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About the artist: Her work is energetic, cacophonous, and idiosyncratic, but close observation reveals formal decisions about color and composition, and a tempering of chaos with control. In a single work, Stockholder deploys a myriad of materials that might include bales of hay, fruit, toys, laundry baskets, curtains, heat lamps, fans, yarn, newspaper, bowling balls, automobiles, and construction materials: bricks, concrete, plywood, and sheetrock.

Themes: (un)common materials, larger than life

Mediums: found objects, installation, sculpture

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Jessica Stockholder was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1959. She studied painting at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and received an MFA from Yale University. Stockholder is a pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations that have become a prominent language in contemporary art. Her site-specific interventions and autonomous floor and wall pieces have been described as "paintings in space." Stockholder's complex installations incorporate the architecture in which they have been conceived, blanketing the floor, scaling walls and ceiling, and even spilling out of windows, through doors, and into the surrounding landscape.

Her work is energetic, cacophonous, and idiosyncratic, but close observation reveals formal decisions about color and composition, and a tempering of chaos with control. In a single work, Stockholder deploys a myriad of materials that might include bales of hay, fruit, toys, laundry baskets, curtains, heat lamps, fans, yarn, newspaper, bowling balls, automobiles, and construction materials: bricks, concrete, plywood, and sheetrock.

To the vibrantly colorful plastic products of consumer culture, she adds painted areas of bright hues, calibrating each color for maximum optical and spatial impact. Stockholder's installations, sculptures, and collages affirm the primacy of pleasure, the blunt reality of things, and the rich heterogeneity of life, mind, and art amid a vortex of shifting polarities-abstraction/realism, classical order/intuitive expressionism, conscious thought/unconscious desire.

Jessica Stockholder is Director of Graduate Studies in Sculpture at Yale University. Her work has been exhibited at Dia Center for the Arts, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City; SITE Santa Fe; the Venice Biennale; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; among others.

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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About the artist: Schorr’s images not only call into question the fractured role of soldiering in today’s society, but also examine the way nationality, gender, and sexuality influence an individual’s identity.

Themes: the body

Mediums: photography

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Collier Schorr was born in New York City in 1963 and attended the School of the Visual Arts, New York. Best known for her portraits of adolescent men and women, Schorr's pictures often blend photographic realism with elements of fiction and youthful fantasy. For her 1998 project, Neue Soldaten, Schorr juxtaposed documentary-style pictures of a Swedish army battalion with pictures of fake Swedish soldiers played by German teenagers. Several of these young men reappear in Schorr's 2001 project Forests and Fields: this time, they are dressed in an anxious assortment of German, Israeli, Weimar (Nazi), and Vietnam-era American Army uniforms.

Schorr's images not only call into question the fractured role of soldiering in today's society, but also examine the way nationality, gender, and sexuality influence an individual's identity. For her Jens F. project, Schorr set out to create a comprehensive, yet unusual portrait of a young man-by photographing a German schoolboy posed as Helga, the housewife whom American painter Andrew Wyeth studied in secret for nearly twenty years. Whereas in this body of work, Schorr is comparing the way men and women pose differently for the artist's gaze, in her photographs of American high-school and collegiate wrestlers, the artist trains her camera on a tribe of young men whose bodies and athletic training homogenize personal differences.

Schorr's work was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and the 2003 International Center for Photography Triennial. Schorr has exhibited her work internationally at prestigious venues that include Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Jewish Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Consorcio Salamanca in Salamanca, Spain. Collier Schorr currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Interview

Collier Schorr discusses the symbolism of the Nazi uniform, and the power of the androgynous, ambiguous quality of her photographs.

Interview

In this interview, Collier Schorr talks about what it was like photographing wrestlers during matches, and how the resulting photographs are installed and received by viewers.

Artist at Work

24 Images

Artwork Survey: 2000s

12 Images

Artwork Survey: 1990s

5 Images

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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About the artist: The subject matter of his paintings, installations, and public projects is often drawn from African American popular culture, and is rooted in the geography of his upbringing: “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central [Los Angeles] near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it. That determined a lot of where my work was going to go,” says Marshall.

Themes: black American experience, history, pop culture, race in America

Mediums: painting

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Kerry James Marshall was born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, and was educated at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, from which he received a BFA, and an honorary doctorate (1999).

The subject matter of his paintings, installations, and public projects is often drawn from African-American popular culture, and is rooted in the geography of his upbringing: "You can't be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central [Los Angeles] near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you've got some kind of social responsibility. You can't move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it. That determined a lot of where my work was going to go," says Marshall.

