Robert Ryman (born May 30, 1930) is an American painter identified with the movements of monochrome painting, minimalism, and conceptual art. He is best known for abstract, white-on-white paintings. He lives and works in New York.

Ryman was born in Nashville, Tennessee. After studying at the Tennessee Polytechnical Institute, Cookeville, between 1948 and 1949, and at the George Peabody College for Teachers between 1949 and 1950, Ryman enlisted in the United States army reserve corps and was assigned to an army reserve band during the Korean War. Ryman moved to New York City in 1953, intending to become a professional jazz saxophonist. He soon took a day job at the Museum of Modern Art as a security guard to make ends meet, and met the artists Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin, who were co-workers with him at MoMA. He also met artist Roy Lichtenstein during this period of the 1950s.

Captivated by the newly acquired abstract expressionist works of Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, Ryman became curious about the act of painting. He purchased some art supplies at local store and began experimenting in his apartment in 1955. That year, Ryman finished what he considers his earliest professional work, a largely monochrome painting titled Untitled (Orange Painting) (1955–59).

Arnold "Arne" Glimcher (born March 12, 1938) is an American art dealer, film producer and director. He is the founder of The Pace Gallery and is widely known as one of the art world's most powerful dealers. Glimcher has also produced and directed several films, including The Mambo Kings and Just Cause.

Glimcher was born in Duluth, Minnesota. He graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Boston University. In 1960, Glimcher founded the Pace Gallery in Boston. In 1963, Glimcher moved the gallery to New York City. Today there are four gallery locations in New York and an additional gallery in Beijing. The Pace Gallery represents contemporary artists including Chuck Close, Tara Donovan, David Hockney, Maya Lin and Kiki Smith. It also represents the estates of several artists, including Pablo Picasso, Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt, and Alexander Calder. Today, Glimcher, serves as Chairman of the Pace Gallery. During his career he has worked closely with important artists, including Jean Dubuffet, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Nevelson, and Lucas Samaras. In 2007, Glimcher received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Agnes Bernice Martin (March 22, 1912 – December 16, 2004) was a Canadian-born American abstract painter, often referred to as a minimalist; Martin considered herself an abstract expressionist. She won a National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1998.

Agnes Bernice Martin was born in Macklin, Saskatchewan, grew up in Vancouver, and moved to the United States in 1931, becoming a citizen in 1950. Martin studied at Western Washington University College of Education, Bellingham, WA, prior to receiving her B.A. (1942) from Teachers College, Columbia University. After hearing lectures by the Zen Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki at Columbia, she became interested in Asian thought, not as a religious discipline, but as a code of ethics, a practical how-to for getting through life. A few years following graduation, Martin matriculated at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, where she also taught art courses before returning to Columbia University to earn her M.A. (1952).

Yvon Pierre Lambert (born May 20, 1950 in Drummondville, Quebec) is a retired Canadian ice hockey forward.

Yvon started his National Hockey League career with the Montreal Canadiens in 1973. He would spend nine years in Montreal before being traded to the Buffalo Sabres. Yvon is best known for scoring the winning goal in overtime of game 7 of the 1979 Stanley Cup Semi-Finals against the Boston Bruins, the culmination of an exciting game most memorable for a career-damaging coaching error by Don Cherry with two minutes left in regulation. Lambert won four consecutive Stanley Cups with the Habs from 1976 to 1979.

Eva Hesse (January 11, 1936 – May 29, 1970), was a German-born American sculptor, known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics.

Hesse was born into a family of observant Jews in Hamburg, Germany. When Hesse was two years old in December 1938, her parents, hoping to flee from Nazi Germany, sent Eva and her older sister to the Netherlands via Kindertransport. After a few months of separation, the reunited family moved to England and then, in 1939, emigrated to New York City, where they settled into Manhattan's Washington Heights. In 1944 Hesse's parents separated, her father remarried in 1945 and her mother committed suicide in 1946.

After graduating from New York's School of Industrial Art in 1952, Hesse studied at New York's Pratt Institute (1952–1953) and Cooper Union (1954–1957), then at the Yale School of Art and Architecture (1957–1959), where she studied under Josef Albers and received a B.F.A. Upon returning to New York she made friends with many young artists. In 1961, she met and married sculptor Tom Doyle. In August 1962, Eva Hesse and Tom Doyle participated in an Allan Kaprow Happening at the Art Students League of New York in Woodstock, New York. There Hesse made her first three dimensional piece: a costume for the Happening. In 1963, Eva Hesse had a one-person show of works on paper at the Allan Stone Gallery on New York's Upper East Side.