PANELIST INFORMATION:

LAWRENCE WESCHLER, a graduate of Cowell College of the University of California at Santa Cruz, has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since the early eighties, where his work has shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award (for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992) and was recently granted a Lannan Literary Award. His books of political reportage include The Passion of Poland (1984); A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (1990); Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas (1998), and the forthcoming Vermeer in Bosnia. His "Passions and Wonders" series currently comprises Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (1982); David Hockney's Cameraworks (1984); Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (1995); A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces (1998) and now Boggs: A Comedy of Values (1999).He has taught variously at Princeton, Columbia, UCSC, Bard, Vassar, and Sarah Lawrence, and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

DOUGLAS FOGLE is associate curator in the Visual Arts Department of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He has recently opened a contemporary painting exhibition at the Walker Art Center entitled, Painting at the Edge of the World. Also a writer, he has published widely in exhibition catalogues and journals such as frieze, Flash Art, and Parkett. His most recent publications include essays on the work of Doug Aitken for the 1999 Venice Biennale, Thomas Hirschhorn for the Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, and Haluk Akak�e for Artforum.

RITA BOTTOMS is head of Special Collections at the UCSC Library where she has been collecting books, archives, photographs, manuscripts and art works for over three decades. She has curated art exhibitions for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Graham Nash, Edward Weston and Kenneth Patchen. She is currently working on a book of essays on life imitating art.