In his Souvenir series of paintings and sculptures, he pays tribute to the civil rights movement with mammoth printing stamps featuring bold slogans of the era ("Black Power!") and paintings of middle-class living rooms, where ordinary African-American citizens have become angels tending to a domestic order populated by the ghosts of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and other heroes of the 1960s. In RYTHM MASTR, Marshall creates a comic book for the twenty-first century, pitting ancient African sculptures come to life against a cyberspace elite that risks losing touch with traditional culture.

Marshall's work is based on a broad range of art-historical references, from Renaissance painting to black folk art, from El Greco to Charles White. A striking aspect of Marshall's paintings is the emphatically black skin tone of his figures-a development the artist says emerged from an investigation into the invisibility of blacks in America and the unnecessarily negative connotations associated with darkness. Marshall believes, "You still have to earn your audience's attention every time you make something." The sheer beauty of his work speaks to an art that is simultaneously formally rigorous and socially engaged. Marshall lives and works in Chicago.

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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About the artist: Kruger layers found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to. In their trademark black letters against a slash of red background, some of her instantly recognizable slogans read “I shop, therefore I am,” and “Your body is a battleground.” Much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, classicism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, although her black-and-white images are culled from the mainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing.

Themes: consumer culture, language and text, money money money

Mediums: collage, installation, language, printmaking

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Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1945. After attending Syracuse University's School of Visual Arts, and studying art and design with Diane Arbus at Parson's School of Design in New York, Kruger obtained a design job at Condé Nast Publications. While there, she worked as a graphic designer and picture editor for Mademoiselle magazine, Vogue, House and Garden, Aperture, and other publications. This background in design is evident in the work for which she is now internationally renowned.

Kruger layers found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to. In their trademark black letters against a slash of red background, some of her instantly recognizable slogans read "I shop, therefore I am," and "Your body is a battleground." Much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, classicism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, although her black-and-white images are culled from the mainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing.

As well as appearing in museums and galleries worldwide, Kruger's work has appeared on billboards, buscards, posters, a public park, a train station platform in Strasbourg, France, and in other public commissions. She has taught at California Institute of the Arts, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and University of California, Berkeley. She lives in New York and Los Angeles.

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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About the artist: Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. In a now-signature technique, Kentridge photographs his charcoal drawings and paper collages over time, recording scenes as they evolve. Working without a script or storyboard, he plots out each animated film, preserving every addition and erasure.

Themes:  history, migration and displacement, world building

Mediums: animation, drawing, installation, performance, projection, sculpture, textile, video

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William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1955. He attended the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (1973-76), Johannesburg Art Foundation (1976-78), and studied mime and theater at L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, Paris (1981-82). Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century's most contentious struggles-the dissolution of apartheid-Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects that are most often framed in narrowly defined terms.

Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. In a now-signature technique, Kentridge photographs his charcoal drawings and paper collages over time, recording scenes as they evolve. Working without a script or storyboard, he plots out each animated film, preserving every addition and erasure. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge uses stereoscopic viewers and creates optical illusions with anamorphic projection, to extend his drawings-in-time into three dimensions.

Kentridge has had major exhibitions at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2009); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2008); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, (2007); and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2004); among others. He has also participated in Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008); the Sydney Biennale (1996, 2008); and Documenta (1997, 2002). His opera and theater works, often produced in collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company, have appeared at Brooklyn Academy of Music (2007); Standard Bank National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, South Africa (1992, 1996, 1998); and Festival d'Avignon, France (1995, 1996).

His production of Dmitri Shostakovich's opera, The Nose, premiered in 2010 at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, in conjunction with a retrospective organized by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. William Kentridge lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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About the artist: Deeply symbolic, her work uses her relationship with her parents and the role sexuality played in her early family life as a vocabulary in which to understand and remake that history. The anthropomorphic shapes her pieces take—the female and male bodies are continually referenced and remade—are charged with sexuality and innocence and the interplay between the two.

Themes:  feminisms, history, the body

Mediums: drawing, installation, painting, printmaking, sculpture, textile

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Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. She studied art at various schools there, including the Ecole du Louvre, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Académie Julian, and Atelier Fernand Léger. In 1938, she immigrated to the United States and continued her studies at the Art Students League in New York. Though her beginnings were as an engraver and painter, by the 1940s she had turned her attention to sculptural work, for which she is now recognized as a twentieth-century leader.

Greatly influenced by the influx of European Surrealist artists who immigrated to the United States after World War II, Bourgeois's early sculpture was composed of groupings of abstract and organic shapes, often carved from wood. By the 1960s, she began to execute her work in rubber, bronze, and stone, and the pieces themselves became larger and more referential to what has become the dominant theme of her work: her childhood. She has famously stated, "My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama."

Deeply symbolic, her work uses her relationship with her parents and the role sexuality played in her early family life as a vocabulary in which to understand and remake that history. The anthropomorphic shapes her pieces take-the female and male bodies are continually referenced and remade-are charged with sexuality and innocence and the interplay between the two. Bourgeois's work is in the collections of most major museums around the world. She lived in New York, where she passed away in May 2010.

