Courtesy of ART21, INC. 2025
Courtesy of ART21, INC. 2025
Courtesy of ART21, INC. 2026
For more than two decades, Tina Kukielski has worked with art, storytelling, and institutional imagination. As the Susan Sollins Executive Director and Chief Curator of Art21, she has helped shape one of the most enduring and influential platforms for documenting contemporary artists through patience, proximity, and long-term commitment.
Art21’s films and educational programs have followed artists across decades, capturing their finished works and their lives, at times defined by uncertainty, doubt, and discovery. In an era marked by fractured attention, technological change that becomes hard to keep up with, and constantly shifting cultural infrastructures, Kukielski continues to ask what it really means to support artists and how institutions might move from being storehouses of objects to spaces of empathy and connection.
In this interview, Tina Kukielski reflects on long-term relationships with artists, the power of process over product, the challenges of documenting work shaped by algorithms and systems, and why uncertainty remains one of art’s most important tools for navigating the present and imagining the future.
About Art21
Art21 enables everyone to learn directly from contemporary artists. As a non-profit organization, it is dedicated to expanding access to contemporary art and the ideas that shape it. With the ambition of inspiring a more creative and inclusive world, Art21 educates people about the works and words of contemporary artists. Since its foundation, Art21 has documented the work of over 300 artists from five continents through films, educational programmes, and public platforms. In 2026, Art21 marks the 25th anniversary of its PBS series Art in the Twenty-First Century.
In 2026, the platform celebrates 25 years of expanding access to art, with special year-round programming, including new films and programs featuring voices like Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Camille Henrot, and Tomás Saraceno.
Episodes 1 and 2 of Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 12 are available to watch online, and Episode 3 premieres June 10, 2026.
hube: Art21 has long been distinct in how it sustains artists over time—through visibility, dialogue, and long-term relationships. How do you define “support” for an artist today, and how does it differ from simple institutional exposure?
Tina Kukielski: When I look back at Art21’s original mission, there was an urge to create an organisation that could fill a gap. At that time of our founding in the late 1990s, one gap centered on access to art: who had it and who did not. Museums were not effective in serving an expanded audience for art, and our founders saw this task as up for remediation. At the time, television provided an antidote. And Art21’s films and education program grew from there.
In supporting artists today, we seek to address the emerging gaps of our present day. Museums continue to struggle to attract audiences, the attention economy has splintered our skills of concentration, the art market ebbs and flows, arts education continually finds its curriculum on the chopping block, and art criticism is in a moment of dormancy. Despite its corruptability, technology still offers hope in crossing geographic and cultural divides, and storytelling continues to be a compelling way to bridge differences.
Art21 combines this core idea of distribution—how one accesses information—and this idea of translation, meaning how the ideas of artists are communicated effectively across that information network. None of us in the cultural sphere would have purpose without the work of artists. We are always guided by the artists we work with, curious about their questions, their provocations, and their visions for what art can do and what kind of world might be possible. Their words and works serve as a guidepost, especially in times of crisis and change. So support for artists today means getting the message across to Art21’s diverse audiences, now numbering in the millions. For some artists in our program, that work transpires over many years and over many encounters and formats.
