Josef Albers (American, 1888 - 1976) was born in 1888 in Bottrop, Germany, a coal-mining city. He learned skills like engraving glass, plumbing, wiring, house-painting, and other crafts from his father who was a general contractor. Albers worked as a school teacher for young children from 1908 to 1913. His role as a teacher exempted him from military service during WWI. He moved to Munich in 1919 and arrived at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920, the year after its founding. Albers studied at the Bauhaus and later taught alongside his wife, Anni. Josef worked in carpentry, metalwork, glass, photography, and graphic design. In 1933, the Berlin Bauhaus was forced to close by the Nazis and the Albers moved to America to teach at the new, revolutionary Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In 1950, Albers became the chairman of the Department of Design at Yale where he taught until his retirement in 1958. He continued making work, in particular at printshops and in the private studio that he shared with Anni. Albers passed away in New Haven in 1976.

Albers is considered one of the most influential art teachers in the United States and a key contributor to the modern and abstract arts movements internationally as a member of the Bauhaus. In particular, he is best known for the Homage to the Square series and development of color theory. He is also well known for his collaborators, co-educators and students, including teaching with Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee at the Bauhaus, teaching to Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Ruth Asawa, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jacob Lawrence at Black Mountain College, and to Richard Anuszkiewicz and Eva Hesse at Yale, to name a few.

Richard Anuszkiewicz (American, 1930 - 2020) was born in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1930 as the child of Polish immigrants. Anuszkiewicz received a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1953 and won a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship which he used to study with Josef Albers at Yale, where he received his MFA in 1955. He also received a BS in Education from Kent State University in 1956. In 1957, Anuszkiewicz moved to New York and worked on restoration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He worked on commercial design projects and in public art while making works for exhibitions, including a solo show in 1955 and 1960. His work was featured in key exhibitions on geometric art and in publications in the 1960s, securing a place as a member of the American Op art (optical art) movement. Anuszkiewicz developed an interest in printmaking, specifically screenprints, in the early 1960s and they became a large part of his practice. He continued experimenting with color, form, and pattern while working in his home studio in New Jersey until his passing in 2020.

Anuszkiewicz is best known for a technique that he called "color performance." He described color as the most important factor in his work: "the image in my work has always been determined by what I wanted the color to do. Color function becomes my subject matter, and its performance is my painting."