Place

“America is a country made of places,” writes curator Thelma Golden for the Art in the Twenty-First Century Companion Book, “not just the places marked by road signs and maps, but also the less tangible but no less meaningful places forged in the crucible of memory, longing and desire.” Barry McGee’s drawings, paintings, and mixed-media installations take their inspiration from contemporary urban culture, incorporating elements such as empty liquor bottles and spray-paint cans, tagged signs, wrenches, and scrap wood or metal. McGee is also a graffiti artist, working on the streets of America’s cities since the 1980s, where he is known by the tag name “Twist.” He views graffiti as a vital method of communication, one that keeps him in touch with a larger, more diverse audience than can be reached through the traditional spaces of a gallery or museum. Laurie Anderson creates large-scale theatrical works that combine a variety of media—music, video, storytelling, projected imagery, sculpture—in which she is an electrifying performer. As a visual artist, her work has been shown at the Guggenheim Museum, SoHo; as well as extensively in Europe, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. She has also released seven albums for Warner Brothers, including Big Science, featuring the song “O Superman,” which rose to number 2 on the British pop charts. In 1999, she staged Songs and Stories From Moby Dick, an interpretation of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel. She lives in New York. Early experiences as a librarian and bookbinder contributed to Margaret Kilgallen’s encyclopedic knowledge of signs, drawn from American folk tradition, printmaking, and letterpress. Painting directly on the wall, Kilgallen created room-size murals that recall a time when personal craft and handmade signs were the dominant aesthetic. Strong, independent women—walking, surfing, fighting, and biking—are featured prominently in the artist’s compositions. Kilgallen had a love of “things that show the evidence of the human hand.” She died in June 2001 in San Francisco, where she lived with her husband, Barry McGee. Pepón Osorio’s work is heavily influenced by his experience as a social worker in The Bronx, and his pieces usually evolve from an interaction with the neighborhoods and people among which he is working. A recent example is Tina’s House, a project created in collaboration with a family recovering from a devastating fire. The house—a tabletop-size art piece—tells the story of the night of the fire and those affected. The work traveled the country in a series of “home visits,” in which a new family lived with the art work for a period of at least one week, allowing the story of Tina’s House to be told in many homes and environments. Richard Serra’s early work in the 1960s focused on the industrial materials that he had worked with as a youth in West Coast steel mills and shipyards: steel and lead. Since those Minimalist beginnings, Serra’s work has become famous for that same physicality—but one that is now compounded by the breathtaking size and weight that the pieces have acquired. His series of Torqued Ellipses (1996–99)—which comprise gigantic plates of towering steel, bent and curved, leaning in and out—carve very private spaces from the necessarily large public sites in which they have been erected. Sally Mann’s early series of photographs of her three children and husband resulted in a series called Immediate Family. In her recent series of landscapes of Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, and Georgia, Mann has stated that she “wanted to go right into the heart of the deep, dark South.” Shot with damaged lenses and a camera that requires the artist to use her hand as a shutter, these photographs are marked by the scratches, light leaks, and shifts in focus that were part of the photographic process as it developed during the nineteenth century. Place is shot on location in New York, New York; San Francisco, California; Lexington, Virginia; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Bilbao, Spain.