Either Limits or Contradictions

Nick Meyer (B.1981) is a photographer and artist living and working in Conway, Massachusetts. He received his BFA from MassArt in 2005 and his MFA from California College of the Arts in 2008. His first book "Pattern Language" was published in 2010 by Brick Publishing. His work has also appeared in Vice Magazine, Mass Appeal Magazine, Wired, SF station, and as illustration for the Novella "A Field Guide to the North American Family" (Mark Batty Publisher 2007/Random House 2016) He is the recipient of the Pace Gallery Award and the Barclay Simpson Prize. His work has been shown both nationally and internationally and is held in private and public collections. He is represented by Uprise Art in New York.

Aaron Schuman (b. 1977) is an American artist, writer and curator based in the United Kingdom. He received a BFA in Photography and Art History from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1999, and an MA in Humanities and Cultural Studies from the University of London's London Consortium in 2003. His photographic work is exhibited and published internationally, and is held in many public and private collections. He is the author of FOLK (NB, 2016), curator of Indivisible (FOMU, 2017), Re:Search (Krakow Photomonth, 2014), InAppropriation (HCP, 2012) and Whatever Was Splendid (FotoFest, 2010) and has contributed texts to numerous books, journals and publications. Schuman is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton and the University of the West of England (UWE, Bristol), and is the founder/editor of SeeSaw Magazine.


Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1919. He received an AB degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina, and an MA from Columbia University, where he wrote a thesis on the influence of John Ruskin’s writing on J.M.W. Turner. After Navy service in World War II, he worked in the mail room at Time Magazine for a while, then lived in Paris (1947–1951), where he received a Doctorat de l’Universite from the Sorbonne in 1949. It was in France that Ferlinghetti began painting. On his return to the United States he settled in San Francisco, where he and Peter D. Martin founded the first all paperbound bookstore in the country, City Lights Books. Under its imprint, Ferlinghetti began the Pocket Poets Series which included work by William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth, and Antonin Artaud. Ferlinghetti’s second books of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions, 1958) is one of the best selling poetry books of our time. A Far Rockaway of the Heart (ND, 1997) won a silver medal, in the category of Poetry, in the California Book Awards, sponsored by The Commonwealth Club of California. On August 11, 1998, Ferlinghetti was named San Francisco’s first poet laureate. He received The Before Columbus Foundation "Lifetime Achievement Award" for the twentieth annual American Book Awards for 1999. In 2001 he was one of two American poets (the other being John Ashbery) chosen to participate in the second celebration of UNESCO’s World Poetry Day in Delphi, Greece, where he along with his international confreres poetically addressed the Oracle. He has also been writing a weeky column, “Poetry as News,” for the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review. In December 2006, Ferlinghetti was named a Commandeur in the French Order of Arts and Letters. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s reputation within the literary world grows out of his commitment to literature and to the literary artists who have pushed the edges of the literary envelope shaping the last half of this century. He is a man of many hats, and he brings to each of his roles an approach that challenges tradition. It is his uncharacteristic personality that allows him to balance comfortably activities as diverse as those of poet, novelist, playwright, publisher, critic, social activist, and visual artist.