Carlos Motta is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores sexuality, gender, and power through historical research and collaborative practice. His mid-career survey Carlos Motta: Pleas of Resistance was presented at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) in 2025 and will travel to OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz in 2026 and will travel to Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen in 2027. Motta has been recognized with numerous fellowships, prizes and awards, including the Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism at Bard College (2025-26), Artist Impact Initiative x Creative Time R&D Fellowship (2023); grants from the Penn Mellon Just Futures Initiative (2023), the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (2019); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008). Motta is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice in the Fine Arts Department at Pratt Institute.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty lives and works in NYC.

In her exhibiting career she has mounted over twenty solo exhibitions at museums and galleries around the world.

Her work is included in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Yale University Art Museum, New Haven, CT; the New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago, IL; and the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, Hanover, NH and dozens of private collections.

Christian Patterson is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily with photography, books, and installation. He also works with archival ephemera, drawing, hand-painted signs, monoprints, readymade objects, sound, and video. His long-form works have been described as a novelistic, subjective documentary of the historical past, and they often deal with themes of the archive, authorship, memory, place, and time. Patterson is the author of Sound Affects, Redheaded Peckerwood, Bottom of the Lake, and Gong Co. He is also a Guggenheim Fellow, winner of the Grand Prix Images Vevey, a New York Public Library Picture Collection Artist Fellow, James Castle House resident, and Pollock-Krasner Foundation grantee. His work is in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Milwaukee Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and his handmade books are in many institutional artist book collections.

Helina Metaferia is an interdisciplinary artist working across collage, sculpture, video, performance, and social engagement. Metaferia’s solo exhibitions include Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA (2024-2025); RISD Art Museum, Providence, RI (2022-2023); and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2021-2022). Her work was included in the 2023 Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates. Group exhibitions include Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2025); Fondazione Merz, Turin, Italy (2025); Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN (2023); The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD (2023); and Modern Art Museum Gebre Kristos Desta Art Center, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (2019). Her work is in several museum collections, including Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Bronx Museum of the Arts; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY. 

Metaferia received her MFA from Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Studio Museum in Harlem Magazine, Artnet, ArtNews, Artforum, BOMB Magazine, and Hyperallergic. A short documentary based on her art practice, titled "Our Songs: By Way of Revolution," premieres in film festivals this year. Metaferia is an Assistant Professor at Brown University, and lives and works in New York City.

Fia Backström (Stockholm, Sweden, 1970) lives and works in New York.

Backström maintains a longstanding inquiry into the fabric of the social. The artist probes relationality through disparate histories of image production, collectivity, poetry, and exhibition-making while agitating the social life of images and language. Methodology becomes a medium to attune to the shifting shapes of collectivity. Installations include photography, video, text, and performance, and are enacted by frequently incorporating works by others artists as well as peers, visitors and institutional staff alike. Recent exhibitions in the US and abroad include: The Great Society, Queens Museum, New York (2025), The last of US—that safe space above I in the word life, The Kitchen, New York (2022), and Facing Her Land – notes from elsewhere, Thielska Museum, Stockholm (2019). Backström represented Sweden in the Venice Biennale (2011), participated in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011), Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York (2015) and was the subject of a survey at the Artist’s Institute (2015.) Backström is a 2026 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and is Associate Professor at The Cooper Union. The work is included in the permanent collections of Moderna Museet and the Whitney Museum.