Art21 is the world’s leading source to learn directly from the artists of our time. The mission of Art21 is to educate and expand access to contemporary art through the production of documentary films ...

Mark Bradford was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1961. He received a BFA (1995) and MFA (1997) from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Bradford transforms materials scavenged from ...

Margaret Kilgallen was born in 1967 in Washington, D.C., and received her BA in printmaking from Colorado College in 1989. Shortly afterward, the artist moved to San Francisco, where she took up ...

Artist Ellen Gallagher discusses her process and how she came to use collaged paper in her paintings. ART21: How did arrive at collaging paper into your paintings? GALLAGHER: I didn’t really come from ...

Gabriel Orozco discusses his artworks that play on various types of games, and how those works relate to underlying theoretical concepts. ART21: Ping Pond Table—where did the idea for that work come ...

Pepón Osorio was born in 1955 in Santurce, Puerto Rico, and currently lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1975, Osorio left Puerto Rico and moved to the South Bronx in New York City, ...

Tania Bruguera was born in 1968 in Havana, Cuba. Bruguera, a politically motivated performance artist, explores the relationship between art, activism, and social change in works that examine the ...

Alex Da Corte was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1980 and lives and works in Philadelphia. The artist received his BFA from the University of the Arts in 2004, and an MFA from Yale University School ...

Rackstraw Downes was born in Kent, England in 1939. Often described as a realist painter, Downes prefers not to use that term. He views the act of seeing and the art of representation as culturally ...

Catherine Opie investigates the ways in which photographs both document and give voice to social phenomena in America today, registering people’s attitudes and relationships to themselves and others, ...

Lynn Hershman Leeson was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1941. At once a pointed critic and a sly practical jokester, Hershman Leeson has worked across a wide range of mediums, from drawing, painting and ...

In videos and drawings filled with punning wordplay, Mary Reid Kelley presents her take on the clash between utopian ideologies and the realities of women’s lives in the struggle for liberation and ...