Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century, the only prime time national television series focused exclusively on contemporary art, invites audiences to meet fourteen of today’s most accomplished artists as they create works that reflect important and timely global issues. The artists span five continents and include such legendary figures as Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, John Baldessari, Carrie Mae Weems and William Kentridge.

Timely and timeless, global and local, beautiful and provocative, contemporary art challenges us to look at our world in new ways. Contemporary artists grapple with the complex issues of our time, ask tough questions, and make works that delight, amaze and sometimes unsettle audiences worldwide. Yet rarely are we provided access to the artists who create the art of our time.

Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century, the Peabody Award-winning biennial series produced by the contemporary art organization Art21, provides viewers a unique look at today’s artists when it returns to PBS for its fifth season in October 2009. In its most international season to date, Art21’s four-part series reveals artists’ perspectives on current affairs, politics, economics, history and popular culture, as well as showcases the artists’ working processes and their studios. For the first time ever, the series is presented in high definition and made available, beyond broadcast, in its entirety on-line via iTunes and other digital platforms.

Season Five of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century will premiere on Wednesday, October 7 at 10:00 p.m. (ET) on PBS, with three additional one-hour episodes airing over the next three consecutive Wednesdays: October 14, 21 and 28 (check local listings). Through in-depth profiles and dynamic behind-the-scenes footage featuring artists speaking directly about their inspirations and ideas, Season Five shows a broad range of artistic practice, technical innovation, and experimentation, from artists tackling large-scale collaborative projects in hangar-like studios, to those working in the quiet of more intimate studio settings.

Art21 traveled around the world in Season Five, filming the creation of new art on every continent (except Antarctica) and in museums, studios, galleries and homes in nine countries. Fourteen internationally recognized artists, from painters and sculptors to photographers and artists exploring the possibilities of new media, were filmed in their own environments and in their own words. The result is an exceptional opportunity for audiences to experience first-hand the complex artistic processes behind some of today’s most intriguing and thought-provoking art.

“This series provides an important glimpse into the minds and workspaces of artists who, regardless of their nationality or background, have the power to challenge the way we view the world,” said Susan Sollins, Executive Producer of Art:21.

As in the previous four seasons, each hour-long episode of Season Five is constructed around a theme that functions as a thread that loosely connects the artists—as diverse as their histories, styles and mediums may be. Season Five of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century features the episodes Compassion, Fantasy, Transformation, and Systems.

episode 1: “compassion”
Premieres Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 10 p.m. (check local listings)

This episode features artists whose works explore the possibility of understanding and reconciling past and present, while exposing injustice and expressing tolerance for others.

Employing stop-motion animation, drawing, and performance, William Kentridge creates poignant films and stage productions that transform sobering political events—such as apartheid, revolution, and colonialism—into poetic allegories. Kentridge, a South African artist perhaps most famous for his animated films, and who works in diverse media including sculpture, charcoal drawings, and prints, was included in the 2009 "Time" magazine 100 most influential people and is currently staging Shostakovich’s The Nose for the Metropolitan Opera. Carrie Mae Weems takes inspiration from colloquial forms—a joke, song, plea, or rebuke—to create complex photographic series that scrutinize subjectivity and insist that pernicious stereotypes be held up to the mirror of everyday emotional and intellectual life. In a recent video and photo series, filmed around the time of the 2008 United States presidential election, Weems reflects upon the legacy of the 1960s that led to this recent historic moment. Doris Salcedo draws from the oppressive history of her country, Colombia, when creating her work. Her understated sculptures and installations embody the silenced lives of the marginalized, from individual victims of violence in her own country to the larger disempowered populations of the Third World.

episode 2: “fantasy”
Premieres Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 10 p.m. (check local listings)

This episode presents four artists whose works or personal stories transport viewers to imaginary worlds and altered states of consciousness. With works that seem at times hallucinatory, irreverent, and sublime, each of these artists pursues a vision first held in the mind’s eye.

