Joe Coleman is a world-renowned painter, writer, and performer who has exhibited for five decades in major museums throughout the world including one-man exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the Barbican Centre in London, and Tilton Gallery and Dickinson Gallery in New York. His collectors have included Iggy Pop, Jim Jarmusch, Anthony Bourdain, Leonardo DiCaprio, and H.R. Giger. He was the subject of an award-winning feature length documentary, Rest in Pieces: A Portrait of Joe Coleman (1997) and lives with his wife Whitney Ward in Brooklyn and upstate New York.
Mike McGee is director of the California State University, Fullerton, Begovich Gallery. Over the past thirty years he has authored and published dozens of books about contemporary art. He has also written for newspapers and periodicals in the United States and Europe.
Tom Waits is an American singer songwriter, musician, composer and actor. Waits’ lyrics frequently present atmospheric portraits of grotesque, often seedy characters and places. In 2011, Waits was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He is included among the 2010 list of Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Singers, as well as the 2015 list of Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time. Waits lives in Northern Californiawith his wife and frequent collaborator, Kathleen Brennan, and their three children.