Artist Documentary Maker Art21 Launches Searchable Archive of Unseen Footage

When curator and filmmaker Susan Sollins founded the nonprofit Art21 in the late 1990s, her goal was to introduce contemporary artists to a wider audience by bringing documentaries about them to television and, later, to the internet. Reviewing Art21’s first series, Art21: Art in the 21st Century, which aired on PBS in 2001, Kay Larson, writing in the New York Times, praised the show for “getting rid of narrators and allowing artists to tell us in their own words how they work and why they do what they do.”

That approach takes time—and a lot of filming. Typically Art21 shoots 40 hours with an artist to get an hour of film that aired, said Art21’s current director, Tina Kukielski. “This is the Art21 style: we’re there, and we’re patient—cameras are rolling,” she said.

That has resulted in a lot of footage left on the cutting room floor. With 315 artist interviews under its belt, the organization is sitting on some 4,000 hours of tape. Just in time for Art21’s 25th anniversary, they’ve made that footage into a searchable archive.

“This is a game changer for us,” Kukielski said. The Art21 Archive is word-searchable, so you can pull up footage of any number of artists talking about, say, the influence of Willem de Kooning.

While not public, the archive is already being put to use. The director of a Jack Whitten documentary came to Art21 to review footage from the interview Art21 did with the painter shortly before he died in 2018. (With the help of an Art21 archivist, I was able to do a search and found a gem of Whitten on de Kooning: “[I was] hanging out with Bill de Kooning as a young painter and … learning more and more about what I got to do, and I got to get [out] from under the thumbs of Bill de Kooning, I knew I had to go faster … Bill de Kooning, we always speak of speed, but it wasn’t fast enough for me. It was still relational, one mark in relation to another mark.”)

The archive project, which has been made possible by seed funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Hearthland Foundation (founded by Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg), came together in June, when the Art21 team completed its vast Media Asset Management (MAM)—specialized software used to store large audio visual files. They’ve been working for a year with an outside developer on cataloging and making it searchable.

Over the past five months, Art 21 has been diving into the archive, releasing short films on its social media—with the artist’s or their family’s blessing. “It’s all brand-new stuff—well, brand-new old stuff,” Kukielski said. The family of Elizabeth Murray, a painter who died in 2007, was so happy to see the unseen material from the deceased artist, Kukielski said, that they wanted to see what other footage of Murray was in the archive.

The archive has also been helpful to Art21 in putting together books based around themes, like artists talking about the unknown. Now, Kukielski is thinking about the possibility of creating a residency for an artist or art historian to make something inspired by the footage.

Already artists are excited. “This archive is a vigorous fountain of facts and information that needs to be stored, protected, and built upon,” said An-My Lê, whose new Art21 film premieres next month. “It’s part of culture. It’s part of our civilization.”

Kukielski said she’s been especially thrilled to find little nuggets of gold in the archives—moments that seem small, but reveal a lot about the artist. In one of them, the painter Kerry James Marshall talks about when he was a kid, teaching himself how to draw by stealing toilet paper from the school bathroom stall and using it as tracing paper.

It’s a subtle echo of what Kay Larson, in that first New York Times review, found so vital about the series to begin with. With the artist “speaking to the camera as if to a friend,” the films “have created a casual yet radical intimacy.”

There are all kinds of reasons tidbits like Marshall’s did not make the final cut, but they serve now to demystify the artists, and create a special kind of connection with viewers. “People want connection,” Kukielski said. “Film can get people out of a state of loneliness and make us feel related to another person. And if that person is an artist, that’s amazing.”