Jeff Koons utilizes symbolically charged images and objects from popular culture to frame his questions about taste and pleasure in modern society. His painstakingly crafted artworks, perfected by a small army of studio assistants in a modern version of a Renaissance atelier, were recently exhibited at a groundbreaking and controversial installation at the Chateau de Versailles. Mary Heilmann filters her inner world through her work, imbuing abstract paintings, ceramics, and furniture with references to memories and aesthetic influences ranging from popular music to her own Catholic background to cartoons. Florian Maier-Aichen is a German-born landscape photographer who lives in both Los Angeles and Cologne. His works— alternately romantic, cerebral and unearthly—question German Romanticism and myths of the American West. Maier-Aichen’s digitally altered finished works contain elements of the original photograph, but veer toward the realm of drawing and fiction rather than more traditional documentation. A young Beijing-based Chinese artist, Cao Fei’s videos, photos, and new media works explore perception, reality and inner lives in places as diverse as a Chinese factory and the virtual world of Second Life.

episode 3: “transformation”
Premieres Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at 10 p.m. (check local listings)

Whether observing and satirizing society or reinventing icons of literature, art history, and popular culture, the artists featured in this episode capture the sensibilities of our age while at times inhabiting the characters they have created.

Yinka Shonibare MBE was born in London and spent his early years in Nigeria. Working in multiple mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography and film, Shonibare draws upon his bicultural upbringing, European literary classics, 18th and 19th century history, and current events to create tableaus of dazzling color and patterns that provoke re-consideration of stereotypical colonial narratives. Art21 filmed Shonibare creating a new drawing “dedicated to the architects of the current economic crisis.” Cindy Sherman is well known for her photographic series in which she creates a myriad of characters, metamorphosing herself from Hollywood starlet to clown to society matron in her photographs and early films. Working alone in her studio, she draws inspiration as much from contemporary tabloids, TV and movies, as from fairy tales and canonical works of art history. Paul McCarthy has created works of video, installation, sculpture and performance throughout his career. His video-taped performances and multimedia installations satirize polite society, ridicule authority, and bombard the viewer with a sensory overload of spectacular imagery. His works, which riff on cultural icons ranging from Hummel figurines to Disney characters, from George Bush to Queen Elizabeth, are often controversial and aim to subvert tradition.

episode 4: “systems”
Premieres Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 10 p.m. (check local listings)

Artists invent new processes to convey the attitudes of today’s supercharged, information-based society, examining why we find comfort in some systems while rebelling against others. This episode features artists who realize complex projects through acts of appropriation or accumulation. In some instances, they create projects vast in scope, which almost elude comprehension.

Julie Mehretu is an accomplished Ethiopian-American painter. Her often large-scale abstract paintings and drawings reference techniques of mapping and architecture to achieve a complexity that suggests turbulent atmospheres and dense social networks. Art21 filmed Mehretu in Berlin, where she has temporarily relocated her studio to accommodate an enormous painting—commissioned by a major financial institution in lower Manhattan—which, in its conception, addresses the history of market-based capitalism. Influential mentor and teacher to several generations of artists, John Baldessari integrates elements of photomontage, painting, and language in his work. He employs visual juxtapositions to associate images with words and illuminate, confound, and challenge their meaning. Kimsooja is a Korean-born artist who now lives and works in the U.S. She combines the techniques of video, performance and installation in pieces which feature repetitive actions, practices and forms. Often inserting her own body in dense urban environments, as well as in isolated rural settings, Kimsooja’s video works at times blur the boundaries between aesthetics and transcendent experience. Applying strategies of mass production to hand-made objects, Allan McCollum explores the meaning of the unique work of art versus that of mass-produced objects. In order to create a recent new work, filmed by Art21, McCollum collaborated—strictly via email and phone—with craftspeople in Maine. He is best known for creating large quantities of nearly identical—yet still unique—component objects which then constitute a single work of art.

“Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century” Season 5 was produced for PBS by the non-profit contemporary art institution Art21, Inc. Executive Producer and Curator: Susan Sollins; Series Producer: Eve Moros Ortega; Associate Producer: Migs Wright; Consulting Directors: Charles Atlas (“Systems” and “Transformation”) and Catherine Tatge (“Compassion” and “Fantasy”); Series Co-Creators: Susan Sollins and Susan Dowling.

Major underwriting for Season 5 of “Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century” has been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Agnes Gund, Bloomberg, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Public Broadcasting Service, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and by individual contributions to Art21. Support for the production of “Jeff Koons” has been provided by The Broad Art Foundation; support for the production of “Kimsooja” has been provided by the Korea Foundation.