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Join us for a screening of Artists and the Unknown, a selection of documentary films by Art21. These films—five in total, making up an hour-long program—explore the work of artists who use randomness, mystery, and unknowability to try to answer some of life’s biggest questions. Featured artists include Linda Goode Bryant, Sarah Sze, Rose B. Simpson, Josephine Halvorson, and Michael Rakowitz. The screening is free to attend and open to all. Pre-registration helps us plan for the right amount of guests, but is not required. You can pre-register using the button above.

This event is presented in collaboration with Art21. For more information, visit art21.org.

What does the “unknown” mean? It is something we encounter in ways big and small every day of our lives. It appears when we wake
up and wonder what the day holds, as we watch the world around us change, develop, and decay, and in our risks, dreams, and curiosities.
The unknown can appear unexpectedly, at any time, and with myriad forms and faces. What do we do with that information? At Art21, we look to artists.

These five films capture engaging, inspiring, and stimulating conversations that explore encounters with the unknown. Featuring the works and words of groundbreaking contemporary artists, this collection serves as a guide and a companion in your own encounters with unknowability.

Film stills courtesy of Art21:

About the Featured Artists:

Linda Goode Bryant 
In the many different titles and hats that the artist has worn throughout her decades-long career, including educator, gallerist, activist, filmmaker, and farmer, Goode Bryant has sought to realize ideas that were previously thought impossible through a choreography of passion, commitment, skill, and community. From creating the first Black commercial gallery in New York City to founding an urban farming nonprofit on concrete yards and city rooftops, Goode Bryant’s works empower communities and create tangible change, allowing others to realize their impossible ideas alongside her.

Josephine Halvorson
Combining acute attention to detail and an insistence on painting from life, Halvorson gives herself only one day to complete each canvas. Interested in her relationship to the subjects of her paintings, Halvorson resists the term painter; she prefers to think of painting as recording time spent with an object in its environment.

Rose B. Simpson
Working across media, Simpson finds new ways to connect past and present, express experience and identity, and contemplate freedom and strength. Her work often references the personal and intimate in connection with something greater, obliquely engaging the histories and knowledge of her Indigenous community and reflecting the enduring oppression and resilience of Indigenous peoples across the United States.

Sarah Sze
Sze builds her installations and intricate sculptures from the minutiae of everyday life, imbuing mundane materials, marks, and processes with surprising significance. On the edge between life and art, her work is alive with a mutable quality as if anything could happen, or not.

Michael Rakowitz
Rakowitz critiques the ongoing forces of colonization, bringing attention not only to the value of cultural artifacts that have been lost, looted, or destroyed but also to the people who have suffered from continuing violence. His work asks viewers to reconsider the relationships between hospitality and hostility, and provenance and expropriation, and to confront the complicity of cultural institutions and audiences in geopolitical matters.

About Art21:

Art21 is a celebrated nonprofit organization and preeminent resource for learning first-hand from the artists of our time. Art21’s mission is to educate and expand access to contemporary art through the production of documentary films, resources, and public programs. For more information, visit art21.org.