Friday, October 24, 2014 at 10 p.m. on KPBS TV
Providing unique access to some of the most compelling artists of our time, Season 7 features a dozen artists from the United States, Europe and Latin America, and transports viewers to artistic projects across the country and around the world. In locations as diverse as a Bronx public housing project, a military testing facility in the Nevada desert, a jazz festival in Sweden and an activist neighborhood in Mexico, the artists reveal intimate and personal insights into their lives and creative processes. Each episode is organized around a theme that connects the artists: "Investigation" (Oct. 24), "Secrets" (Oct. 31), "Legacy" (Nov. 7) and "Fiction" (Nov. 14).
"Investigation" - How do artists push beyond what they already know and readily see? Can acts of engagement and exploration be works of art in themselves? In this episode, artists use their practices as tools for personal and intellectual discovery, simultaneously documenting and producing new realities in the process.
While enlisting the participation of the residents of a Bronx public housing development to develop a sprawling installation out of everyday materials, Thomas Hirschhorn poses political and philosophical questions, and searches for alternative models of thinking and being. The process leads to the creation of a new kind of monument that, while physically ephemeral, lives on in collective memory.
For Graciela Iturbide, the camerais a pretext for understanding the world. Her principal concern has been the photographic investigation of Mexico—her own cultural environment—through black-and-white images of landscapes and their inhabitants, abstract compositions, and self-portraits. Whether photographing indigenous communities in her native country, cholos in Los Angeles, Frida Kahlo’s house, or the landscape of the American South, her interest, she says, lies in what her heart feels and what her eyes see.
Leonardo Drew, whose art career began as a child in inner city Bridgeport, Connecticut, transforms new materials—through processes of decay, oxidization, and exposure to weather—in his sculptures. Never content with work that comes easily, Drew reaches daily beyond his comfort zone, charting a course of experimentation with his materials and processes and letting the work find its own way.
This series is produced by Art21. Art21 is on Facebook, Instagram, tumblr, and you can follow @ART21 on Twitter.
