Al Held: About Space

Chicago-based artist Anna Kunz creates work grounded in a rigorous concern for generative process; her expansive practice emanates from painting, leading to installation and collaboration. She received an MFA from Northwestern University and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kunz participated as an artist-in-residence in the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Brooklyn, The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, among others. Kunz has been honored with nominations from 3Arts Foundation, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Emerging Artist award from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Artadia finalist, Chicago, the Rema Hort-Mann Foundation’s Individual Artists Grant, and The Joan Mitchell Foundation.

Working from a heterogeneous array of cultural traditions, Chris Martin (b. 1954, Washington, D.C.) makes paintings that serve as living documents of the eternal present. Chris Martin has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions worldwide, and his paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other museums. Paintings, a career-spanning monograph, was published by Skira in 2017. Martin lives and works in Brooklyn and the Catskills, New York.

Often cited as a pioneer of installation-art and contributor to the Pattern and Decoration Movement (P&D), Judy Pfaff creates work that spans disciplines and eschews definition. She represented the US in the 1998 Sao Paulo Bienal and is the recipient of many awards including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center (2014), the MacArthur Foundation Award (2004), and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1983). Pfaff lives and works in Tivoli, New York.

Pepe Karmel is a Professor in the Department of Art History, New York University. He is the author of Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (2003), Abstract Art: A Global History (2020), and Looking at Picasso (fall 2023). He has written widely on modern and contemporary art for museum catalogues, as well as for The New York Times, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. He has also curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Robert Morris: Felt Works (Grey Art Gallery, New York, 1989), Jackson Pollock (MoMA, New York, 1998), and Dialogues with Picasso (Museo Picasso Málaga, 2020).