Joseph Beuys (1921-1986), alchemist, social visionary and artist, was born in Germany. In 1961, he became Professor of Monumental Sculpture at the Düsseldorf Academy, but was expelled in 1972. With his first gallery "action" in 1965, Teaching Paintings to a Dead Hare, his international reputation began to grow. In 1979, he was honored with a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City. He died just after receiving the prestigious Lehmbruck Prize and left behind numerous large-scale installations and site works, hundreds of provocative multiples and small objects, thousands of drawings, documented social sculpture forums about energy, new money forms and direct democracy, and above all, a methodology and ideas such as "parallel process" and "social sculpture.

Kim Levin, renowned art critic and curator, author of Beyond Modernism and President Honoraire of AICA, was a regular contributor to The Village Voice for two decades and also to ARTnews. Her writings have appeared in many publications internationally. She has also given lectures at numerous universities and museums in the U.S. and elsewhere.