Biographical note

New York–based artist Nate Lowman (b. 1979) deftly mines mass-produced images culled from art history, the news, and popular media, transforming visual signifiers from these distinct sources into a diverse body of paintings, sculptures, collages, prints, and installations. Since the early 2000s, Lowman has continually pushed the boundaries of language and object making with works that are at turns political, humorous, and poetic. Through his art—which dynamically explores themes of representation, celebrity, obsession, and violence—Lowman stages an encounter with commonplace, universally recognizable motifs, questioning and revisiting their intended meanings while creating new narratives in the process.

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant; and The Katherine Anne Porter Prize awarded by The American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a professor and writer in residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany.

Andrew Paul Woolbright is an artist, critic, and curator working in Brooklyn. In addition to exhibiting his own work, he is a critic and contributing writer for The Brooklyn Rail, and is the director of the gallery Below Grand on the Lower East Side.

Jim Lewis is the author of four novels, which have been translated into many languages: Sister (1993), Why the Tree Loves the Ax (1998), The King Is Dead (2003), and Ghosts of New York (2021). He has written extensively on the visual arts, including contributions to some thirty museum and gallery monographs, and he has published criticism, essays, and all manner of reportage for Granta, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and Wired, among other outlets.