Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) established a singular visual vocabulary over the course of her more than four decade career. Born in Chicago and educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which she received a BFA (1947) and an MFA (1950), Mitchell moved to New York in 1949 and was an active participant in the downtown arts scene. She began splitting her time between Paris and New York in 1955, before moving permanently to France in 1959. In 1968, Mitchell settled in Vétheuil, a small village northwest of Paris, while continuing to exhibit her work throughout the United States and Europe. When Mitchell passed away in 1992, her will specified that a portion of her estate should be used to establish a foundation to directly support visual artists.

Julie Otsuka is the award-winning and best-selling author of The Swimmers (2022), The Buddha in the Attic (2012), and When the Emperor Was Divine (2003). Her books have been awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the American Library Association Alex Award, among other distinctions.

Shinique Smith is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice includes painting, sculpture, video, installation, and performance. Exploring ideas of transformation and ritual through materials such as fabric, clothing, and personal belongings, breath, bundling, collage, and gesture, Smith has built a complex visual vocabulary that resonates on intimate and social scales.

Yves Michaud is a French philosopher, writer, and professor emeritus of philosophy at the Sorbonne, Paris. In the 1970s, he began working as an art critic, developing relationships with contemporary artists of the time in Paris, including Joan Mitchell. Michaud has published widely on the relationships of the arts and culture in a globalized, technological world. From 1989 to 1997 he was the director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Lily Stockman is a Los Angeles–based painter. Drawing from nature and its grammar of symmetry, camouflage, and repetition, Stockman plumbs the American landscape for her distinctive palette of glowing, tertiary colors. Her essays have appeared in Vogue, the Iceland Review, Monocle, and books on artists, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, and the Orange County Museum of Art, among other institutions.