Robin Rhode’s team of “art soldiers” at work in Johannesburg, South Africa. Production still from the Art21 television series Art in the Twenty-First Century, Season 9. © Art21, Inc. 2018.
New episodes of Art in the Twenty-First Century are coming to PBS. Art21 announced this week that their celebrated television series will present its ninth season in September. Featuring twelve innovators and one nonprofit center in three cities across three continents, the season continues its focus on artists’ relationships with the places they live and work.
In Berlin, Art21 explores a city that has become synonymous with experimentation and cross-cultural dialogues. Featuring Swedish artists Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, Iraqi-Kurdish artist Hiwa K, and Scottish Susan Philpsz, the episode celebrates Berlin as a mixing pot of international influences and a place in which artists from all over the world come to work and be inspired.
Traveling to the sub-Sahara, Art21 will also take viewers to Johannesburg, South Africa to explore a city that has emerged as the artistic capital of the continent. With the history of apartheid still deeply felt, artists David Goldblatt, Nicholas Hlobo, Zanele Muholi, and Robin Rhode use their work to empower marginalized communities, and examine historical memory.
Finally, the San Francisco Bay Area episode will take a closer look at the city’s history of innovation and continued avenues of experimentation through the work of Katy Grannan, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Stephanie Syjuco. For the first time, Art21 will also feature a nonprofit art space: Creative Growth Art Center. The celebrated incubator was founded in 1974 and provides studios, gallery space, and supplies to more than 150 artists with developmental, mental, and physical disabilities.
Always putting the artist’s voice front and center, the new season guarantees an intimate look into the lives of artists changing the way we see and experience the world today. As Olafur Eliasson states in the trailer, “What we are interested in is to examine the organization of the world. Art doesn’t stop where the real world starts.”
Season 9 of Art in the Twenty-First Century premieres September 21, 2018 on PBS.
News of the Week
- Barbara Kasten’s work is included in Tate Modern’s Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art, an exhibition exploring the relationship between abstract painting and photography since the 1910s. The show runs through October 14, and is sure to be a game-changer for the history of photography.
- Louise Bourgeois’s powerful poems will be published for the first time in conjunction with the opening of five decades of her work at Glenstone in Potomac, Maryland. The accompanying catalogue will include nearly 50 pages of previously unpublished diary entries that the artist wrote between ages 14 and 91. You’ll have plenty of time to catch the exhibition, as it will be on view from May 2018 through January 2020.
- Charles Gaines is presenting a new series of twelve large-scale works on paper at Paula Cooper Gallery from through June 9. Extending his long interest in serialized projects, the exhibition will explore the relationship between aesthetics, politics, language and systems.
- Charles Atlas is taking over The Kitchen’s stage May 10-12 for a performance art variety show titled The Kitchen Follies. Bringing together a range of artists working in performance art, dance, and music, Atlas will film each performance live, using video cameras to simultaneously record, mix, and project footage.
- LaToya Ruby Frazier reprises her Pledges of Allegiance flag with Creative Time, adding 357 more days to the time Flint has been without clean water. Frazier’s flag is flying at sixteen cultural institutions nationwide through May 16th.
- Nick Cave’s latest solo exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery, Weather or Not, opens May 17 and runs through June 23. Tackling the effect of gun violence on Black youth, Cave will debut a series of wire Tondos created from layering cataclysmic weather patterns with brain scans of youth who are suffering from PTSD as a result of this violence.
- Diana Al-Hadid’s first public art project, Delirious Matter, goes on view at Madison Square Park on May 14. Featuring six new sculptures, the project will continue Al-Hadid’s interest in dissolving the boundaries between architecture, landscape, and figuration, while considering how women have been depicted as objects throughout the history of art.