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 ...

Sarah Sze was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1969. Sze builds her installations and intricate sculptures from the minutiae of everyday life, imbuing mundane materials, marks, and processes with ...

Martin Puryear was born in Washington, DC, in 1941. In his youth, he studied crafts and learned how to build guitars, furniture, and canoes through practical training and instruction. After earning ...

Mark Bradford was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1961. He received a BFA (1995) and MFA (1997) from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Bradford transforms materials scavenged from ...

Tania Bruguera was born in 1968 in Havana, Cuba. Bruguera, a politically motivated performance artist, explores the relationship between art, activism, and social change in works that examine the ...

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

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 ...

Mary Mattingly was born in 1978 in Rockville, Connecticut, and lives and works in New York. Combining a visual-art practice with environmental activism and education, Mattingly wrote a manifesto that ...

Laurie Simmons was born on Long Island, New York, in 1949. She received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia (1971). Simmons stages photographs and films with paper dolls, finger puppets, ...

Lynn Hershman Leeson was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1941. At once a pointed critic and a sly practical jokester, Hershman Leeson has worked across a wide range of mediums, from drawing, painting and ...

Diana Thater was born in San Francisco in 1962. She makes video installations that poetically grapple with threats to the natural world, from the extinction of species to long-lasting environmental ...

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