William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1955. He attended the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (1973–76), Johannesburg Art Foundation (1976–78), and studied mime and ...

Pepón Osorio was born in 1955 in Santurce, Puerto Rico, and currently lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1975, Osorio left Puerto Rico and moved to the South Bronx in New York City, ...

Abigail DeVille was born in 1981 in New York, where she lives and works. Maintaining a long-standing interest in marginalized people and places, DeVille creates site-specific immersive installations ...

Glenn Ligon was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1960. Ligon’s paintings and sculptures examine cultural and social identity through found sources—literature, Afrocentric coloring books, photographs—to ...

Theaster Gates was born in Chicago in 1973. He first encountered creativity in the music of Black churches on his journey to becoming an urban planner, potter, and artist. Gates creates sculptures ...

Elizabeth Murray was born in Chicago in 1940. She earned a BFA at the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California. A pioneer in painting, Murray’s distinctively ...

Artist Martin Puryear discusses his work’s connection to the history of abstraction and the inspiration for his 1996 installation piece, “Ladder for Booker T. Washington.” ART21: Your work is often ...

Look for the plus icon next to videos throughout the site to add them here. Save videos to watch later, or make a selection to play back-to-back using the autoplay feature. While sharing her earliest ...

Mark Bradford was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1961. He received a BFA (1995) and MFA (1997) from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Bradford transforms materials scavenged from ...

Kiki Smith was born in 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany. The daughter of American sculptor Tony Smith, Kiki Smith grew up in New Jersey. As a young girl, one of Smith’s first experiences with art was ...

Look for the plus icon next to videos throughout the site to add them here. Save videos to watch later, or make a selection to play back-to-back using the autoplay feature. Paul Pfeiffer discusses the ...

Look for the plus icon next to videos throughout the site to add them here. Save videos to watch later, or make a selection to play back-to-back using the autoplay feature. In this rare interview ...