21st Century
Art made since 2000: digital and immersive work, a resurgence of figurative painting, community-based practice and global craft media.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for 21st Century are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Art since 2000 has been shaped by the internet, the smartphone and a truly global community of artists. Images now circulate instantly, and many artists work with that flood: some build immersive digital environments, as the Tokyo collective teamLab has done since 2001, while others train machine-learning systems on vast image archives.
Figurative painting has returned with new urgency, notably in portraits of Black life by Kerry James Marshall, Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald; Wiley and Sherald painted the official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama, unveiled in 2018. Njideka Akunyili Crosby layers Nigerian and American domestic scenes with photo transfers. Other artists work with communities and places as much as objects: Theaster Gates restores buildings on Chicago's South Side as cultural spaces, and Ibrahim Mahama covers façades with stitched jute sacks from Ghana's markets. Climate, migration and the legacies of colonialism recur as subjects, and textiles and ceramics have moved from the margins to the centre.
