David Opdyke is an artist known for his trenchant political send-ups of American culture. Opdyke's political awakening in the early 2000s led to a body of work that confronted the horror of 9/11 and America's subsequent wars. His hyperrealistic topographical models of American suburbs comment on mall culture and suburban sprawl, while his sculptures of ruined monuments mock imperialistic hubris. His work is held in the collections of MoMA, the Washington Convention Center in DC, and the Brooklyn Museum.
Lawrence Weschler is author of more twenty books of narrative nonfiction, most recently And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? (FSG, 2019). He is a former staff writer at the New Yorker, and served as director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU (2001-14), and artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival (2006-11). His books include Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees; Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize); Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, 2007); and A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers.
Maya Wiley is a Professor of Public & Urban Policy at the New School University and an NBC News and MSNBC Legal Analyst. Before the New School, Ms. Wiley, a civil rights attorney, was Counsel to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. In October 2020, Wiley announced her own candidacy to succeed de Blasio as mayor of New York.
