Art21 is the world’s leading source to learn directly from the artists of our time. The mission of Art21 is to educate and ...

Theaster Gates was born in Chicago in 1973. He first encountered creativity in the music of Black churches on his journey to becoming an urban planner, potter, and artist. Gates creates sculptures ...

Arlene Shechet was born in 1951 in New York City. Fascinated by the way things are made, Shechet likens her studio to both farm and factory. Employing an experimental approach to ceramic sculpture, ...

Catherine Opie was born in Sandusky, Ohio in 1961. Opie investigates the ways in which photographs both document and give voice to social phenomena in America today, registering people’s attitudes and ...

Creative Growth Art Center was founded by Elias and Florence Katz in 1974. Operating in a former car-body shop near downtown Oakland, California, Creative Growth provides studios, gallery space, and ...

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 ...

Before focusing on a particular question, it may help to begin with a general brainstorm about art being made today, to find out what ideas your students already have. Try to solicit as many different ...

Stan Douglas was born in Vancouver in 1960. He reenacts historical moments of tension that connect local histories to broader social movements of struggle and utopian aspiration. In the artist’s ...

El Anatsui was born in Anyanko, Ghana in 1944. Many of Anatsui’s sculptures are mutable in form, conceived to be so free and flexible that they can be shaped in any way and altered in appearance for ...

Elizabeth Murray was born in Chicago in 1940. She earned a BFA at the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California. A pioneer in painting, Murray’s distinctively ...

Rackstraw Downes was born in Kent, England in 1939. Often described as a realist painter, Downes prefers not to use that term. He views the act of seeing and the art of representation as culturally ...