About Linda Goode Bryant
I have always sought to make art that has the ability to have real life consequences. Its value is measured and increased by its impact and not its purchase price. Where it is discovered andexperienced by the public without mediation and preferably while doing the routines and rituals of daily life. I consider my first major work to be Just Above Midtown Inc. (JAM). The first gallery to exhibit the work of African American and other artists of color in a major gallery district. (1974 – 1986). In the 1990s and early 2000s I began making experimental and documentary films. One of the films, The Vote (2003-2012), focused on why so many enfranchised people across the country chose not to vote in national elections. This led me to create the Active Citizen Project (ACP) which provided ways and opportunities for non-voters and disenfranchised individuals to be more active and effective in having their social, economic, environmental, and cultural priorities addressed by community, local and national leaders. In 2009, ACP’s work shifted from elections to Project EATS (PE), a network of community-based small-plot production farms and programs located in low-wealth communities throughout New York City. PE has built and operated 20 farms in all of the city’s boroughs. PE currently operates 6 small plot farms on approximately 4 acres of land and rooftops providing food, art, and healthy life programs where they are most needed.
 
An interior installation of my work, “Are we really that different?” was on view In Social Works at Gagosian Gallery in New York City in September 2021. The installation combines a hanging farm created in collaboration with the architect, Liz Diller, of Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro with archival, direct cinema footage of former JAM artists shot after the gallery closed.
 
Other projects include: “Infrastructure” a 7-week academy and exhibit of the process of 11 artists and creatives working in different parts of the world who reimagine an infrastructure for art. Infrastructure is a partnership between RAW Materials in Dakar Senegal and the ICA in Philadelphia (2022). Just Above Midtown: 1974 to the Present is an exhibition scheduled to open in October 2022 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
 
Linda is also a Guggenheim Fellow and Peabody Award recipient.

About Glenn Ligon
Glenn Ligon was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1960. He graduated with a BA from Wesleyan University in 1982 and participated in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 1985. His early paintings were largely abstract; he began adding language to them during the mid-1980s in order to explore questions around race, identity, and history. In the text-based works for which he is best known, Ligon looks to prominent writers and cultural figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Gertrude Stein, Jean Genet, James Baldwin, and Richard Pryor for source material. In addition to making paintings, works on paper, and prints, he began creating neons in 2005, incorporating a sculptural component into his practice. His work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1997, 2015), Berlin Biennial (2014), Istanbul Biennial (2011, 2019), and Documenta XI (2002). In 2011, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented America, a comprehensive midcareer retrospective organized by Scott Rothkopf. Recent painting series include Debris Field and Static, which see Ligon move increasingly toward abstraction and varying degrees of legibility to reflect on the instability and limits of language in a “post-truth” world. He is also deeply engaged with the work of other artists and undertakes curatorial projects such as Blue Black at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Saint Louis, Missouri (2017), and Glenn Ligon: All Over the Place at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, England (2024). Ligon lives and works in New York.

About Jules Allen
Jules Allen’s photographs, over four decades, expresses the essential truth that a culture’s power is clearest when presented on its own terms and thus, evocative of the contemporary American experience. His images place subjects, drawn from the richness of an urban black life, within universal paradigms.

Born in San Francisco, CA, in 1947, attended California State University, where he took his Iirst formal photography class, studying with Jack Welpott, a well known, “west coast” portrait and landscape photographer, student and protégé of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Allen obtained a B.A. in Fine Arts in 1973 and M.S. in Clinical Counseling Psychology in 1975, the latter was a conscious choice to facilitate the understanding of human behavior.

Prior to moving to New York, Allen worked as a psychiatric social worker within the criminal justice system in the San Francisco Bay area, which he found an enlightening and profoundly disturbing experience, and credits it as providing a major developmental shift that helped to shape his life and approach to photography. Working as a New York commercial photographer in editorial, advertising and entertainment, Allen actively pursued the development of a personal vision. Early inIluences in photography for Allen were Edward Weston, Cartier Bresson and Robert Frank, as well as Roy deCarava, with whom he studied at Hunter College and obtained a Masters in Fine Arts in 1985.

