Arts and Music

ART21

Art21 produces features focusing exclusively on contemporary visual art and artists throughout the world, including the Peabody Award-winning biennial series "Art in the Twenty-First Century." Intimate footage allows the viewer to observe the artists at work and watch their process as they transform inspiration into art.

Friends and Strangers

55m 11s

Four contemporary artists look inside and outside their immediate circles to find emotional connections and build community. This film showcases playful and poignant sculptures, performances, and more. Includes celebrated filmmaker Miranda July.

Episodes

  • Friends and Strangers: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Friends and Strangers

    S11 E3 - 55m 11s

    Four contemporary artists look inside and outside their immediate circles to find emotional connections and build community. This film showcases playful and poignant sculptures, performances, and more. Includes celebrated filmmaker Miranda July.

  • Bodies of Knowledge: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Bodies of Knowledge

    S11 E2 - 55m 12s

    Finding inspiration outside the studio, a group of acclaimed contemporary artists use history, science, and politics as the raw material to create potent sculptures, paintings, drawings, and public works.

  • Everyday Icons: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Everyday Icons

    S11 E1 - 55m 14s

    Four contemporary artists breathe new life into some of humanity's oldest artforms, icons and monuments, creating paintings, sculptures, and films out of everyday objects and popular culture. Featuring Michelle Obama portrait painter Amy Sherald.

Extras + Features

  • "Future Ancestral Technologies": asset-mezzanine-16x9

    "Future Ancestral Technologies"

    S11 E3 - 1m 17s

    Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger started a series of works called “Future Ancestral Technologies,” rejecting the romantic historical narrative of native people that their culture is ancient and primitive. Through science fiction and speculative fiction presented with sculptures, videos, regalia, and performance, Luger imagines how our culture shifts in the future and what it will mean to be indigenous.

  • Artist Miranda July Performs At a Gas Station: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Artist Miranda July Performs At a Gas Station

    S11 E3 - 1m 30s

    Artist Miranda July walks through a busy gas station while uncoiling a roll of white ribbon, asking strangers to hold onto a part of it but feel free to let go whenever they need to. The ribbon tangles and wraps around the entire gas station. In the voiceover, July discusses how taking risks is her comfort zone and not being afraid to do so gives her a superpower to work freely.

  • The Origin Story of the Art Gallery "Just Above Midtown": asset-mezzanine-16x9

    The Origin Story of the Art Gallery "Just Above Midtown"

    S11 E3 - 1m 17s

    Illustrated with archival images from the 70s and 80s, Linda Goode Bryant tells the story of how she realized artists of color were not given the opportunities to exhibit their work at the time and decided to take the initiative to establish the art gallery, Just Above Midtown, which fostered a vibrant artists community and gave artists the space to exchange ideas and experiment with new work.

  • Christine Sun Kim Explains Her Site-Responsive Project: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Christine Sun Kim Explains Her Site-Responsive Project

    S11 E3 - 1m 14s

    As a muralist paints artist Christine Sun Kim’s site-responsive project at the Queens Museum, “Time Owes Me Rest Again,” Kim explains the ideas behind the piece. She used echoing motion lines to represent the five words in the title in American Sign Language, conveying the unease and fatigue many felt during the COVID-19 pandemic and the persisting inequity between Deaf and hearing communities.

  • Episode 3 Preview: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Episode 3 Preview

    S11 E3 - 30s

    Four contemporary artists look inside and outside their immediate circles to find emotional connections and build community. This film showcases playful and poignant sculptures, performances, and more. Includes celebrated filmmaker Miranda July.

  • The Unveiling of "The Embrace": asset-mezzanine-16x9

    The Unveiling of "The Embrace"

    S11 E2 - 1m 16s

    Artist Hank Willis Thomas is at the unveiling of his sculpture, “The Embrace,” a monument celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, in Boston. Through this public artwork, he hopes to inspire people to reflect on the past with care and concern for the future, and continue to give people a sense of pride and connection beyond this lifetime.

  • Guerrilla Girls Engage the Public: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Guerrilla Girls Engage the Public

    S11 E2 - 1m

    Clad in all-black, their faces obscured by oversized gorilla masks, “Frida Kahlo” and “Käthe Kollwitz” take to the streets as Guerrilla Girls to engage the public in their decades-long battle against discrimination in the art world. Animated sequences and archival footage illustrate the artist-activist collective’s fight for equality through posters with bold designs and other creative means.

  • Artist Tauba Auerbach: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Artist Tauba Auerbach

    S11 E2 - 1m 20s

    Artist Tauba Auerbach is in their studio in New York City, creating drawings with a “knit structure,” sequences of a single gesture woven together on the page, challenging themselves to modify the rules without lifting the marker or draw from a specific part of their body. The trance-like state achieved in these intuitive and spontaneous drawings is the ideal space for the artist to think.

  • Artist Anicka Yi: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Artist Anicka Yi

    S11 E2 - 1m 3s

    Artist Anicka Yi runs her studio as if it’s a laboratory, developing hypotheses, testing them in small trials, and bringing in experts to help bring them to life as the idea is refined. Through footage of the studio and the installation leading up to an exhibition, we see the diverse disciplines she draws inspiration from, as well as the wide range of materials she works with.

  • Episode 2 Preview: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Episode 2 Preview

    S11 E2 - 30s

    Finding inspiration outside the studio, a group of acclaimed contemporary artists use history, science, and politics as the raw material to create potent sculptures, paintings, drawings, and public works.

  • Artist Alex Da Corte Transforms Into Characters: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Artist Alex Da Corte Transforms Into Characters

    S11 E1 - 1m 40s

    Artist Alex Da Corte is in his studio in Philadelphia, PA, transforming into characters for a video shoot with the help of his team. In Da Corte's video artworks, he performs while dressed as a wide variety of cultural icons. By spending time with these characters, he hopes to make his mind freer than it is and give depth to icons that are often rendered as flat symbols.

  • How Daniel Lind-Ramos Sources Materials for His Sculptures: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    How Daniel Lind-Ramos Sources Materials for His Sculptures

    S11 E1 - 53s

    In his studio in Loíza, Puerto Rico, artist Daniel Lind-Ramos uses found materials to create his sculpture, "María Guabancex," inspired by the artist's experience with Hurricane Maria. Lind-Ramos explains that he often finds materials related to the narrative he's trying to organize and lets the materials activate his imagination.

Schedule

WETA Passport

Stream tens of thousands of hours of your PBS and local favorites with WETA Passport whenever and wherever you want. Catch up on a single episode or binge-watch full seasons before they air on TV.

Similar Shows