Art21: Art in the 21st Century

An-My Lê by Michael Almereyda

The New York Public Library
Spring 2009

Read the edited transcript of this conversation.

This episode of Art21 entitled “Protest” examines the ways in which contemporary artists picture and question war, express outrage, and empathize with the suffering of others. Whether bearing witness to tragic events or engaging in acitivism, the artists interviewed in “Protest” use visual art as a means to provoke ideas and question social revolutions.

An-My Lê is a contemporary artist born in Saigon, Vietnam. She fled the country with her family in 1975, and after earning both a BAS and an MA at Stanford, she earned her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1993. Her work deals heavily with war from many angles, and in the course of her career has won a number of fellowships and awards, among them the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in photography (1996), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship (1997), and the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship (2004). She currently lives and works in New York City.

Michael Almereyda is a self-made writer and filmmaker, whose projects have included Nadja (1994), which he wrote and directed and which was produced by David Lynch and Mary Sweeney, and Hamlet (2000), for which he wrote the screenplay and also directed.