\u201cAmerica is a country made of places,\u201d writes curator Thelma Golden for the Art in the Twenty-First Century Companion Book, \u201cnot 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Barry McGee\u2019s 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\u2019s cities since the 1980s, where he is known by the tag name \u201cTwist.\u201d 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.
\nLaurie Anderson creates large-scale theatrical works that combine a variety of media\u2014music, video, storytelling, projected imagery, sculpture\u2014in 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 \u201cO Superman,\u201d 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\u2019s 1851 novel. She lives in New York.
\nEarly experiences as a librarian and bookbinder contributed to Margaret Kilgallen\u2019s 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\u2014walking, surfing, fighting, and biking\u2014are featured prominently in the artist\u2019s compositions. Kilgallen had a love of \u201cthings that show the evidence of the human hand.\u201d She died in June 2001 in San Francisco, where she lived with her husband, Barry McGee.
\nPep\u00f3n Osorio\u2019s 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\u2019s House, a project created in collaboration with a family recovering from a devastating fire. The house\u2014a tabletop-size art piece\u2014tells the story of the night of the fire and those affected. The work traveled the country in a series of \u201chome visits,\u201d in which a new family lived with the art work for a period of at least one week, allowing the story of Tina\u2019s House to be told in many homes and environments.
\nRichard Serra\u2019s 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\u2019s work has become famous for that same physicality\u2014but one that is now compounded by the breathtaking size and weight that the pieces have acquired. His series of Torqued Ellipses (1996\u201399)\u2014which comprise gigantic plates of towering steel, bent and curved, leaning in and out\u2014carve very private spaces from the necessarily large public sites in which they have been erected.
\nSally Mann\u2019s 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 \u201cwanted to go right into the heart of the deep, dark South.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Place is shot on location in New York, New York; San Francisco, California; Lexington, Virginia; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Bilbao, Spain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Art 21 presents contemporary artists and offers you a more intimate view of their creative process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":124740,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"program_type":[15],"group":[542,546],"d_category":[665],"genre":[2492],"class_list":["post-124739","program","type-program","status-inactive","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","program_type-episode","group-creation","group-portraits","d_category-art-pop","genre-entertainement"],"yoast_head":"\n