PBS_TheArtAssignment

We’re talking about your responses to Tameka Norris’s assignment to Become Someone Else and how both internal and external change are a constant and inevitable reality in our lives.

This week we’re at Mildred’s Lane, a 96-acre site in rural Pennsylvania founded by J. Morgan Puett. Mildred’s Lane is an experiment in living - it's a space where Morgan and her friends collaborate on projects, practice creative domestication, and pay closer attention to every aspect of daily life.

Michelle Grabner is curator, critic, professor, and artist who works in multiple mediums, but much of her work centers around pattern and color. Her assignment asks you to recall an activity you may have done in kindergarten and explore it’s potential as a design project.

So you look at a work of art and think to yourself, I could have done that. And maybe you really could have, but the issue here is more complex than that -- why didn't you? Why did the artist? And why does it have an audience?

We continue our stay at Mildred's Lane and talk to it's Director and Ambassador of Entanglement J. Morgan Puett about it's origins, it's goals and how her installation art practice influences her vision for the site.

Today we meet with artist and musician Nathaniel Russell. Nat's work plays with the divide between real and imagined, making posters and flyers for events that may or may not exist. His assignment asks you to make a fake flyer and share it with the world too.

Son Lux invited you to collaborate with him by responding to a piece of his music, and you all delivered in as many forms as possible.

We accepted J. Morgan Puett's art assignment and gathered some friends together to host our own Scramble Scrabble Dinner.

We spent a week in Grand Rapids absorbing everything that was ArtPrize 2015, the world’s largest art competition. Here’s a taste of what we found.

We went to ArtPrize and met up with Minneapolis based artists Carolina Borja and Amy Toscani. Their exhibit this year invited the audience to destroy the large-scale handmade piñatas that they had spent hours constructing. And now it’s your turn to make and break.

We continue our exploration of ArtPrize and meet with Brooklyn-based artist Diana Shpungin. Diana's work and her assignment for you are both based on empathy -- it's a feeling we usually have for other people, but Diana wants you to direct your empathy towards objects instead.

This week we meet with artist and designer Jonathan Nesci at the First Christian Church in Columbus, Indiana. Jonathan uses systems of design to experiment with new materials and processes, and his assignment for you invites you to do the same by combining a set of particular shapes into different variations.

This week we're talking about a group of supremely awesome and unapologetic artists who take risks, question art world practices, and also happen to be women. These are truly inspirational artists who make a wide range of work, and today we're going to single out and celebrate five of them.

Alec Soth is a photographer who works on large-scale projects that play with the boundaries between his roles as a fine art photographer and photojournalist. This week, he asks you to take on the role of a newspaper photographer and report on a story from a different perspective.

In which we explore a few of Minnesota's many fantastic art offerings. Let's take a trip through the Twin Cities!

This week we share some of your excellent responses to two assignments -- Geof Oppenheimer's Embarrassing Object and Diana Shpungin's Object Empathy.

This week’s assignment comes from artist Paula McCartney, whose work explores the boundaries between the natural and unnatural. Her assignment asks you to reexamine what those terms even mean by constructing an image of the so-called natural world.

This week we come to you from Rosarito, Mexico AND Chicago, IL to bring you an assignment from Hugo Crosthwaite. Hugo asks you to create a collaborative drawing by playing the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse.

In which we explore Washington, DC's vast and diverse collection of landmarks, museums, and galleries - ranging from institutions like the Hirshhorn to the art-worthy metro system. Let's take a trip through Washington, DC.

Kanye West was given an honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in May of 2015, and more than a couple of people questioned it. But why? Why shouldn't Kanye be taken seriously in the world of art? Here's our case for Kanye as an artist.

David Rathman’s paintings pair atmospheric landscapes with carefully selected phrases, playing with the relationship between text and image. This week, he created a painting for you to caption.

This week we meet D.C. based artist Molly Springfield. Molly's graphite drawings transform texts into images, and her assignment for you asks you to consider how repeating a process can turn a copy into an original.

What is public art? Who funds it, owns it, and shapes it? Who does it serve? And why is it important? We try to answer some of these questions by looking at an example of public art that never came to be - Fred Wilson’s E Pluribus Unum.

We interview the remarkable Vanessa Hill, creator of BrainCraft, a production of PBS Digital Studios, which explores psychology, neuroscience & why we act the way we do. And we challenge Vanessa to respond to our recent art assignment Conjure a Studio offered by Hope Ginsburg:

Yoko Ono was an established artist before most of the world heard of her in 1968, and she continues to make groundbreaking work to this day. Who is Yoko Ono? What is her work? And why should you take her seriously? This is the case for Yoko Ono.