A weekly digest of things to watch, read, and hear from the comforts of your home, selected by Art21-featured artists and Art21 staff.

Art21 is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization; all donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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About the Artist: Turrell’s work involves explorations in light and space that speak to viewers without words, impacting the eye, body, and mind with the force of a spiritual awakening.

Themes: larger than life, sensory sensations

Mediums: installation, land, sculpture

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21’s mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of con…

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About the Artist: Working in site-specific installation and sculpture, Yin uses second-hand or recycled items like clothing and domestic objects to create works that preserve personal memories in a rapidly globalizing and homogenizing world.

Themes: (un)common materials

Mediums: found objects, installation, sculpture

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Yin Xiuzhen was born in 1963 in Beijing, China. Working in site-specific installation and sculpture, Yin uses second-hand or recycled items like clothing and domestic objects to create works that preserve personal memories in a rapidly globalizing and homogenizing world.

Originally trained in oil painting, Yin Xiuzhen was influenced by the New Wave movement in China in the 1980s, which refused the social-realism aesthetic of the 1960s-70s Cultural Revolution and prioritized more experimental and conceptual art practices. Turning to sculpture, installation, and performance, Yin produced early works such as Washing the River (1995), in which she and the audience attempted to wash ten cubic meters of ice created from polluted river water. For her Portable City (2001-ongoing) series, the artist creates miniature fabric versions of city skylines, housed within suitcases, to explore the latent memories that used clothing can hold. Works such as Ruined City (1996), an installation of Beijing roof tiles, and Collective Subconscious (2007), a large-scale installation of a 1990s Chinese mini-bus, are more direct meditations on what has been lost during the rapid modernization of China and the artist's yearning to preserve individual and collective memory. Yin has also collaborated with her husband, the artist Song Dong, on the series, The Way of the Chopsticks (2001-ongoing).

Yin Xiuzhen studied oil painting at Capital Normal University in Beijing. She has had major solo shows at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia (2016); Tasmania Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, Australia (2014); Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Germany (2013); Groninger Museum, Netherlands (2012); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2008); Redcat, Los Angeles, California (2006); Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, Australia (2000); Beijing Contemporary Art Museum, China (1995); among others. Her work has been included in the Venice Biennale, Italy (2007, 2019); the São Paulo Biennale, Brazil (2004); the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2002); among many other international exhibitions. Yin Xiuzhen lives and works in Beijing.

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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About the Artist: Weems’s vibrant explorations of photography, video, and verse breathe new life into traditional narrative forms: social documentary, tableaux, self-portrait, and oral history. Eliciting epic contexts from individually framed moments, Weems debunks racist and sexist labels, examines the relationship between power and aesthetics, and uses personal biography to articulate broader truths.

Themes: black American experiences, history, race in America, the body

Mediums: performance, photography, video

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Carrie Mae Weems was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1953. Weems earned a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (1981), and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego (1984), continuing her studies in the Graduate Program in Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley (1984-87). With the pitch and timbre of an accomplished storyteller, Weems uses colloquial forms-jokes, songs, rebukes-in photographic series that scrutinize subjectivity and expose pernicious stereotypes.

Weems's vibrant explorations of photography, video, and verse breathe new life into traditional narrative forms: social documentary, tableaux, self-portrait, and oral history. Eliciting epic contexts from individually framed moments, Weems debunks racist and sexist labels, examines the relationship between power and aesthetics, and uses personal biography to articulate broader truths. Whether adapting or appropriating archival images, restaging famous news photographs, or creating altogether new scenes, she traces an indirect history of the depiction of African Americans of more than a century.

She has received honorary degrees from Colgate University (2007) and California College of the Arts (2001). Awards include the MacArthur Fellowship (2013); Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2007); Skowhegan Medal for Photography (2007); Rome Prize Fellowship (2006); and the Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant in Photography (2002); among others. Weems's work has appeared in major exhibitions at Savannah College of Art and Design (2008); W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University (2007); Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown (2000); and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1998); among others. Carrie Mae Weems lives and works in Syracuse, New York.

Links:
Artist's website

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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About the artist: Nick Cave was born in Fulton, Missouri in 1959. He creates “Soundsuits”—surreally majestic objects blending fashion and sculpture—that originated as metaphorical suits of armor in response to the Rodney King beatings and have evolved into vehicles for empowerment. Fully concealing the body, the “Soundsuits” serve as an alien second skin that obscures race, gender, and class, allowing viewers to look without bias towards the wearer’s identity.

Themes: (un)common materials, black American experiences, community, race in America, sensory sensations, the body

Mediums: found objects, installation, performance, photography, sculpture, textile

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.