Andrea Blum: BIOTA and its accompanying monograph foreground Blum’s practice of creating public projects, installations, sculptural objects, and images in video and still-format that posit the natural world in juxtaposition with a constructed one, exploring the complex relationship between art and architecture. The exhibition features work from 2008 to 2024, including sculpture-furniture, installation, and digitally constructed video and still images in which she presents “natural elements” as placeholders for another type of body—something alive, but not human. In presenting these situational tableaux, she immerses viewers within social studies, inviting them to compare one species to another and us to them. The monograph focuses on Blum’s entire body of work. The first publication to compile scholarly writing about Blum's practice, it surveys her work from the mid–1970s to 2023, including experiments in urban intervention, site-specific public artwork, and design commissions for libraries and other institutions, and features texts by critics, artists, and art historians.

Andrea Blum is a New York-based artist who has built projects in Europe and the United States that include urban space, exhibition design, libraries, and furniture. She has exhibited in international exhibition venues, including Kunsthaus Baselland, Münchenstein, Switzerland; La Conservera Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Murcia, Spain; and Stroom Center for Art & Architecture, The Hague, Netherlands. She has built special projects for the La Biennale di Venezia, 51st International Art Exhibition; Maison Rouge, Paris; and MUDAM, Luxembourg; and designed the set for a Donizetti Opera at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, Paris. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Graham Foundation grant, SJ Weiler award, Art Matters grant, New York State Council on the Arts and National Education Association Fellowships, and in 2005 was named Chevalier, Order of Arts and Letters, by the French Minister of Culture. Blum was a professor and associate chair of studio art at Hunter College where she frequently lectured on the relationship of art and architecture.

Jenny Jaskey is chief curator and director of Art Awards at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. Previously she was director and curator of the Artist’s Institute, New York (2013–22) and distinguished lecturer in the department of art and art history at Hunter College. She has edited monographs with artists including Pierre Huyghe, Carolee Schneemann, and Agnieska Kurant, and is coeditor, with Suhail Malik and Christoph Cox, of Realism Materialism Art (Sternberg, 2015). She is the curator and a catalog contributor for Andrea Blum: BIOTA.

Joseph Logan designs books for contemporary art museums, galleries, and artists. Trained as an artist, receiving his BFA at Hunter College, he worked as a senior art director under Fabien Baron at Baron & Baron (1999–02). Subsequent positions include art director of Vogue Paris (2003–06) and design director of Artforum (2006–10). He started Joseph Logan Design in 2010 and has since designed over 200 publications for clients including The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. He is the catalog designer for Andrea Blum: BIOTA.

Harper Montgomery has written for The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and the Brooklyn Rail and has organized exhibitions on art of the nineteenth-century, the twentieth-century, and the present for the galleries of Hunter College. Montgomery is the author of The Mobility of Modernism: Art and Criticism in 1920s Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2017), which won the Arvey Foundation Book Award for distinguished scholarship on Latin American Art, and coeditor of Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013). Her current research has been supported by a senior Dedalus Fellowship and concerns the ascent of “artesanía” within contemporary art spaces in Latin America. She is a professor of art history at Hunter College and the director of the Hunter College Art Galleries.

Katie Hood Morgan has supported Hunter College’s exhibition program since 2018 and has served in nonprofit arts leadership roles in San Francisco and New York state. Curatorial projects include a long-term permanent collection exhibition at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at The State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz, and a residency and exhibition with the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (BICA), NY. Past positions include leadership roles at the San Francisco Art Institute and FOR-SITE Foundation (San Francisco). She has contributed to programming, curatorial projects, and publications at institutions including the Oakland Museum of California; Newark Museum of Art; Grey Art Gallery, New York University (New York); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (San Francisco); SFMOMA (San Francisco); and MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA). She holds a master’s degree in curatorial practice from California College of the Arts and a bachelor's in the history of art and visual culture from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Morgan is the chief curator and deputy director of Hunter College Art Galleries.

The Hunter College Art Galleries, under the auspices of the department of art and art history, have been a vital aspect of the New York cultural landscape since their inception over a quarter of a century ago. The galleries provide a space for critical engagement with art and pedagogy, bringing together historical scholarship, contemporary artistic practice, and experimental methodology. The galleries are committed to producing exhibitions, events, and scholarship in dialogue with the intellectual discourse generated by the faculty and students at Hunter and serve as an integral extension of the department’s academic programs.