Preview each of the twelve segments from the new season of Art21’s Peabody Award-winning “Art in the Twenty-First Century” series.

Season 9 charts art-making in three urban centers across three continents: Berlin, Johannesburg, and the San Francisco Bay Area. From the post-Cold War cultural and economic rebirth in Berlin, to the dramatic fall of apartheid in South Africa and the technological boom in the Bay Area, the twelve artists and one non-profit art center highlighted in this season respond to the forces that have shaped the places where they live and work, while pursuing their personal visions for a better future.

The new season premieres September 21, 2018 on PBS.

In the first season of Art in the Twenty-First Century, we examined how artists respond to the concept of consumption—of images, information, objects, and land. Over the past 21 years, our films have continued to explore how artists approach this theme, broadening the scope of voices and investigating new forms of consumption introduced by emerging trends such as the rise of social media and the evolution of advertising tactics.

“We spend our whole lives training to understand movies and television and video games and clothes and beds and houses,” writes curator Katy Siegel in her essay for the Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 1 companion book. “And so contemporary art often invokes these experiences and objects; art often looks like a commodity, because in a consumer culture, nothing could be more essential.” This playlist begins with the five artists who were featured in our original Consumption episode, followed by ten additional artist perspectives on how we consume the world around us.

Throughout our first 21 years, our films have documented the progression of artists and their practices, capturing artists as they continuously refine their approaches to creating work. By revisiting artists at various stages throughout their careers—in many cases, nearly a decade apart—we have watched their development as creative thinkers unfold over time.

Studios might relocate and cultural trends might shift, but the ideas that drive each artist remain consistent, becoming more refined and complex with each new work. The films in this playlist reveal the evolution of these artists’ practices—tracing experiments with material, scale, and overall ambition, and demonstrating that the path of an artist’s growth is always clear of stagnation.