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 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.