Doris Salcedo is a contemporary Colombian artist known for her politically driven sculptures and installations.

Through arrangements of domestic objects such as chairs and shoes, Salcedo evokes the absence of those lost to violent conflicts, both in her country and abroad.

“Their suffering becomes mine; the center of that person becomes my center and I can no longer determine where my center actually is,” she has explained.

Born in 1958 in Bogotá, Colombia, she holds a BFA from the Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano and an MA in Sculpture from New York University.

The artist’s thoughtful evocations of history through materiality, developed from an interest in the works of both Joseph Beuys and Beatriz González.

In the decades that followed, Salcedo has produced a number of site-specific public projects. More recently, the artist has explored the United States industrial prison system and the notion of being socially dead but physically alive.

She continues to live and work in Bogotá, Colombia.

Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.

Lubaina Himid is a contemporary Zanzibar-born British artist working across media to examine racial identity and the African diaspora.

Her wide-ranging practice of installation, painting, drawing, and printmaking seeks to champion the artistic contributions of black culture while highlighting continued institutional racism and erasure.

One of her best-known series, Naming the Money (2004), consists of over 100 life-sized human cutouts. Made of wood and painted in an array of bright color, each figure in the series is given two names: a birth name and a slave name.

“I’m not in the business of making work where I repeat the trauma,” Himid has explained.

• “My work is about attempting to belong, about understanding who we are as black people in the diaspora, how much we have contributed across Europe in terms of culture, building, the wealth of the European machine.”

Born in 1954 in Zanzibar (now Tanzania), she moved to England at the age of four following the death of her father.

Himid went on to attend the Wimbledon College of Art and graduate with a BA in theatre design in 1976, and then the Royal College of Art, where she obtained her master’s in cultural history in 1984.

Over the course of her career, she has been the subject of solo presentations at the Studio Museum in New York, Spike Island in Bristol, and C.U.B.E. in Manchester, among others, and has served as professor of contemporary art at the University of Central Lancashire. In 2017, Himid became the oldest person to win the prestigious Turner Prize, having been nominated alongside Hurvin Anderson, Andrea Büttner, and Rosalind Nashashib.

A sculptor who began working during the postwar period in a classical figurative style, Alina Szapocznikow radically reconceptualized sculpture as an imprint not only of memory but also of her own body.

Though her career effectively spanned less than two decades (cut short by the artist’s premature death in 1973 at age 47), Szapocznikow left behind a legacy of provocative objects that evoke Surrealism, Nouveau Réalisme, and Pop art.

Her tinted polyester casts of body parts, often transformed into everyday objects like lamps or ashtrays; her poured polyurethane forms; and her elaborately constructed sculptures, which at times incorporated photographs, clothing, or car parts, all remain as wonderfully idiosyncratic and culturally resonant today as when they were first made.

Well known in Poland, where her work has been highly influential since early in her career, Szapocznikow’s compelling book of work is ripe for art historical reexamination.

Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972 offers a comprehensive overview of this important artist’s work at a moment when international interest is blossoming.

Spanning one of the most rich and complex periods of the 20th century, Szapocznikow’s oeuvre responds to many of the ideological and artistic developments of her time through artwork that is at once fragmented and transformative, sensual and reflective, playfully realized and politically charged.