Artist, entrepreneur, businessman, and philanthropist David Howe has been a part of Art21 since 2003, acting as Board Chair of Art21 for 16 years until 2021. Howe’s multimedia artistic practices investigate hierarchies and relationships of power and are concerned with the conflicting human needs for both freedom and stability. Through photography, video, painting, sculpture, and installations, his conceptual work deals with humankind’s never-ending oscillation between open and closed systems.

Featured in the 11th Season of Art in the Twenty-First Century (2023), Amy Sherald documents the contemporary African American experience in the United States through arresting, intimate portraits. Sherald engages with the history of photography and portraiture, inviting viewers to participate in a more complex debate about accepted notions of race and representation in order to situate Black life in American art.

Hiroshi Sugimoto was featured in Season 3 of Art in the Twenty-First Century (2005) and “Cabinet of Curiosities” an Extended Play film (2011). The Japanese artist and architect explores history and temporal existence by investigating themes of time, empiricism, and metaphysics. Grounded in technical mastery of the classical photographic tradition, he examines the ways photography can record traces of invisible but elemental forces.