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Place
“America is a country made of places,” writes curator Thelma Golden for the Art in the Twenty-First Century Companion Book, “not just the places marked by road signs and maps, but also the less tangible but no less meaningful places forged in the crucible of memory, longing and desire.” Place is shot on location in New York, New York; San Francisco, California; Lexington, Virginia; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Bilbao, Spain.
More information and creditsCredits
Created by: Susan Sollins & Susan Dowling. Executive Producer & Curator: Susan Sollins. Executive Producer: Susan Dowling. Series Producer: Eve-Laure Moros Ortega. Associate Producer: Migs Wright. Production Coordinator: Laura Recht. Researcher: Quinn Latimer & Wesley Miller. Director: Catherine Tatge. Editor: Donna Marino. Director of Photography: Bob Elfstrom & Joel Shapiro. Additional Photography: John Chater, Ken Kobland, & Don Lenzer. Sound: Gautam K. Choudhury, Ray Day, Doug Dunderdale, Aldo Ferraris Hierro, Chris Kellett, Ramon Larrabaster, Juan A. Torres, Bill Wander. Assistant Camera: Matthew Gordon, Brian Hwang, Paul Marbury, Glen Piegari, Enrique Puig, & Kipjaz Savoie. Gaffer/Grip: Ned Hallick, Paco Mayo, & Pedro Villalon. Location Manager: Asier Bilbao; Michelle Fernandez Echebarre; & Hilda Frontanes-Suarez, Tropical Visions. Production Assistant: Steve Carrillo, Graham Gangi, Brent Hamilton, Gabriel Monts, Eric Pfriender, Orlando A. Rivera, & Scott Stevens. Animation Stand Photographer: Marcos Levy & City Lights. Assistant Avid Editor: Heather Burak & Matt Prinzig. Assistant to the Director: Rachel Connolly.
Introductory Segment | Director & Writer: Laurie Anderson. Cast: Laurie Anderson. Director of Photography: Joey Forsyte. Gaffer: Peter Boynton, John Roche. Grip/Swing: Kit DiBenedetto, Patrick J. Webb. Make-up: Brooke Hunyady. Props: Heather Dunbar, Ali Goldman, & Zhanna Gurvich. Editor: Melody London. Assistant Editor: John Kim. Tai Chi Music by: Oliver Shanti & Friends.
Creative Consultant: Ed Sherin. Art Design and Direction: Open, New York. Animation, Visual Effects & Compositing: Spontaneous Combustion. On-Line Editor: Don Wyllie & Frame:Runner NYC. Composer: Peter Foley. Music Supervisor: John Yaffé. Sound Editing: Margaret Crimmins, Greg Smith, & Dog Bark Sound. Sound Mix: Tony Volante & Soundtrack, New York. Post-Production Supervisor: Michael Weingrad & Keir Randall.
Artworks courtesy of: Margaret Kilgallen; Sally Mann; Barry McGee; Pepón Osorio; Richard Serra; Bernice Steinbaum Gallery; Deitch Projects; Edwynn Houk Gallery; & Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. Archival footage of Barry McGee courtesy of: Thomas Campbell.
Special Thanks: Anne C. Baker; Alison Beall; City Lights; Silvia Karman Cubina; Susan Delson; Escuela de Artes Plasticas; Goldenberg Family; Russell Hassell; Jenni Holder; Instituto De Cultura Puertorriquena; Bruce Mac Corkindale; The Mann Family; Margarita Moreno; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Puerto Rico; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico; Chris Pullman; Tina Rosario and family; Tamberelli Video; Tropical Visions; UCLA Hammer Museum; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Darin Webb
Interns: Maytal Ahrony, Joyce Alcantara, Christina Darcy, Leslie Fritz, Johanna Goldfeld, Susannah Gust, Sage Lehman, Kelly McCoy, Genevieve Mercatante, Jeff Seelbach, & Stacy Wu.
Public Relations: Kelly & Salerno Communications. Legal Counsel: Albert Gottesman.
Major underwriting for Season 1 of Art in the Twenty-First Century is provided by Robert Lehman Foundation, PBS, National Endowment for the Arts, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, The Allen Foundation for the Arts, The Broad Art Foundation, The Jon and Mary Shirley Foundation, Bagley Wright Fund, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and The Foundation-to-Life.
Closed captions
Through the Art21 Translation Project, multilingual audiences from around the globe can contribute translations, making Art21 films more accessible worldwide.
Interested in showing this film in an exhibition or public screening? To license this video please visit Licensing & Reproduction.
Barry McGee’s drawings, paintings, and mixed-media installations take their inspiration from contemporary urban culture, incorporating elements such as empty liquor bottles and spray-paint cans, tagged signs, wrenches, and scrap wood or metal. McGee is also a graffiti artist, working on the streets of America’s cities since the 1980s, where he is known by the tag name “Twist.” He views graffiti as a vital method of communication, one that keeps him in touch with a larger, more diverse audience than can be reached through the traditional spaces of a gallery or museum.
Laurie Anderson creates large-scale theatrical works that combine a variety of media—music, video, storytelling, projected imagery, sculpture—in which she is an electrifying performer. As a visual artist, her work has been shown at the Guggenheim Museum, SoHo; as well as extensively in Europe, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. She has also released seven albums for Warner Brothers, including Big Science, featuring the song “O Superman,” which rose to number 2 on the British pop charts. In 1999, she staged Songs and Stories From Moby Dick, an interpretation of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel. She lives in New York.
Early experiences as a librarian and bookbinder contributed to Margaret Kilgallen’s encyclopedic knowledge of signs, drawn from American folk tradition, printmaking, and letterpress. Painting directly on the wall, Kilgallen created room-size murals that recall a time when personal craft and handmade signs were the dominant aesthetic. Strong, independent women—walking, surfing, fighting, and biking—are featured prominently in the artist’s compositions. Kilgallen had a love of “things that show the evidence of the human hand.” She died in June 2001 in San Francisco, where she lived with her husband, Barry McGee.
Pepón Osorio’s work is heavily influenced by his experience as a social worker in The Bronx, and his pieces usually evolve from an interaction with the neighborhoods and people among which he is working. A recent example is Tina’s House, a project created in collaboration with a family recovering from a devastating fire. The house—a tabletop-size art piece—tells the story of the night of the fire and those affected. The work traveled the country in a series of “home visits,” in which a new family lived with the art work for a period of at least one week, allowing the story of Tina’s House to be told in many homes and environments.
Richard Serra’s early work in the 1960s focused on the industrial materials that he had worked with as a youth in West Coast steel mills and shipyards: steel and lead. Since those Minimalist beginnings, Serra’s work has become famous for that same physicality—but one that is now compounded by the breathtaking size and weight that the pieces have acquired. His series of Torqued Ellipses (1996–99)—which comprise gigantic plates of towering steel, bent and curved, leaning in and out—carve very private spaces from the necessarily large public sites in which they have been erected.
Sally Mann’s early series of photographs of her three children and husband resulted in a series called Immediate Family. In her recent series of landscapes of Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, and Georgia, Mann has stated that she “wanted to go right into the heart of the deep, dark South.” Shot with damaged lenses and a camera that requires the artist to use her hand as a shutter, these photographs are marked by the scratches, light leaks, and shifts in focus that were part of the photographic process as it developed during the nineteenth century.
“Most of the work that I do as an artist, whether it’s music, or images or a story, begins with a place.”
Laurie Anderson