AA Bronson (Michael Tims) (Canadian, 1946-) is a conceptual artist and founding member of the collective General Idea (1969-1994), along with his artistic partners Felix Partz, born Ronald Gabe (Canadian, 1945-1994) and Jorge Zontal, born Slobodan Saia-Levy (Italian, 1944-1994).  Since 1994, Bronson has worked as a solo artist, curator, writer, activist and healer.  Bronson was the director of Printed Matter Inc. from 2004 to 2010 and founded the NY Art Book Fair in 2005 and the Printed Matter LA Art Book Fair in 2011.  Bronson has received three honorary doctorates, was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2008 and was awarded the Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres by the government of France.  General Idea’s practice largely involved unconventional media of mail art, performance art and installation using ideas of appropriation, satire and conceptualism, often taking on political issues, most notably challenging dominant ideas of capitalist heteronormativity.  Through the focus on their activities as a collective, General Idea sought to remove the individualistic notions of artist-as-genius and further queer the art space through their integration of domestic life and popular culture with artistic practice.  The collective’s activities stopped in 1994 when both Partz and Zontal passed away due to complications from AIDS.

Scott Watson (Canadian, b. 1950) is Director Emeritus and Research Fellow at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia. A curator whose career has spanned more than thirty-five years, Watson is internationally recognized for his research and work in curatorial and exhibition studies, contemporary art and issues, and art theory and criticism. His distinctions include the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2010); the Alvin Balkind Award for Creative Curatorship in BC Arts (2008) and the UBC Dorothy Somerset Award for Performance Development in the Visual and Performing Arts (2005). Watson has published extensively in the areas of contemporary Canadian and international art. His 1990 monograph on Jack Shadbolt earned the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 1991. Recent publications include Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry (2015); Thrown: British Columbia’s Apprentices of Bernard Leach and their Contemporaries (2011), a finalist for the 2012 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize; “Race, Wilderness, Territory and the Origins of the Modern Canadian Landscape” and “Disfigured Nature” (in Beyond Wilderness, McGill University Press, 2007); and “Transmission Difficulties: Vancouver Painting in the 1960s” (in Paint, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2006).