Dave Hickey is a distinguished American art and cultural critic and the author of The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993), Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997), and Pirates and Farmers (2014). His most recent book, 25 Women: Essays on Their Art, is just out from the University of Chicago Press. Hickey was Professor of English at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and Distinguished Professor of Criticism for the MFA Program in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of New Mexico. Julia Friedman is a Russian-born art historian, writer, and curator. Her book Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism: Alexei Remizov's Synthetic Art was published by Northwestern University Press in 2010. She is currently working on a monograph about the California artist Wally Hedrick.