Thought Portal

Art21 proudly presents an artist segment, featuring Walton Ford, from the "Humor" episode in Season 2 of the "Art in the Twenty-First Century" series.

"Humor" premiered in October 2003 on PBS.

A voracious reader of colonial letters and diaries, Walton Ford is fascinated by the fear and wonder of nature that he finds in historical texts. Contrasting the romanticized tradition of Audubon with the destructive qualities of existence, Ford merges a dreamlike vision with a frenetic and comic reality.

Walton Ford was born in 1960 in Larchmont, New York. Learn more about the artist at: https://art21.org/artist/walton-ford

Art21 proudly presents an artist segment, featuring Laylah Ali, from the "Power" episode in Season 3 of the "Art in the Twenty-First Century" series.

"Power" premiered in September 2005 on PBS.

Working in extremely detailed paintings that take months to create, Laylah Ali combines cartoon and folkloric aesthetics to explore notions of ethnicity and social violence. In her studio, Ali demonstrates the tricky process of working with gouache on paper and speculates that the physiological effects of color and light on the eye may have real social effects.

Laylah Ali was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1968, and lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Learn more about the artist at: https://art21.org/artist/Laylah-Ali

Donald Sutherland reading from Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo

“Romance” premiered in October 2007 on PBS.

Balancing intense planning with improvisational decision-making, Judy Pfaff creates exuberant, sprawling sculptures and installations that weave landscape, architecture, and synthetic color into a tense yet organic whole. Judy Pfaff was born in London, England, in 1946.

Learn more about the artist at: https://art21.org/artist/Judy-Pfaff

this asshole

As urban expansion quickly replaces natural habitats, façade engineer Alistair Law has discovered a new way to restore native ecosystems for pollinators and create natural spaces for us all within cities – by turning the walls of buildings into meadows.

As a child, artist Hank Willis Thomas was told he stared too much and asked too many questions. Today, these very attributes shape his artistic practice, which pivots on the theme of perspective. “All of my work is about framing and contexts,” says the artist. “Depending on where you’re standing, it really shapes your perspective of the truth, of reality, and of what’s important.” Reading Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, Thomas was struck by the idea of the punctum, the part of an image that impacts and stays with the viewer. Drawing from his background in photography to augment his work with other media, the artist’s sculptural works like Liberty (2015) isolate this punctum and translate it into three-dimensional space.

Chris Ware, known for his New Yorker magazine covers, is hailed as a master of the comic art form. Ware’s complex graphic novels, which tell stories about people in suburban midwestern neighborhoods, poignantly reflect on the role of memory in constructing identity. Stories featuring many of Ware’s protagonists—Quimby the Mouse, Rusty Brown, and Jimmy Corrigan—often first appear in serialized form, in publications such as “The New York Times,” the “Guardian,” or Ware’s own ongoing comic book series “Acme Novelty Library,” before being organized into their own stand-alone books.

HBO Max’s biographical drama series ‘Julia’ revolves around the incredibly moving life of television chef and author Julia Child, who hosted the famed and influential cooking show titled ‘The French Chef.’ The series depicts Julia’s efforts to launch her show on WGBH-TV upon overcoming the sexism of the television industry of the early 1960s.

In the series, Julia appears in P. Albert Duhamel’s book review show ‘I’ve Been Reading’ to promote her cookbook ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking.’ Since Julia’s well-received appearance acts as a stepping stone for her to create her cooking series, one must be wondering about the authenticity of Duhamel and his show. Well, here’s everything you need to know

From her experimental home and clothing projects to her artificial Pocket Property island off the coast of Denmark, Andrea Zittel is an artist who truly “lives” art. “We’re obsessed with perfection, we’re obsessed with innovation and moving forwards. But what we really want is the hope of some sort of a new and improved or better tomorrow.”

Filmed in Zittel’s Brooklyn home and studio, which serves as her artful business A-Z Administrative Services, the artist takes the viewer on a tour of her specially designed bathroom, furniture, and wardrobe—a whimsical blend of the artist’s Southern California roots and 20th Century Modernist design philosophy.

Luchita Hurtado reflects on her eight-decade-long career and the relationship between the human body and the natural world that is embedded in her work. In her Santa Monica studio, Hurtado works on a new painting from her “Birthing” series, discussing how her experience of motherhood and her commitment to environmental activism merge in this most recent body of work.

Born in Venezuela, Hurtado describes her childhood growing up in New York City, her first art classes, and the challenges of starting a family while maintaining an artistic practice. “It takes a great deal of energy, having the life of a parent and having the life of an artist,” recounts Hurtado. “My real painting, I could do at night after everyone was asleep.”

Speaking with her studio director, Ryan Good, Hurtado explains that it was not until recent years that her work began receiving more attention from curators and museums. The artist travels to the Serpentine Galleries in London to celebrate her first solo exhibition at a public institution, showcasing over one hundred works and charting her many styles of painting and drawing: from dynamic abstractions of human figures to bold self-portraits that depict the artist’s body from her own downward-facing perspective, from swirling blue skies with floating feathers to paintings with words like “AIR,” “WATER,” and “EARTH” embedded within them.

Back in Los Angeles, Hurtado paints en plein air in a local park and elucidates on the tenuous relationship between humans and nature, which is the focus of her newest work. “We’re all on this planet together and we’re all related,” says the artist. “To be in this park, with these trees, it’s just the joy of life.”

The most fundamental demand made that morning, however, was that the profession begin to think about racism differently than it had in the past. Racism did not just happen because some bad people had hateful beliefs. Unlike many of their liberal white colleagues, who were fascinated by the potential mental pathologies of individual racists, the Black Psychiatrists of America (drawing on new sociological work) insisted that racism was built into the systems and structures of American life, including psychiatry itself. For this reason, as some of them put it in 1973, “institutional change (as opposed to personality change) are needed to root out and eliminate racism.”

The program had originally been a radical experiment in the use of mass media to give the youngest generation of Americans their first experience of what Martin Luther King Jr. had famously called the Beloved Community: one based on justice, equal opportunity and positive regard for one’s fellow human beings, regardless of race, color or creed.