Jason Polan (1982–2020) was an American artist who lived and worked in New York City. His illustrations and projects appeared in Metropolis, The New Yorker, and ARTNews. His self-published artists’ books included Every Piece of Art in the Museum of Modern Art, a collection of line drawings of all the artwork that was visible to the public for two weeks in 2005. He exhibited throughout the U.S. and Europe—including a show with Robin Cameron at Esopus Space in 2010—and his book Every Person in New York was published by Chronicle Books in 2015. Polan contributed the weekly column “Things I Saw” to The New York Times’s Opinionator blog from 2012 to 2013. Polan passed in 2020 from cancer at age 37.

Born in Geneva, New York, in 1956, Robert Warner is a collage artist, letterpress printer, optician, and eyewear designer based in New York City’s Greenwich Village. In 2011, Warner staged the exhibition and event series Ray and Bob Box, which related to a yearslong correspondence between himself and the artist Ray Johnson at Esopus Space in New York City. It subsequently traveled to venues including the University of California, Berkeley and the Valade Family Gallery at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.