Nayland Blake is an artist, writer, educator and curator. Born in New York City in 1960, they attended Bard College and then California Institute of the Arts. After receiving their MFA, they moved to San Francisco in 1984. They have had one-person exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; University Art Museum, Berkeley; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in SanFrancisco, and the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College. Their works are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Brooklyn Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and many others. In 2019, a retrospective of their work entitled “No Wrong Holes, Thirty Years of Nayland Blake” was organized by the ICA, Los Angeles and traveled to The List Center at MIT. They have authored numerous catalogue essays, as well as articles and interviews appearing in such publications as Artforum, Out, Interview, and Outlook, and in 2025 those were collected and published as My Studio Is A Dungeon Is The Studio, by Duke University Press. In 1995 they were co-curator, with Lawrence Rinder, of the landmark exhibition In A Different Light, at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, the first museum exhibition to examine the impact of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Queer artists on contemporary art. In 2017 they curated Tag, Propositions on Queer Play and the Way Forward at the ICA Philadelphia. From 2002 until 2020 they were the founding chair of the ICP/Bard MFA program at the International Center for Photography in New York. They are the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. They are currently the co-director of the studio art program at Bard College. Blake is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery in New York. For more information about Blake’s work visit: http://naylandblake.net.

Jamillah James is Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She was co-curator (with Margot Norton) of Soft Water Hard Stone, the 2021 New Museum Triennial at the New Museum, New York. From 2016-2022, James was Curator then Senior Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA); and has held curatorial positions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Studio Museum in Harlem and Queens Museum, New York, in addition to producing exhibitions and programs at various alternative and artist-run spaces throughout the US and Canada.

Recent and forthcoming exhibitions for MCA Chicago include From the Center: Looking at Lucy Lippard (2026); the North America debut of Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, organized by Tate, London (2025); the 60-artist survey The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies 1970-2020 (2024); Faith Ringgold: American People, organized by the New Museum, New York (2023); and Enter the Mirror (2022). For ICA LA James curated Rebecca Morris: 2001-2022 (2022); Sara Cwynar: Apple Red/Grass Green/Sky Blue (2021); Harold Mendez: Let us gather in a flourishing way (2020); Stanya Kahn: No Go Backs (2020); The Inconstant World (2020); No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake (2019); and This Has No Name, the first US museum survey of B. Wurtz (2018), among others.

Other projects include solo exhibitions of Lucas Blalock, Sarah Cain, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Alex Da Corte, Abigail DeVille, rafa esparza, Maryam Jafri, Stanya Kahn, Ann Greene Kelly, and Simone Leigh, among others. James has contributed to Artforum, Frieze, Art in America, Bomb, The International Review of African American Art, and numerous institutional exhibition catalogues. She currently serves on the advisory boards of the Verbund Collection, Vienna and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.