Robert Ryman (1930–2019) was born in Nashville, Tennessee. Ryman moved to New York in 1953 to pursue a career as a professional jazz musician. That same year, he took a job as a security guard at The Museum of Modern Art, where he would work for seven years. His time working at the museum in part inspired Ryman to devote his life toward painting. His first institutional solo exhibition was at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1972.

Dieter Schwarz is a curator and writer. He has organized numerous exhibitions and contributed to publications on artists from early modernity to the present, including Pierre Bonnard, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman.

Jeffrey Kastner is a New York–based writer and critic, the senior editor of Cabinet magazine, and a contributing editor at Places. His writing on contemporary art and cultural issues has appeared in publications such as Artforum, The Economist, Frieze, The New Republic, and The New York Times, and his monographic essays have been published in books and exhibition catalogues on artists including Doug Aitken, David Altmejd, Michaël Borremans, Nina Katchadourian, Ragnar Kjartansson, Tomas Saraceno, and Sarah Sze.

Lucy R. Lippard is a contemporary writer, activist, and sometime curator best known for her study of conceptual art in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 and for her writing on feminist art and politically engaged art. She has published twenty-eight books, with two forthcoming, and has organized some fifty exhibitions and cofounded Ad Hoc Women Artists, Heresies: A Journal of Art and Politics, the artists’ book center Printed Matter, and the activist group PAD/D (Political Art Documentation/Distribution). Her many honors include the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award and nine honorary degrees.