Art is for the Spirit: Records of the Self

David Hammons (b. 1943, Springfield, Illinois) is an American artist best known for his work in and around Los Angeles and New York in the 1970s and 1980s. The youngest of ten children raised by a single mother, he moved to Los Angeles in 1962 and attended the Chouinard Art Institute from 1966 to 1968 and the Otis Art Institute from 1968 to 1972, where Charles White allowed him into his night classes. His early career was nurtured by the Brockman Gallery in Leimert Park, the South L.A. space founded by Alonzo and Dale Brockman Davis.

Kazuko Miyamoto (b. 1942, Tokyo) is a Japanese-born American visual and performance artist based in New York, associated with feminist art, minimalism and postminimalism. She studied at the Contemporary Art Research Studio in Tokyo from 1962 to 1964, then emigrated to New York, where she studied at the Art Students League until 1968. Combining formalist minimalism with a foregrounding of the artist's hand, her work offers subtle, ironic commentary on the masculinity of male-dominated minimalism, and she has been called "a preeminent feminist figure of minimalism."