How do we bridge the time and distance between some of the places beyond our own immediate region—beyond our own knowledge, lives, and experiences? How can we find connections to the urban toxicity, the pollution of rivers and streams, and the stories of community resilience? 

This playlist shapes the contours of a range of questions about the world and ‘International Community-ism.’ It comes from my interest in connecting the global with the local, and I can use these videos to introduce global studies content in my classroom. These videos offer a range of possibilities for unpacking intersections of aesthetics and ecologies in multiple localities. 

Read about how Amiko Matsuo teaches with global/local connections in her classroom.

Watch each of the twelve full segments from Season 7 of Art21’s Peabody Award-winning Art in the Twenty-First Century series.

Providing unique access to some of the most compelling artists of our time, Season 7 features a dozen artists from the United States, Europe, and Latin America, transporting viewers to artistic projects across the country and around the world. In locations as diverse as a Bronx public housing project, a military testing facility in the Nevada desert, a jazz festival in Sweden, and an activist neighborhood in Mexico, the artists reveal intimate and personal insights into their lives and creative processes. Season 7 artists create socially and politically engaged art, draw upon the influence of family and youthful experiences, and experiment with both form and medium.

Season 7 premiered in October 2014 on PBS.

Shahzia Sikander’s most recent project, Havah…to breathe, air, life (2023), reimagines the monument as a marker of boundary-breaking, feminine spirit, and collective visibility. “I like to think of my practice as an anti-monument,” says Sikander, “because it engages the past without glorifying it.”

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s participatory anti-monumental approach in A Crack in the Hourglass (2021) gives communities the space to mourn, remember, and feel connected again to those lost to COVID-19. “I think that the monuments that are most interesting are the monuments that either disappear, question themselves, that complicate some of these stories that we tell ourselves,” says the artist.

In a recreated monument, KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner) forces audiences to face the profound racism underlying the life and work of Dr. J. Marion Sims, long considered the “father of modern gynecology,” who performed torturous procedures on enslaved Black women for the purposes of experimentation and research.

Monuments carry special significance for Krzysztof Wodiczko as sites for public gatherings and protests, witnesses and recorders of history, and blank canvases upon which new narratives can be painted.

In our latest playlist, artists reimagine the idea of the monument and reconsider how we acknowledge the past.