| Summary: | This "Art in the 21st Century" episode explores how artists mine the past to explore the present and use their own histories to examine the human condition. Painter and sculptor Glenn Ligon examines American identity through found sources-literature, Afrocentric coloring books, photographs-to reveal the ways in which the history of slavery, the civil rights movement, and sexual politics inform our understanding of contemporary society. A pioneer of performance as a visual art form, Marina Abramovic has used her body to test her physical, mental, and emotional limits in a quest for heightened consciousness, transcendence, and self-transformation. In black and white videos, Mary Reid Kelley presents her take on the clash between utopian ideologies and the realities of women's lives in the struggle for liberation and through political strife, wars, and other historical events
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