Paul McCarthy with Dan Cameron

Widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists. Born in 1945, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multi-faceted artistic practice, which sought to break the limitations of painting by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums – from performance, photography, film and video, to sculpture, drawing and painting. He earned a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969, and an MFA in multimedia, film and art from USC in 1973. For 18 years, McCarthy taught performance, video, installation, and art history in the New Genres Department at UCLA, where he influenced future generations of west coast artists and he has exhibited extensively worldwide.

A New York-based curator, art writer, and educator whose professional career began with his 1982 New Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition, Extended Sensibilities: Homosexual Presence in Contemporary Art, the first museum effort in the US to examine gay & lesbian identity in art. During his eleven years as Senior Curator at the New Museum (1995-2006), Cameron organized survey exhibitions of David Wojnarowicz, Martin Wong, Marcel Odenbach, and Pierre et Gilles, among many others. While serving as artistic director of international biennials from Istanbul and Taipei to Newport Beach, CA and Cuenca, Ecuador, Dan is probably best-known as the founding director of Prospect New Orleans, organized to assist in the cultural rebuilding of the city after Hurricane Katrina; and in 2016 he organized the exhibition When Jackie Met Ethyl on Jackie Curtis and Ethyl Eichelberger at Howl! Happening on NYCs Lower East Side.