Institute in Los Angeles (1994-1995).

Tony Cragg is an English sculptor whose work focuses largely on materiality. During the early 1980s, he arranged found materials in large installations which create a sense of clinical detachment from the objects and materials that comprise the world. His later work proposes the experience of materials as our primary interface with the world.

Los Angeles-based artist Charles Ray is perhaps best known for his sculptures of altered and refashioned familiar objects, such as mannequins in the form of outsized or unusual depictions of various surrogate people that reflect back to us the human race in odd, often bizarre form. Born in 1953 in Chicago, IL, he received his BFA from the University of Iowa and his MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutg

Alighiero Boetti (also known as Alighiero e Boetti) was born in Turin, Italy in 1940. Along with his Turinese contemporaries Mario Merz and Michaelangelo Pistoletto, Boetti was a participant in arte povera.

Sigmar Polke was born in former East Germany in what is now Olesnica, Poland, in 1941. In 1961 he moved to Dusseldorf, Germany, and began his studies at Düsseldorf Art Academy. Polke first gained attention in the mid-1960s for the works he created as part of the Capitalist Realism group, which included Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg (later Konrad Fischer).