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Vija Celmins is one of the most important artists of the postwar generation. She is best known for her drawings of the ocean and the galaxies of the night sky. These brilliant works were mostly realized during a seventeen year period when she stopped painting altogether in order to explore drawing. In her forty year retrospective at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles she recalls her beginnings in abstraction, her choices of subject matter after she...

Elizabeth Murray has been moving forward fearlessly during more than 4 decades constantly inventing new shapes for the unique style of painting for which she is known. Her decision to become an artist was the result of an encounter with a still life by Cezanne at the Art Institute of Chicago as a student. Subsequently many artists had an impact on her thinking, the Surrealists, deKooning, and Guston, just to name a few. Earlier influences were the...

Ed Ruscha first worked in a commercial art studio before he began creating pop art based on the illusionist side of surrealism. Curator Margit Rowell visits Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha in his studio to view new work and discuss his progress over the last four decades, and invites him to comment on many milestones in his large retrospective exhibition at MoCA in Los Angeles.

Hans Haacke visits his retrospectives taking place simultaneously in Berlin and Hamburg with art historian Jon Bird. The work in these long awaited, non-chronologically arranged exhibitions reveals Haacke's strong convictions and desire for justice for all. Haacke is a key figure in contemporary art whose work intersects with conceptual, pop, minimal and land art. The artist is particularly known for his research into the hidden economies and politics...

Christo’s Wrapped Walk Ways is a stunning work dedicated to public interaction and communal observation. As we follow Christo down his path, he shows us exactly what those who lend themselves to the piece experience. Covering a total of 2.8 miles of walkway in Kansas City’s Loose Park, Christo’s golden nylon morphs and molds with each step, touch, and breeze. By encouraging visitors of the park to interact with the piece, the artists makes them...

Our visit with Thomas Chimes, one of Philadelphia’s most important contemporary artists, begins at the Philadelphia Museum whose collection inspired him as a schoolboy to become an artist. Here he was drawn to Thomas Eakins, a fellow Philadelphian, and to Duchamp and Van Gogh. Anne d’Harnoncourt, Director of the museum, joins Chimes to revisit the galleries of these influential artists and to “compare notes” with Chimes. Just as many other...

BLACK IS THE COLOR highlights key moments in the history of African-American visual art, from Edmonia Lewis’s 1867 sculpture Forever Free, to the work of contemporary artists such as Whitfield Lovell, Kerry James Marshall, Ellen Gallagher, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Both comprehensive and lively, BLACK IS THE COLOR is a much-needed survey of great work by artists whose contributions were neglected by the mainstream art world for far too long.

One of the contemporary art world’s most acclaimed mixed-media and performance artists, the masked Narcissister is the subject of this smart, sassy documentary that showcases her spectacle-rich approach to explorations of gender, racial identity and sexuality. Directed by the enigmatic artist herself, the film deconstructs her celebrated stage shows which combine dance, elaborate costumes, pop music hits, unabashed eroticism and heavy doses of humor....

The purposeful dismantling of the modernist myth has been the central issue of contemporary art making and art criticism. Since the 1960s, other disciplines, cultures, and artists previously excluded from modernism's privileged canons have become absorbed into an ever expanding field of activity and influence. Younger artists are a new breed of cultural scavengers -- anything or anyone is fair game for appropriation or reinterpretation. Meaning is...

'It's a simple proposition. We need one hour of your time. You decide what to do with it. What will unfold is completely unpredictable. We are literally going public. We are putting the Plinth in your hands - or literally under your feet!' - Antony Gormley. In the summer of 2009, artist Antony Gormley, previously best known for his iconic Angel of the North, created One & Other, a unique portrait of contemporary Britain. Across 100 days, 2,400 volunteers...