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Artists are the gateway to our future. They are agitators and disrupters—constantly challenging us to rethink the world around us and guide us past our limits.

As an artist myself, I am humbled by this process and how its impact can help create new perspectives. I am even more humbled and inspired by the community that surrounds me and how we collectively push this mission together.

The art world, the industry, the market, the movement—however you want to phrase it—is a complex community. All of us are hard at work, shaping what the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years will look like for those in the next generation who dare to be an artist, a curator, a collector, a gallerist, a specialist, a museum director—a visionary.

Brendan Dugan

Artists like Rob Pruitt bring their work to New York’s Karma bookstore and gallery for sleek, idiosyncratic cover designs. Readers at Karma for Pruitt’s book signing were greeted by the artist—totally nude save for a strategically placed panda doll. Guile and style are the brand at the Karma enterprise, which now consists of a gallery, bookstore, and publisher. The visionary behind the unlikely empire? Forty-year-old graphic designer-turned-gallerist Brendan Dugan. Since Karma’s launch in 2011, it has published books by Jonas Wood and Richard Prince; even the world’s most powerful gallery is a client. Gagosian published books about Dike Blair and Jonas Wood with Dugan. And now Dugan has even begun launching his artists to mainstream fame—Alex Da Corte, who has shown with Karma since the early part of his career, now has solo exhibitions in museums around the world, and Nicolas Party recently got represented by Hauser & Wirth, who will share him with Dugan’s company.