Featured in Art21 Extended Play film “Systems & Structures” (2022), Charles Gaines is a conceptual artist whose work investigates the ways in which society produces distinctions and categories. Examining the underlying structures of social and political life, Gaines calls attention to the systems that organize our daily lives and the inequities and injustices they produce.

Featured in Season 2 of Art in the Twenty-First Century (2003) and the Extended Play film “Interrupting the Broadcast” (2023), Paul Pfeiffer employs video, sculpture, and photography to dissect the role that mass media plays in shaping consciousness. Presented on small LCD screens and often looped, Pfeiffer’s intimate and idealized video works are meditations on faith, desire, and a contemporary culture obsessed with celebrity.

Agnes Gund was a beloved philanthropist, collector of modern and contemporary art, civic leader, and staunch supporter of education, environmental efforts, and social justice. She was a steadfast supporter of Art21 since its inception, helping the organization share the words and works of contemporary artists to audiences worldwide.

Gund founded Studio in a School in 1977 to restore visual arts education in New York City public schools. To date, the organization has served over one million students. In 2007, Gund co-founded the Center for Curatorial Leadership, a program that equips curators with the tools to assume leadership positions in museums. From June 2017 through June 2023, Gund founded and chaired the Art for Justice Fund in partnership with the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors to support criminal justice reform in the United States. Agnes Gund was president emerita and life trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, as well as chair of its International Council.