Vito Acconci
 
Vito Acconci was born in 1940, in the Bronx, New York. He graduated from Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1962, with a major in English Literature. Acconci then attended the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he received his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. After graduating in 1964, he moved back to New York City. In the mid- and late-1960s Acconci was a writer and then in the 1970s made a gradual transition to performance art, video, and installation. In 1980 Acconci began to work in architecture, landscape-architecture and furniture design. At the end of the 1980s, he started Acconci Studio, a group of architects who design projects for public places. After the 1988 exhibition "Public Places" at the museum of Modern Art in New York Acconci and Acconci Studio began to be invited to make public proposals for permanent commissions. Some of the more significant commissions include Loloma Transportation Center (Scottsdale, Arizona, U.S.A., 1993), Park in the Water (The Hague, Netherlands, 1997), Munich Buildings Department (Munich, Germany, 1997), and Billboard for Breda Garbage Dump (Breda, the Netherlands, 1999).

Acconci's first solo exhibitions were at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, the United States in 1969 and at several New York galleries in 1970 and 1971. Many prestigious museum and gallery exhibitions followed worldwide, including "Biennale des Jeunes" (Paris, 1971), "36th Venice Biennale" (Venice, 1976), "1977 Biennial Exhibition" at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 1977), "Documenta 6" (Kassel, Germany, 1977), "Vito Acconci: Headlines and Images" at the Stedlijk Museum (Amsterdam, 1978), Vito Acconci: A Retrospective 1969-1980" at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, 1980), "1981 Biennial Exhibition" at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 1981), "Vito Acconci: Public Places" at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1988), "1991 Biennial Exhibition" at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 1991), "Vito Acconci: The City Inside Us" at Osrerreichisches Museum fur Angewandte Kunst (Vienna, 1993), "Vito Acconci: House of Streets, Parks and Plazas," at L'Usine, Le Consortium (Dijon, France 1994), and "Vito Acconci: High-rise of Models" at Munich Buildings Department (Munich, Germany, 2000). Acconci lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
 

Akira Arita

Akira Arita, born in Osaka, Japan in 1947, moved to the United States in 1966 to attend the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in 1970 and later spent six years on the faculty of the Rhode Island School of Design. In 1981 Arita began to devote his entire time to painting and eventually moved to New York City, where he currently lives and works. Since his first solo show at the Staempfli Gallery in New York, NY in 1982, Arita has exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States and Japan. He is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts award in the U.S.A (1985) and The Japan Art Grand Prix (1991).
 

John Coplans
 
British/American artist John Coplans was born in London in 1920. Between 1938 and 1946 he served in the British Armed Forces. He then studied art in London and Paris and started his career as a painter. He has exhibited as a painter through 1961, when he had his solo exhibition of painting at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco where he had moved a year before. In the following years Coplans taught at the University of California at Berkeley; co-founded Artforum magazine where he became Editor-in Chief in 1971; and worked as director and curator of two American art museums. In 1980 he moved permanently to New York and turned to photography. At the age of sixty-four Coplans began to photograph his own naked body, the subject he has pursued through a series of "self-portraits" over the past fifteen years. These photographs have been widely represented in solo and group exhibitions at many major American and European museums, most notably in retrospectives at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1994, at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, in 1997, and at the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, in 1999. Coplans was selected as participant in three recent Biennials of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (in 1983, 1991 and 2000). Coplans lives and works in New York City.

William De Lottie
 
William De Lottie was born in New Britain, Connecticut, in the United States of America in 1942. He studied fine arts and science at the University of Connecticut (Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, 1968). After graduating from college, De Lottie chose to live and work in Connecticut, holding non-art jobs, as he still continues to do. Over the years he has participated in group and solo exhibitions in galleries and museums in Connecticut and more recently at the inaugural exhibition in Gallery at Village Shalom at the Kansas City Jewish Museum, Kansas City, Missouri and with Derek Eller Gallery in New York City. De Lottie's work recently became known internationally with its inclusion in the "2000 Biennial Exhibition" at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City).

Rens Lipsius

Rens Lipsius (b. 1960 in Soest, the Netherlands) a painter for whom "what is of interest is what one can still do with a canvas, brush, knife and paint." The artist responsible for the conception of the ICAR-Paris space, Lipsius has collaborated with other participants in the Art/Research 2000 Program that Icar-Paris ran from January 2000 to April 2002. Lipsius is an autodidact who converted his early fascination with nature, natural history and related subjects to research experimentation with camera and brush in the late seventies. In addition to his involvement with Icar-Paris Lipsius has recently worked on a landscape project in the Netherlands. While working on painting in Paris, Friesland (the Netherlands) and New York over the past two decades, he has directed the course of his production to escape the control of a traditional focus on individual works and demonstrate in practice his approach to art as a total oeuvre.

Dennis Oppenheim
 
American sculptor and conceptual artist Dennis Oppenheim was born in Mason City (now Electric City) in Washington State, in the United States of America in 1938. He studied fine arts and art history at the California College of Arts and Crafts (Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, 1965) and at Stanford University, where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1966. Oppenheim had his first solo show in the United States at John Gibson Gallery, New York, in 1968 and in France at Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris, in 1971. Many other solo and group exhibitions followed, including an influential two-person show with Robert Smithson - "Dialogue", organized by John Coplans at the Akron Art Institute (Ohio). Since that time Oppenheim has continued to exhibit widely in North America, Europe and Asia, including in Documenta VI in 1977; in the 1976 and 1980 Venice Biennale; in the Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City) in 1977 and 1981; and in a number of museum retrospectives. His most recent museum exhibition was organized by the Foundation for the Museum of Contemporary Art of Venice City Counsel in conjunction with the 1997 Venice Biennale and was held on the premises of an operating factory in the Marghera, a district of Venice. Oppenheim lives and works in New York City.