ART21

Four contemporary artists look inside and outside their immediate circles to find emotional connections and build community. This film showcases playful and poignant sculptures, performances, and more. Includes celebrated filmmaker Miranda July.

Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger started a series of works called “Future Ancestral Technologies,” rejecting the romantic historical narrative of native people that their culture is ancient and primitive. Through science fiction and speculative fiction presented with sculptures, videos, regalia, and performance, Luger imagines how our culture shifts in the future and what it will mean to be indigenous.

Artist Miranda July walks through a busy gas station while uncoiling a roll of white ribbon, asking strangers to hold onto a part of it but feel free to let go whenever they need to. The ribbon tangles and wraps around the entire gas station. In the voiceover, July discusses how taking risks is her comfort zone and not being afraid to do so gives her a superpower to work freely.

Illustrated with archival images from the 70s and 80s, Linda Goode Bryant tells the story of how she realized artists of color were not given the opportunities to exhibit their work at the time and decided to take the initiative to establish the art gallery, Just Above Midtown, which fostered a vibrant artists community and gave artists the space to exchange ideas and experiment with new work.

As a muralist paints artist Christine Sun Kim’s site-responsive project at the Queens Museum, “Time Owes Me Rest Again,” Kim explains the ideas behind the piece. She used echoing motion lines to represent the five words in the title in American Sign Language, conveying the unease and fatigue many felt during the COVID-19 pandemic and the persisting inequity between Deaf and hearing communities.

Artist Anicka Yi runs her studio as if it’s a laboratory, developing hypotheses, testing them in small trials, and bringing in experts to help bring them to life as the idea is refined. Through footage of the studio and the installation leading up to an exhibition, we see the diverse disciplines she draws inspiration from, as well as the wide range of materials she works with.

Finding inspiration outside the studio, a group of acclaimed contemporary artists use history, science, and politics as the raw material to create potent sculptures, paintings, drawings, and public works.

Artist Hank Willis Thomas is at the unveiling of his sculpture, “The Embrace,” a monument celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, in Boston. Through this public artwork, he hopes to inspire people to reflect on the past with care and concern for the future, and continue to give people a sense of pride and connection beyond this lifetime.

Clad in all-black, their faces obscured by oversized gorilla masks, “Frida Kahlo” and “Käthe Kollwitz” take to the streets as Guerrilla Girls to engage the public in their decades-long battle against discrimination in the art world. Animated sequences and archival footage illustrate the artist-activist collective’s fight for equality through posters with bold designs and other creative means.

Artist Tauba Auerbach is in their studio in New York City, creating drawings with a “knit structure,” sequences of a single gesture woven together on the page, challenging themselves to modify the rules without lifting the marker or draw from a specific part of their body. The trance-like state achieved in these intuitive and spontaneous drawings is the ideal space for the artist to think.

Artist Amy Sherald invites two models into her studio in Jersey City, NJ, to help her visualize her painting, "For love, and for country." Sherald has the models imitating the pose in Alfred Eisenstaedt's famous black-and-white photo "V-J Day in Times Square." The artist explains that taking photographs of models serves as her sketchbook, where she figures out what she wants in her painting.

Artist Alex Da Corte is in his studio in Philadelphia, PA, transforming into characters for a video shoot with the help of his team. In Da Corte's video artworks, he performs while dressed as a wide variety of cultural icons. By spending time with these characters, he hopes to make his mind freer than it is and give depth to icons that are often rendered as flat symbols.