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Elizabeth Murray was born in Chicago in 1940. She earned a BFA at the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California. A pioneer in painting, Murray’s distinctively ...

Diana Al-Hadid was born in 1981 in Aleppo, Syria. She was raised in Cleveland, Ohio, and currently lives and works in New York. Al-Hadid’s large-scale sculptures and wall hangings are the outcome of ...

Theaster Gates was born in Chicago in 1973. He first encountered creativity in the music of Black churches on his journey to becoming an urban planner, potter, and artist. Gates creates sculptures ...

Margaret Kilgallen was born in 1967 in Washington, D.C., and received her BA in printmaking from Colorado College in 1989. Shortly afterward, the artist moved to San Francisco, where she took up ...

William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1955. He attended the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (1973–76), Johannesburg Art Foundation (1976–78), and studied mime and ...

Pepón Osorio was born in 1955 in Santurce, Puerto Rico, and currently lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1975, Osorio left Puerto Rico and moved to the South Bronx in New York City, ...

ART21: You have many books here in your studio—very eclectic, like this one—it’s a very old natural history book. KILGALLEN: Oh, of the Indies, probably. I don’t know, French. When I first started ...

Glenn Ligon was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1960. Ligon’s paintings and sculptures examine cultural and social identity through found sources—literature, Afrocentric coloring books, photographs—to ...

Liz Magor was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1948. She makes uncannily realistic casts of humble objects—garments, cardboard boxes, ashtrays—that speak to mortality and local histories. Magor’s ...

Alejandro Almanza Pereda was born in 1977 in Mexico City. He formerly worked in New York, and currently lives and works between the United States and Mexico, maintaining his practice in both locales.

Art21: What was the title of that first sculpture? Suh: The title of that work is Metal Jacket. I was almost going to use Full Metal Jacket, but I think that was too much. Art21: Are the dog tags ...