When Richard Diebenkorn died at the age of seventy-one in 1993, Michael Kimmelman, the chief art critic for the New York Times, wrote that he was “one of the premier American painters of the postwar era, whose deeply lyrical abstractions evoked the shimmering light and wide-open spaces of California, where he spent virtually his entire life.” Adam Gopnik, in the New Yorker, quoted Kimmelman and countered that “if ‘lyrical’ means anything more precise than just ‘nice,’ Diebenkorn was in fact one of the least lyrical painters who have ever lived. There is nothing singing or unimpeded in his best paintings. His Ocean Park landscapes are a daily journal of second thoughts, half-spoken sentences, and reproachful self-corrections … Diebenkorn’s art is never just pretty.”

Richard Diebenkorn was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1922 and grew up in San Francisco. His first one-person museum exhibition was at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in 1948. He began making prints at Crown Point Press beginning in 1962 and returned regularly to the press until his death, in 1993. The estate of Richard Diebenkorn is represented by Van Doren Waxter, New York.

Leonardo Drew was in Tallahassee, Florida in 1961 and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He attended the Parsons School of Design in New York in 1981-82 and received a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1985. A sculptor, Drew is lauded for his emphasis on concept, materiality, and process and often employs a formal grid as a framework for his meticulously fabricated, large-scale, sculptural installations. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn and is represented by Galerie Lelong & Co. in New York City.

Sol LeWitt died in 2007 at the age of 78. “A lodestar of modern American art…patron and friend of artists young and old…the opposite of the artist as celebrity” wrote Michael Kimmelman in an obituary in the New York Times. “Why does everybody love Sol LeWitt?” asked Peter Schjeldahl years earlier, in the New Yorker when a LeWitt retrospective opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000. In the course of the article, Schjeldahl answered his own question. LeWitt’s work, he says, is “clear, accessible, and generous…. He structures large understandings of perception and thought… . His wall drawings belong in a hall of fame for parsimonious, incredibly potent inventions, like the lever and the wheel…. His art belongs directly to the viewer.” LeWitt was born in 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut. He majored in art at Syracuse University, earning a B.F.A. in 1949. He first made prints with Crown Point in 1980. His estate is represented by Pace Gallery, New York.

Wayne Thiebaud was born in 1920 in Mesa, Arizona, and resides in Sacramento, California. Studying under the GI Bill, Thiebaud received a BA and an MA from California State College (now California State University) in Sacramento. His first exhibition in New York, at the Allan Stone Gallery in 1962, received tremendous critical attention, with reviews in Newsweek, Art News, the New York Times, and Life magazine. That same year he had a one-person exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Thiebaud began making etchings at Crown Point Press in 1964. His first prints date from 1950, and he has been an active printmaker throughout his career. He is represented by Acquavella Galleries, New York, and the Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco.

Patricia Treib develops her paintings and watercolors from memories that she has experienced over time. She has said that she “registers the time of looking” when she begins a painting. Recalled glimpses of a cuffed hand from a Russian icon, an outline of a sleeve from a Pierro della Francesco painting, the contours of a 35mm camera, or the face of an old clock provide a catalyst. A review in Artforum suggests “it is the act of translating these various found motifs into twirling abstract forms, flat shapes, and curvy silhouettes through gesture and color that constitute the basis of Treib’s art.” Treib was born in 1979 in Saginaw, Michigan. She received her B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2001, and graduated with an M.F.A. from Columbia University in 2006, where she studied painting with Charline von Heyl. In January 2018, she completed her first project at Crown Point Press. Treib is represented by Bureau, New York; Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid, Spain; and Kate MacGarry, London, UK. She is an awardee of this year's Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.