Celebrating 21 Years of Art21 with a Winter Film Series

Art21 is starting off 2018—the year of our 21st anniversary—with a special series of five new film premieres featuring five artists.

Opening with a film featuring Barbara Kruger and culminating with a film featuring Jack Whitten (produced throughout 2017, before his recent passing), the winter series will also include new films featuring artists Raúl de Nieves, Doreen Garner, and Abigail DeVille.

From January 24 through March 21, a new film will premiere at noon every other Wednesday here on Art21.org and on the Art21 YouTube channel.

Winter Premiere Schedule

Wednesday, January 24
Barbara Kruger (Extended Play)

Wednesday, February 7
Raúl de Nieves (New York Close Up)

Wednesday, February 21
Doreen Garner (New York Close Up)

Wednesday, March 7
Abigail DeVille (New York Close Up)

Wednesday, March 21
Jack Whitten (Extended Play)

Five Artists, Five Films

Kicking off the winter programming is Art21’s first collaboration with Barbara Kruger since the 2001 inaugural season of the Peabody Award-winning Art in the Twenty-First Century television series. In this rare new interview, Kruger reflects on her development as an artist, tracing her roots back to working class Newark, New Jersey, then through joining Condé Nast as a designer—the role that would equip her with design fluencies employed throughout her career. The film is bookended by two of the artist’s most recent projects: a site-specific installation in a New York City skatepark commissioned by Performa and an immersive full-room-wrap at Sprüth Magers gallery in Berlin.

Explorations of friendship and collaboration run through the second film from Art21’s acclaimed New York Close Up series to feature artist Raúl de Nieves. Working in partnership with artist Colin Self, the film tracks the pair as they prepare for The Fool, a 2017 performance at The Kitchen in New York City

Artist Doreen Garner makes her Art21 debut through a new film from the New York Close Up series. Shown preparing for her recent exhibition at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, the artist explores the history of Dr. J. Marion Sims, the controversial figure canonized as “The Father of Modern Gynecology” despite the savage procedures he performed on enslaved women without anesthesia or consent.

Perceptions of space and time are challenged in a recent project by Abigail DeVille, as seen in the artist’s third feature from the New York Close Up series. Through exhaustive research and planning, the artist transforms Baltimore’s former Peale Museum into a venue for investigating the extensive and, in some cases, untold history of the first building in the Western Hemisphere to be built and designed as a museum.

Closing the winter series is a film from the Extended Play series featuring renowned artist Jack Whitten—the second artist to make an Art21 debut in 2018. Filmed in late 2017, months before his passing, the artist is shown at work in his Queens studio, contemplating the decades-long career that brought him from Alabama to New York City in the 1960s. The film also features a recent body of work by the artist shown at a solo gallery exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in New York City.