The recipient of numerous grants and awards, Allen has been widely exhibited in the

U.S. and abroad. His photographs are included in museums and private collections worldwide, inclusive of the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian, the National Gallery, the Schomburg Center for Culture & Research and others.

Mr. Allen currently lives and works in New York. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Department of Art and Design at Queensborough College. In collaboration with QCC Art Gallery Press, he has published six books: “Black Bodies,” “Double Up,” “In Your Own Sweet Way,” “Marching Bands,” “Good Looking Out.”

“The Hats or Hat Nots,” the sixth book, explores the territories of those who make up the overwhelming majority of the black diaspora in the enormous American lands. Its focus, the Hat, and all of its sub-textual trappings: legitimacy, power, honor, righteousness, the glory and resurrection, was released in September 2022.

Allen’s work can be viewed at www.julesallen.photography.

About Vernon Reid
Guitarist and composer Vernon Reid is a true artist, one whose art is a work forever in progress, from his formative years on the downtown New York jazz/ funk/ punk scene with Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society, and in Joe Bowie’s notorious DeFunkt, to his leadership of the pioneering multi-platinum rock band Living Colour, to his collaborations with creative spirits ranging from iconic guitarists Carlos Santana and James ‘Blood’ Ulmer, New Age pioneer LaRaaji, legendary Maliian singer Salif Keita, rock legends Mick Jagger, Jack Bruce, Garland Jeffreys, P-Funk keyboard maestro Bernie Worrell, hip hop pioneers Public Enemy, Pop Superstars Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson, Babyface, Jermaine Jackson, Lady Gaga to choreographers Bill T. Jones, Gabri Christa, and Donald Byrd, and filmmakers Thomas Allen Harris, Brad Lichtenstein, Shola Lynch, and Spike Lee, Vernon Reid remains a musical shape shifter. His solo Verntronics project, which often accompanies his multimedia work in progress, Artificial Africa, has been influenced by the visionary guitarist & producer Robert Fripp’s early Frippertronics tape loop experiments, and Electronica artists such as The Orb, Brian Eno, and Flying Lotus.

About AC Hudgins
Friend of the Artist.

About Tom Finkelpearl
Tom Finkelpearl has been a curator, writer, museum director and public official. He worked 12 years each at PS1 MoMA (as administrator and curator), Queens Museum (Executive Director), and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs (public art program director, then Commissioner). Along with the artist and educator Pablo Helguera, he is writing a book about the state of North American art museums. Finkelpearl is Social Practice Teaching Scholar-in-Residence at City University of New York. He is co-curator of Christine Sun Kim ‘All Day All Night’ currently at the Whitney. 

About Bruce Talamon
Bruce W. Talamon (b. July 31, 1949) is a photographer who grew up in the South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. His photographs catalog the journeys that have taken him around the world.
In 1971 while on foreign study he bought an Asahi Pentax camera. For the last fifty years he has had adventures… He shot the music scene, was a contract photographer for Time Magazine in the 80’s. And he has worked in the motion picture industry for 48 years, shooting action, movie posters and publicity campaigns for feature films.

He has published two books. His work has been collected and exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum, the Grammy Museum, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Duke University, Studio Museum in Harlem, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles.
In 2019 the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery selected his portrait of Earth Wind & Fire to represent one of six inductees for its “Portrait of A Nation” Celebration. His last film project was shooting Stills and creating the movie poster and publicity photographs for the 2020 Universal Pictures film NEWS OF THE WORLD, directed by Paul Greengrass, starring Tom Hanks.

And in the spirit of that next adventure, Bruce likes to share ideas with photographers about the work. “I fear for young photographers today. There is more to photography than just pushing a button. You must be prepared. You must protect your photographs. Now photographers are being called “Content Providers” and everyone wants to own that content. Photographers need to understand what that really means and start conversations about copyright, and taking care of our photographs for the future.”

Bruce is currently working on two documentaries and another book project for TASCHEN Books.

On a historical note, in the summer of 1974 Bruce Talamon was introduced to David Hammons. That meeting sparked a friendship and lifelong conversation that is ongoing. “David taught me to use my eyes. Because of David I have had adventures. And maybe along the way I took some good pictures and didn’t mess up the vibe.”