Art21

What do wrestling, photography, and acting all have in common?

In 2019, Art21 joined artist Elle Pérez in their studio as they explained their collaborative approach to photography, playing with notions of authenticity and performance through portraiture.

"I don't think there's a way to involve the camera without immediately involving a kind of fiction."

Watch "Elle Pérez Works Between the Frame" for free → https://bit.ly/4dPcYLO

Is New York City an inverted suburbia?

🎞️ Edited from never-before-seen interview footage from the . To see Janet Olivia Henry in full Art21 films and episodes, visit art21.org/artist/janet-olivia-henry.

Janet Olivia Henry’s work in collage and assemblage draws from American culture, using images from magazines, dolls, and objects produced in miniature to create connections and juxtapositions.

Artwork courtesy Gordon Robichaux.

José de Jesús Rodríguez explores the edges.

The artist complicates reductive understandings of identity by placing disparate historical and personal references within a single work.

In this clip, Rodríguez contextualizes his 2024 painting “Move Over, Denzel,” which draws inspiration from muralists like José Clemente Orozco to reflect on stereotypical depictions of Mexicans in Hollywood films.

Watch the full film for free → https://art21.org/watch/new-york-close-up/jose-de-jesus-rodriguezs-back-forth/

José de Jesús Rodríguez gets away from image.

In 2024, following his first solo show in New York City, the artist shifted his focus from detailed image-making toward a slower, more tactile method of production using acrylic mosaic.

“This is very new to me, so it might not work or it might not do something that I want it to do,” he explains. “But you know, it’s all trial and error in some way.”

Watch the full film → https://bit.ly/4vlVo9H

José de Jesús Rodríguez searches for a visual language.

“Fresco is simply just painting on wet plaster. The binder is the wall itself.”

In our latest release, José de Jesús Rodríguez searches for a visual language capable of reflecting the complex experience of his personal and collective identities.

“There's something really beautiful about it because it's both becoming image and paint and material at the same time. It's always this fluctuating experience. As you move through it, as the moisture is leaving the surface, it changes how you approach painting too. It makes you attentive to what is at hand because the margin of it doing what you want to do is really slim, and you can't just wipe away.”

Watch the full film, “José de Jesús Rodríguez's Back & Forth,” free on YouTube: https://youtu.be/7JyHsaJRNho

🎬 New on Art21→ “José de Jesús Rodríguez's Back & Forth”

“For me, being an artist felt like a really selfish thing to do.”

This documentary short follows the artist in a moment of creative transition as he adapts the techniques of mosaic to his multilayered compositions, embracing more openness, gesture, and ambiguity in this emerging body of work.

“I think early on the paintings functioned as a diary. The things I grew up with, the images I grew up with. I felt like a kind of duty to account for my parents' experience, but I think I'm trying to untangle that from painting.”

Watch the premiere on Wednesday, May 27 at 12pm ET on YouTube: https://youtu.be/7JyHsaJRNho

Nicholas Hlobo conducts a silent orchestra. 🎷

In this film from 2022, the artist reflects on creating "Mphephethe uthe cwaka," a sculpture composed of trumpets, bugles, and other wind instruments whose shapes have been radically reimagined.

Watch all of Art21's films with Nicholas Hlobo on art21.org.