Joe Fusaro. Suspension, 2016. Acrylic, graphite, gesso on wood; 12×12 inches. © Joe Fusaro. Courtesy of the artist. Being an artist and an educator is easy, but making meaningful connections between the two vocations isn’t always simple. For many years, I separately practiced both: each day, when I arrived at school, I left my artist identity in the car and walked into class, determined to be a great art teacher but wary of the connections between being an artist and an educator. One day, a colleague, Donna, asked me why I didn’t share my own drawings and paintings with the students. “I don ..read more

Courtesy of the artist. Landscape has always been a foundational lens through which I interpret the world around me. I was born in Kentucky and raised in Florida. My maternal family’s farm lies in the rural flatlands of western Tennessee, and my dad’s family is from the tobacco country of the Carolinas. As a product of the American South, and growing up with its unforgiving humidity, dense swamplands and bayous, omnipresent reptiles, dripping moss, and strangling kudzu, I understood how landscape underscored my everyday experience. I learned how natural materials hold a tangible history of l ..read more

Kevin Beasley in his studio.Production still from the New York Close Up film, Kevin Beasley’s Raw Materials, 2019 © Art21, Inc. 2019. Editor’s Note: “Sound has always been important to me, and it has increasingly become a way for me to process the world,” reflected Kevin Beasley in a recent Art21 New York Close Up film, which offered a look behind the scenes as the artist prepared for his Whitney Museum exhibition, A view of a landscape. Mark Bradford, also celebrated for his material-oriented practice, is known for creating large wall-sized collages and installations from found materials th ..read more

Paul Weinberg. Mogopa Removals, 1984. Archival Digital Print. ©Paul Weinberg, 2019. Courtesy of the artist. I remember a seminal moment during the turbulent 1980s, when David Goldblatt confided in me. At the time, I was part of a collective of photographers, called Afrapix, that I had co-founded. Without trying, we were at the center of the storm: We photographed the ongoing violence against ordinary black South Africans, who had prepared themselves for continued resistance to the apartheid state. We called ourselves the “Taking Sides” generation and were unashamedly partisan as we recorded ..read more

Production still from the Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 2 episode, Place. © Art21, Inc. 2019. In the fall of 2018, there was a wonderful exhibition at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Do Ho Suh: Specimens, in which the artist, Do Ho Suh, used transparent cloth to recreate items from his home, such as a fire extinguisher and stove. The results are beautiful, ethereal objects. In the show, there were also works from the artist’s “Rubbing/Loving” project, in which he covered the interior of his New York City apartment with paper and made pencil rubbings of each room, including every ..read more

Production still from the Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 1 episode, Place. © Art21, Inc. 2019. For an art form so daring, defiant, and overwhelmingly public as graffiti, it is too often dismissed, ignored, and (in some cases) made invisible, disappearing into the barrage of visual information around it. Encompassing everything from larger-than-life paintings to train tags or the scratching of one’s moniker into an air-conditioner grill, graffiti both animates and disrupts our landscape. It finds a home on the sides of buildings, buses, and train cars, carving out a place on benches a ..read more

Production still from the “Extended Play” series, “Julie Mehretu: Politicized Landscapes,” 2017 © Art21, Inc. 2017 Last year, when I watched for the first time the Art21 Extended Play episode, Julie Mehretu: Politicized Landscapes, I was overcome with its power and beauty. The short film documents Mehretu creating large-scale abstract landscape paintings for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). The artist explains the process and concept for the contemporary paintings and collaborates with the jazz musician, Jason Moran. The film presented so much, with themes of the artist’s ind ..read more

Tiona Nekkia McClodden. Be Alarmed Lobby Card, 2014. Courtesy of the artist. The sense of place achieves its clearest articulation through narrative, providing the thematic drive and focus of the stories that people tell about the places in their lives. —Kent C. Ryden, Mapping the Invisible Landscape. Archival image of postcard, artist unknown. I was born in 1981 on an Air Force base in Blytheville, Arkansas, a small rural town where my mother Deborah Ann was born and raised, as were her mother Marvis and her grandmother Signora. Cotton fields are clear in my memory—they often appear as a ..read more

Lucia Hierro. New Yorker collage series, Mixed media, (2012-present). Image provided by the artist. Now, being an artist also means creating a platform to monumentalize the wide range of cultural histories.  I grew up hearing the music of La Gran Manzana (The Big Apple) blaring from bodegas, six-floor walk-ups, and taxicabs. Henry Hierro, my father, is the singer/songwriter for the group, a fixture in the merengue movement popular in New York City in the 1980s. Raised in Manhattan at Dyckman and Riverside, aka Little Dominican Republic, I grew up in a basement apartment with an attached ..read more

The word agency describes the capacity of a person to act in a given environment. By analogy, it could be the capacity of a student artist to create in the art classroom. But who makes the art-making decisions in that environment? Is it my job, as the teacher, to decide what will get made and how, or do I hand over some decisions to my students and guide them in the process? I create assignments through which personal, relevant, and challenging ideas can be investigated One of my big teaching objectives is to give as much control over decisions to my students as I can. This objective is com ..read more