Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Born in Montreal, Canada, David Deitcher is a writer, art historian, and critic whose essays have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Parkett, Village Voice, and other periodicals, as well as in numerous anthologies and monographs on such artists as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Isaac Julien, and Wolfgang Tillmans. He is the author of Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918 (Abrams, 2001) and curator of its accompanying exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York. Since 2003, he has been core faculty at the International Center of Photography / Bard College Program in Advanced Photographic Studies. He lives in New York City.

Bob Nickas, a writer and curator based in New York, has organized more than 120 exhibitions since 1984. His books include Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting (2014) and four collections of his writings and interviews: Live Free or Die (2000), Theft Is Vision (2007), The Dept. of Corrections (2016), and Komplaint Dept. (2018). Most recently, he has contributed essays to Vija Celmins (2018), Brand New: Art & Commodity in the 1980s (2018), Robert Grosvenor (2020), and Josh Smith: Emo Jungle (David Zwirner Books, 2020).

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was a poet and novelist, best known for his highly lyrical poetry. He was born in Prague, but spent significant portions of his life in Paris, where he initially served as the sculptor Auguste Rodin’s secretary before going on to produce much of his important early work. Throughout his life, Rilke was continuously inspired by works of visual art. His biography of Rodin and his Letters on Cézanne, published posthumously, provide insight into the way visual artists, and their art, figured into his creative approach, and establish him as one of the key twentieth-century poets to engage with visual culture.

Robert Storr is an American artist, critic, and educator who was a curator, and then senior curator, of The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Painting and Sculpture from 1990 to 2002 and from 2005 to 2007. He served as the first American-born director of the Venice Biennale. From 2002 to 2006, he was the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and then dean of the Yale School of Art from 2006 to 2016, where he remains as a professor of painting and printmaking. The exhibition he organized at David Zwirner in 2013 to celebrate the centenary of Ad Reinhardt was voted “Best Show in a Commercial Space in New York” by the US Art Critics Association.