Catherine Opie was born in Sandusky, Ohio in 1961. Opie investigates the ways in which photographs both document and give voice to social phenomena in America today, registering people’s attitudes and ...

Martin Puryear was born in Washington, DC, in 1941. In his youth, he studied crafts and learned how to build guitars, furniture, and canoes through practical training and instruction. After earning ...

Kiki Smith talks about the roles that her family, domesticity, and death play in her work. ART21: What is it that you like about domestic objects? SMITH: [All the things] we use in our daily lives are ...

Jaimie Warren was born in 1980 in Waukesha, Wisconsin; she lives and works in New York. Warren’s photography and performance practice is deeply connected to her work with Whoop Dee Doo, a traveling ...

Sally Mann discusses her photographic process of using collodion, a syrupy solution of nitrocellulose, to prepare a negative. ART21: Could you take us through some of the steps of your photographic ...

Rackstraw Downes was born in Kent, England in 1939. Often described as a realist painter, Downes prefers not to use that term. He views the act of seeing and the art of representation as culturally ...

Richard Serra was born in 1938 in San Francisco, California. He graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a BA in English Literature in 1961, working at different steel mills to ...

Filmed in 2011 at The Museum of Modern Art in Hayama, Japan, El Anatsui discusses the role of language and symbols in his artwork. When naming works such as Gli (2010), Anatsui often uses his native ...

Artist Janine Antoni discusses her video piece Touch and her sculptural installation Moor. ART21: Can you tell me about your piece, Touch? Where did the idea come from for this work? ANTONI: While ...

In 2008, twenty of Cindy Sherman’s History Portraits (1989–1990) were exhibited at Skarstedt Gallery in New York City. In the following interview, Sherman walks Art21 through the exhibition and ...

Artist Trenton Doyle Hancock discusses his story of the Mounds as it’s told through his paintings. ART21: Your paintings and installations are but moments in the ...

Mika Tajima was born in 1975 in Los Angeles, California, and lives and works in New York. Taking international political, social, and economic points of reference as her inspiration, Tajima employs ...