Artists who tackle complex projects or those vast in scope are featured in the conclusion of Art21, including East Lansing native Julie Mehretu, who is shown creating a large work about the history of market-based capitalism.

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.

A graduate of East Lansing High School, Kalamazoo College and Rhode Island School of Design, Mehretu has works in the permanent collection of MSU's Kresge Art Museum. She has had major art exhibits across the U.S., including the opening exhibit of the remodeled Detroit Institute of the Arts last year.  She also has a commission for a major mural in the New York building going up at the site of the World Trade Towers disaster on 9/11. Mehretu is the daughter of MSU Professor of Geography Assefa Mehretu and Doree Mehretu.

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.

In addition to the premiere broadcast, the program can also be seen on Sunday, November 1 at 8 p.m. on WKAR World.

Also on the Program...

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 that 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 for a society gripped by consumption. In order to create a recent new work, 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 that then constitute a single work of art.