Art21 is the world’s leading source to learn directly from the artists of our time. The mission of Art21 is to educate and ...

Elizabeth Murray was born in Chicago in 1940. She earned a BFA at the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California. A pioneer in painting, Murray’s distinctively ...

Filmed in her Syracuse studio, artist Carrie Mae Weems discusses the impetus for her work The Kitchen Table Series (1990), a photographic investigation of a single domestic space in which the artist ...

Richard Serra was born in 1938 in San Francisco, California. He graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a BA in English Literature in 1961, working at different steel mills to ...

Liz Magor was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1948. She makes uncannily realistic casts of humble objects—garments, cardboard boxes, ashtrays—that speak to mortality and local histories. Magor’s ...

Nancy Spero discusses her reasons for creating politically-motivated works. ART21: When did your attention turn to political subject matter? SPERO: I think my political instincts came by having a ...

Artist Vija Celmins discusses her methodology, inspiration, and the materiality of her work.

Krzysztof Wodiczko was born in 1943 in Warsaw, Poland, and lives and works in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1980, he has created more than seventy large-scale slide and video ...

This episode provides an in-depth look at the creation of Kara Walker’s monumental public project, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014), at the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, NY. Seated ...

Kara Walker discusses her 2002 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On).

Theaster Gates was born in Chicago in 1973. He first encountered creativity in the music of Black churches on his journey to becoming an urban planner, potter, and artist. Gates creates sculptures ...