Concluding the series of thematically focused Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection discussions, this program brings together Suzanne Jackson and Firelei Báez, two artists whose works are featured in the exhibition, in conversation with writer, curator, and UC Berkeley teaching professor Hilton Als. The group will discuss approaches to artmaking that defy conventional modes of representation, through innovations in portraiture and lively methods of abstraction.

Suzanne Jackson studied painting, theater, and dance in San Francisco before moving to Los Angeles in 1967, where she studied drawing with Charles White at Otis Art Institute. Her painting, drawing, printmaking and bookmaking, and theater design has been exhibited in a solo exhibition at the Jepson Center/Telfair Museums in Savannah in 2019 and included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial and group exhibitions including Just Above Midtown: 1974 to the Present at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Joan Didion: What She Means at the Hammer Museum in 2023, among others.

Firelei Báez was born in the Dominican Republic and studied fine art at The Cooper Union, Hunter College, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her 2024 U.S. survey exhibition debuted at the ICA Boston and she has also been the subject of solo presentations at the Louisiana Museum of Modern at in Humlebaek; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Studio Museum in Harlem. She was included in the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, as well as in group exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Art Gallery of Toronto, and the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai.

Hilton Als has been a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1994 and a theater critic in 2002, and in 2017 received the Pulitzer Prize for criticism for his New Yorker work. Als is the author of The Women (1996), White Girls (2013), and My Pinup (2022), and editor of God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin (2024) He is a teaching professor at UC Berkeley, an associate professor of writing at Columbia University, and has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan University, and Smith College.