Visual arts/museums

Festival planner Marilyn Wood. Using dance, film, sound and light, Wood designs celebrations of the urban environment. She organized celebrations and festivals like the first Riverfront Celebration in Columbus, Ohio, The Hong Kong Arts festival, and the opening of the Tehran Museum of Art. Wood used to be a dancer with the Merce Cunningham dance company. (Interview by Faith Middleton)

Artist, writer, and poet Françoise Gilot During her l0-year relationship with Pablo Picasso, they had two children, Claude and Paloma. She is now married to Dr. Jonas Salk. She has written the books Life With Picasso, Interface: The Artist and the Mask, and her new book, An Artist's Journey.

Cartoonist Charles Burns. His comics are grotesque stories of alienation. Burns' new book of cartoons is titled Hard-Boiled Defective Stories.

Cartoonist P.S. Mueller. His one-frame, absurdist work appears regularly in alternative newspapers around the country. His new book of cartoons is titled Spread of Terror.

Photographer William Claxton. His new book, Jazz, is a collection of jazz photographs taken in the 50s and 60s and includes photographs of jazz greats like Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane and Max Roach.

Paul Grushkin, author of a new book titled The Art of Rock, which traces the last 30 years of rock through the art designed to promote concerts.

Cartoonist Roz Chast, whose quirky pen-and-ink drawings appear in The New Yorker. She avoids the dry board-room humor typical of The New Yorker, preferring to draw dinosaurs, appliances with skirts, and cheese.

Video artist Bill Viola. His work draws on his extensive travel throughout Northern India, the Sahara, the American West and Europe and strives to establish video as an art independent of film and television. Viola has been working with video since 1970, including stints as an artist-in-residence at WNET's Artists' Television Laboratory, and as a Guggenheim Fellow.

New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger will discuss the contemporary urban skyline.

Herblock, the Pulitzer-Prize winning editorial page cartoonist for The Washington Post since 1946. His cartoons are syndicated in more than 300 papers.