Richard Loving (1924–2021) was an American artist and educator, primarily based in Chicago, Illinois. He gained recognition in the 1980s as a member of the "Allusive Abstractionists," an informal group of Chicago painters, whose individual forms of organic abstraction embraced evocative imagery and metaphor, counter to the dominant minimalist mode. He is most known for paintings that critics describe as metaphysical and visionary, which move fluidly between abstraction and representation, personalized symbolism taking organic and geometric forms, and chaos and order. They are often characterized by bright patterns of dotted lines and dashes, enigmatic spatial fields, and an illuminated quality. In 2010, critic James Yood wrote that Loving's work "mull[ed] over the possibilities of pattern and representation, of narrative and allegory" to attain a kind of wisdom, transcendence and acknowledgement of universals, "seeking understanding of self within the poetics of the physical world."

Frank Piatek is an American artist, known for abstract, illusionistic paintings of tubular forms and three-dimensional works exploring spirituality, cultural memory and the creative process. Piatek emerged in the mid-1960s, among a group of Chicago artists exploring various types of organic abstraction that shared qualities with the Chicago Imagists; his work, however relies more on suggestion than expressionistic representation. In Art in Chicago 1945-1995, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA) described Piatek as playing “a crucial role in the development and refinement of abstract painting in Chicago" with carefully rendered, biomorphic compositions that illustrate the dialectical relationship between Chicago's idiosyncratic abstract and figurative styles. Piatek's work has been exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, MCA Chicago, National Museum, Szczecin in Poland, and Terra Museum of American Art; it belongs to the public art collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and MCA Chicago, among others. Curator Lynne Warren describes Piatek as "the quintessential Chicago artist—a highly individualistic, introspective outsider" who has developed a "unique and deeply felt world view from an artistically isolated vantage point." Piatek lives and works in Chicago with his wife, painter and SAIC professor Judith Geichman, and has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1974.