The nonprofit Art21 has revealed the 12 artists and collectives who will be featured across three episodes in the tenth season of its Emmy-nominated television series Art in the Twenty-First Century, premiering on PBS and online on September 18. Each installment this season will be dedicated to a different location, focusing on London, Beijing, and the United States Mexico border, respectively.
The first episode, which spotlights artists working in the English capital, will showcase the practices of John Akomfrah, Phyllida Barlow, Anish Kapoor, and Christian Marclay, offering viewers “a really intimate portrait of their processes through the development of new projects,” Tina Kukielski, executive director and chief curator of Art21, told ARTnews in an interview.
The following installment, airing September 25, looks at the works of Beijing-based artists Guan Xiao, Liu Xiaodong, Song Dong & Yin Xiuzhen, Xu Bing, providing “an opportunity to learn about and think through the conditions of making art in china, but also the importance of tradition in each one of those artists’ work,” Kukielski said. The final episode on October 2, titled “Borderlands,” features Tanya Aguiñiga, Rafael Lozano Hemmer, Richard Misrach, and Postcommodity, with a focus on their bodies of work centering the histories of the United States-Mexico border.
Kukielski said that, in a moment of global crisis, the next season of Art in the Twenty-First Century highlights the ways that artists “are engaged with the issues of our time, and we have something to learn from living artists in a way that is even more important as travel and communication has been curtailed and limited.”
She added that Art21’s audience members “are really hungry right now to be reminded of creative potential, and the opportunity to have a real-time experience of that through film is being felt differently now.”