Contemporary art is the art of today, produced in the second half of the 20th century or in the 21st century. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a dynamic combination of materials, methods, concepts, and subjects that continue the challenging of boundaries that was already well underway in the 20th century. Diverse and eclectic, contemporary art as a whole is distinguished by the very lack of a uniform, organising principle, ideology, or "-ism". Contemporary art is part of a cultural dialogue that concerns larger contextual frameworks such as personal and cultural identity, family, community, and nationality.
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago is a contemporary art museum near Water Tower Place in downtown Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, United States. The museum, which was established in 1967, is one of the world's largest contemporary art venues. The museum's collection is composed of thousands of objects of Post-World War II visual art. The museum is run gallery-style, with individually curated exhibitions throughout the year. Each exhibition may be composed of temporary loans, pieces from their permanent collection, or a combination of the two.
The New Museum of Contemporary Art, founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker, is a museum in New York City at 235 Bowery, on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
Faith Wilding is a Paraguayan American multidisciplinary artist - which includes but is not limited to: watercolor, performance art, writing, crocheting, knitting, weaving, and digital art. She is also an author, educator, and activist widely known for her contribution to the progressive development of feminist art. She also fights for ecofeminism, genetics, cyberfeminism, and reproductive rights. Wilding is Professor Emerita of performance art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Marcia Tucker was an American art historian, art critic and curator. In 1977 she founded the New Museum of Contemporary Art, a museum dedicated to innovative art and artistic practice in New York City, which she ran as the director until 1999.
The feminist art movement in the United States began in the early 1970s and sought to promote the study, creation, understanding and promotion of women's art. First-generation feminist artists include Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Suzanne Lacy, Judith Bernstein, Sheila de Bretteville, Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneeman, Rachel Rosenthal, and many other women. They were part of the Feminist art movement in the United States in the early 1970s to develop feminist writing and art. The movement spread quickly through museum protests in both New York and Los Angeles, via an early network called W.E.B. that disseminated news of feminist art activities from 1971 to 1973 in a nationally circulated newsletter, and at conferences such as the West Coast Women's Artists Conference held at California Institute of the Arts and the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts, at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C..
The Block Museum of Art is a free public art museum located on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The Block Museum was established in 1980 when Chicago art collectors Mary and Leigh B. Block, donated funds to Northwestern University for the construction of an art exhibition venue. In recognition of their gift, the university named the changing exhibition space the Mary and Leigh Block Gallery. The original conception of the museum was modeled on the German kunsthalle tradition, with no permanent collection, and a series of changing temporary exhibits. However, the Block Museum soon began to acquire a permanent collection as the university transferred many of its art pieces to the museum. In recognition of its growing collection and its expanding programming, the Gallery became the American Alliance of Museums accredited Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art in 1998. The Block embarked on a major reconstruction project in 1999 and reopened in a new facility in September 2000.
Michelle Grabner is an artist, curator, and critic based in Wisconsin. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. She has curated several important exhibitions, including the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art along with Anthony Elms and Stuart Comer, and FRONT International, the 2016 Portland Biennial at the Oregon Contemporary, a triennial exhibition in Cleveland, Ohio in 2018. In 2014, Grabner was named one of the 100 most powerful women in art and in 2019, she was named a 2019 National Academy of Design's Academician, a lifetime honor. In 2021, Grabner was named a Guggenheim Fellow by The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Elaine A. King is a curator, critic, professor, and editor.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is an American conceptual artist known for multidisciplinary, socially oriented sculpture, video and installations and urban community-based projects of the 1990s. His work often explores a dialectical relationships involving minimalist aesthetics, the utopian ambitions of modernism and science, and the resulting—often negative—social, geopolitical and ecological consequences of such ideologies. New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote that Manglano-Ovalle was adept in "distilling complex ideas into inviting visual metaphors," while Jody Zellen described his work as "infused with a formal elegance and sociopolitical content." Manglano-Ovalle has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, MASS MoCA, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), and participated in Documenta 12, the Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, and Bienal de São Paulo. He has been recognized with MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and his work belongs to the collections of forty major institutions. He has been a professor at Northwestern University since 2012 and lives and works in Chicago.
Lonnie Graham is a fine art photographer, professor, installation artist, and cultural activist investigating the methods by which the arts can be used to achieve tangible meaning in peoples lives. He is Professor of Visual Art at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, near State College, Pennsylvania. He has been the executive director of PhotoAlliance since August 2019. In January 2013, Graham spoke at the TEDxPSU symposium. His talk is available for streaming through YouTube.
Martha Jackson Jarvis is an American artist known for her mixed-media installations that explore aspects of African, African American, and Native American spirituality, ecological concerns, and the role of women in preserving indigenous cultures. Her installations are composed using a variety of natural materials including terracotta, sand, copper, recycled stone, glass, wood and coal. Her sculptures and installations are often site-specific, designed to interact with their surroundings and create a sense of place. Her works often focus on the history and culture of African Americans in the southern United States. In her exhibition at the Corcoran, Jarvis featured over 100 big collard green leaves, numerous carp and a live Potomac catfish.
Joyce J. Scott is an African-American artist, sculptor, quilter, performance artist, installation artist, print-maker, lecturer and educator. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016, and a Smithsonian Visionary Artist in 2019, Scott is best known for her figurative sculptures and jewelry using free form, off-loom beadweaving techniques, similar to a peyote stitch. Each piece is often constructed using thousands of glass seed beads or pony beads, and sometimes other found objects or materials such as glass, quilting and leather. In 2018, she was hailed for working in new medium — a mixture of soil, clay, straw, and cement — for a sculpture meant to disintegrate and return to the earth. Scott is influenced by a variety of diverse cultures, including Native American and African traditions, Mexican, Czech, and Russian beadwork, illustration and comic books, and pop culture.
Elizabeth A. T. Smith is an American art historian, museum curator, writer, and presently the executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. She has formerly held positions as a curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), the chief curator and deputy director of programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the executive director, curatorial affairs, at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She is the author of numerous books on art and architecture, including Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses; Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective, Helen Frankenthaler: Composing with Color, 1962–63, and many others.
Abigail Satinsky is an American arts organizer, curator and writer on socially engaged art.
Nade Haley was an American visual artist whose work has been exhibited at numerous museums and galleries, and is held in public and private collections. After relocating from Washington DC, Haley lived and kept studios in New York City and in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
Regina Frank is a German artist mainly working with text and textile installation and performance. Since 1989, she has been one of the pioneers of combining performance art with technology, integrating the Internet and interactive social software installations. Her performances and installations deal with social and political-social issues and link digital media with traditional text transformed into textiles.
Paula Marincola is executive director of the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and is a contemporary art curator and critic. She was named one of the city's most influential and innovative people by Philadelphia Magazine. Marincola was awarded an honorary degree from Drexel University in 2018 as “a leader in the arts for more than three decades, playing a major role in shaping and fostering Greater Philadelphia’s vibrant arts and culture community.”
Culture in Action was an art exhibition that took place in Chicago from May to September 1993. It was a landmark event in the development of public art.
Tricia Ward is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work has included public and environmental art, sculpture, and social practice art. She emerged in the 1980s, when collaborations with underserved youth and urban groups that bridged art and social change began to gain institutional attention. Her work combines collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches that include physical transformations of derelict urban environments into "pocket parks," environmental remediation, cultural and educational programming, public policy and civic engagement.
