Libby Lumpkin is Assistant Professor of Modern Art at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas (UNLV), and Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art for the Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery at UNLV. She was the founding curator of the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art in Las Vegas, and has served as a visiting professor at Harvard University, University of California–Santa Barbara, and Umea University in Sweden. Lumpkin received her MA from the University of Texas–Austin, and her Ph.D from the University of New Mexico, and has written on design in New Mexico. Lumpkin publishes widely on art and design, and a number of her essays have been collected in Deep Design: Nine Little Art Histories (Art Issues Press, 1999), in which she examines “how” objects make meaning rather than “why” they exist: ” ‘How,’ ” she writes, “is a question of design,” which, in turn, can be interpreted as “the artificial configuration…of visible materials in the presence of a beholder at particular points in time and space…”

Dave Hickey, recently named a 2001 MacArthur Fellow (commonly referred to as the Genius Award), is the curator for SITE Santa Fe’s Fourth International Biennial, Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism. Hickey received a B.A. (1961) from Texas Christian University and an M.A. (1963) from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a freelance writer, curator, and lecturer who has been affiliated with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, since 1992. His critical essays on art have been collected in two volumes: The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993) and Air Guitar: Essays in Art and Democracy (1997). He is the author of many museum exhibition catalog essays on a variety of artists’ work such as that of Josiah McElheny for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, John Baldessari for the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and Vija Celmins for the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art. Hickey is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1969) and the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art or Architectural Criticism (1993).

Josiah McElheny’s work combines old world craftsmanship–specifically traditional glassblowing–with provocative conceptual frameworks that reference historical models and the works of individuals such as Joseph Albers and Frank Lloyd Wright, and the architects/designers Adolf Loos and Josef Hoffman. His installation in the Biennial is entitled KŠrtner Bar, Vienna, 1908, Adolf Loos (White), 2001, is an homage to the Viennese architect/designer, and was commissioned by SITE Santa Fe. McElheny has taught at the Pilchuk Glass School and the Rhode Island School of Design, and has been a visiting artist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston presented a survey of his work in 1999.

SITE Santa Fe’s Fourth International Biennial, Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism, curated by Dave Hickey, is on exhibit through January 6, 2002. SITE Santa Fe’s Art & Culture series is partially supported by The Brown Foundation, Inc., Houston, Lannan Foundation, Madelin Coit and Alan Levin, Bobbie Foshay-Miller and Chuck Miller, and Marlene Nathan Meyerson.