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Napoleon Jones-Henderson attended the Sorbonne in Paris, received a BA of Fine Arts from the Art Institute of Chicago and completed his graduate studies at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. He is a founding member of Africobra, one of the most important visual arts collectives to come out of the Chicago Black Arts Movement. He received the Mayor of Boston Award of Recognition for Outdoor Sculpture Exhibit; the Massachusetts State Senate Omical Citation for Cultural Excellence, and an Award of Excellence from the National Conference of Artists.

Charles Martin earned his BA in english from Florida State University, MA in journalism and PhD in communication from Regent University. He served one year at Hampton University as an adjunct professor in the English department and as a doctoral fellow at Regent. In 1999, he left a career in business to pursue his writing.

Jonathan Mahler is the author of *The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight over Presidential Power (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)*, which grew out of an article he wrote in June 2004 for *The New York Times Magazine*. He is also the author of the best-selling book *Ladies and Gentlemen*, *The Bronx Is Burning*, a 2004 *New York Times* *Notable Book* that was adapted as an eight-part dramatic miniseries for ESPN starring John Turturro. Mahler is a contributing writer for *The Times Magazine*, where he has written about everything from baseball to politics to religion. His work has appeared in a variety of other publications, including *The New York Times Book Review*, *New York magazine*, *The New Republic and Slate*. A 1990 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Northwestern University, Mahler lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife Danielle Mattoon and their children, Gus and Nora.

Rob Pruitt is an internationally renowned contemporary artist who came to fame in the late 1980's as half of the art team Pruitt Early. Their celebrated bodies of work, "Artwork for Teenage Boys" and "Artwork for Teenage Girls," took art about gender politics into a radical new pop arena. In 1998, Pruitt created "Cocaine Buffet," "101 Art Ideas You Can Do Yourself," and his popular glitter paintings of panda bears. Abrams Publishing will be releasing a comprehensive career monograph entitled Low and Behold: the Art of Rob Pruitt.

Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of law at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers University. She is the author of *Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy*. She lives in New York City.

Michael Harris joined the High Museum of Art as the first consulting curator of African American Arts in January 2005. As a consulting curator, Harris will continue his duties at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he has been associate professor of African and African American Art History since 1996. In spring 2004, Harris served as a visiting professor of art at Dillard University in New Orleans, and has taught at Duke University, Georgia State University, Morehouse College and Wellesley College. Harris, who has published extensively, curated the exhibition "Transatlantic Dialogue" that traveled to the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and to the Tampa Museum of Art, and co-curated "Astonishment and Power" at the National Museum of African Art in 1993. In 1996, Harris completed a doctorate at Yale University.

Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University, where he has taught since 1982. A prolific writer, he has published seven critically acclaimed non-fiction books which have helped shape the national debate on issues ranging from the role of religion in politics and culture to that of integrity and civility in our daily lives. He received his bachelor's from Stanford University and his law degree from Yale before clerking for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, briefly practicing law, and then finally joining the faculty at Yale. Carter's among the 50 leaders for the new millennium as picked by *Time* magazine.

Jon Entine is an internationally renowned journalist, TV commentator, executive consultant and public speaker, on the DNA of human behavior. An Emmy winning television producer and author, Jon has been described as a "public intellectual", the rare individual in touch with business, political, and scientific trends and adept at translating the ideas of the future into the transformative practices of today. Jon is the author of four books, including the best-sellers *Abraham's Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People* and *Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It*. Jon has been profiled around the world, including on 20/20 (John Stossel profile), HBO, BBC, ABC Nightly News, CNN, MSNBC, FOX TV, CBC, and Dubai TV, and his work has been featured in hundreds of the top newspapers and magazines in 19 countries.

Christopher Bucklow, was born on the first of June, 1957, in Flixton, Lancashire, England. His parents were Roy and Doreen Bucklow. Roy Bucklow was an architect, but he died before Christopher's first birthday in 1958. Christopher was adopted by his stepfather Alfred Noel Titterington, a businessman in the printing industry, in 1967 and used the name Chris Titterington until the beginning of his life as an artist in 1989, when he was 32 years old. After Bucklow graduated in 1978 he accepted a post as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He worked in the Prints and Drawings department. There he researched Romantic works of art on paper and early photography. He also continued his interest in contemporary art and he wrote reviews of contemporary exhibitions for *Artscribe magazine*, London. During this whole period as a museum curator, he did not make any art himself. He was completely absorbed in the study of the Romantic mind in particular the developments that led to the rise of landscape in the genre hierarchy of the period. However, he was becoming interested in William Blake and would spend time after hours studying the many wonderful examples of Blakes work that he was looking after as part of the V&A collection. During these years as a curator, he also continued his early interest in physics and astronomy.

Houston-based artist Jamal Cyrus's work examines the spaces between radical socio-political movements and untold histories, both real and imagined. For his first New York solo exhibition, Cyrus presents a new series of drawings, sculptures and videos that use Palmer Hayden's seminal social realist painting *The Janitor Who Paints* (1937) as a point of departure. Echoing this narrative scene, Cyrus creates an interrelated series of videos and drawings wherein the janitor's persona and his immediate tools become a metaphor for recovering the creative production of the overlooked and unnamed. Evocatively reworking the symbolic and political traditions in Hayden's painting, Cyrus explores slippages between the metaphysical and the ordinary, overlapping ideas of labor and creativity and the retelling of historical narratives.