Join ATNE for a screening of the San Fransisco Bay Area episode from Season 9 of Art21
Episode Synopsis: A longtime home for political progressives and technological pioneers, the San Francisco Bay Area is a magnet for artists who are drawn to its experimental atmosphere, countercultural spirit, and history of innovation. In addition to pre-senting three artists working across photography, installation, and new media, this episode features a nonprofit art center, spotlighting multiple artists with physical and cognitive disabilities who work in a range of mediums. The artists in this hour are united by their steadfastness and persistence in creating; their art serves as an essential expression of their experience of the world.
Stephanie Syjuco
born 1974, Manila, Philippines
Stephanie Syjuco makes research-driven photographs, sculptures, and installations that explore the tension between the authentic and the counterfeit and challenge deep-seated assumptions about history, race, and labor. As a flashpoint of social and political protest, the Bay Area spurs Syjuco’s investigations of colonialism, capitalism, and citizenship, in works that range from her participatory projects to her studio-portrait photographs.
Katy Grannan
born 1969, Arlington, Massachusetts
Fascinated by the lives of people she describes as “anonymous,” the Berkeley based photographer and filmmaker Katy Grannan develops longterm relationships with the residents of western American cities and towns, which generate beautiful and unsettling images. Surveying her work taking portraits of society’s most invisible members to the making of her first feature-length film, The Nine, this segment charts the collaborative and at times complicated dynamics between and an artist and her muses.
Lynn Hershman Leeson
born 1941,Cleveland, Ohio
Lynn Hershman Leeson is at once a pointed critic and a sly practical jokester, as she explores the roles that technology, media, and artifice play in society. This episode surveys the artist’s richly varied body of work, from her early performances as the fictional character Roberta Breitmore to the more recent Vertighost, a work incorporating surveillance video and sculpture that ofers a feminist rif on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Overlooked for the better part of her decades-long career, Leeson is now recognized as a pioneering multidisciplinary artist and critiques the gender biases that excluded her and other women artists.
Creative Growth Art Center
founded 1974 by Elias and Florence Katz,Oakland, California
Founded four decades ago, at the height of the disability-rights movement, Creative Growth Art Center is a nonprofit organization serving artists with physical and cognitive disabilities. Telling the story of remarkable individuals—Dan Miller, Judith Scott, William Scott, and Monica Valentine—and a uniquely productive artist community, this segment explores the idea that artmaking is a fundamental human practice and should be accessible to all.
Image Credit: Stephanie Syjuco at work in her studio, Richmond, CA, USA. Production still from the Art21 television series “Art in the Twenty-First Century,” Season 9, 2018. © Art21, Inc. 2018.
This event is produced in collaboration with Art21, a nonprofit global leader in art education, producing preeminent films on today’s leading visual artists and education programs that inspire creativity worldwide.