Global Contemporary, 1980 CE to Present

Contemporary artists choose materials for their meaning. Basquiat combined paint, oil paintstick and words across three panels, Faith Ringgold joined painting with a pieced-fabric quilt border, Magdalena Abakanowicz shaped burlap and resin into hollow headless bodies, Nam June Paik built a map of the United States from neon and many video monitors, and Julie Mehretu layered ink and acrylic marks on canvas.

Contemporary works often depend on how the audience meets them. Visitors walk down into Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial and see their own reflections among the names of the dead, Xu Bing filled a room with books of invented characters that no one can read, and Ai Weiwei spread millions of handmade porcelain sunflower seeds across a gallery floor to make viewers think about mass production and the individual.

Many of these artists work between cultures and question who gets to tell history. Yinka Shonibare dressed a Fragonard scene in Dutch wax-print fabric tied to colonial trade, El Anatsui joined bottle caps with copper wire into shimmering cloth that recalls kente, Michel Tuffery built a bull from corned-beef tins to show how imported food changed Samoan life, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith used a canoe and souvenirs to criticize the treatment of Native Americans.

Some contemporary works test what art can be. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates filled Central Park with 7,503 saffron-colored fabric gates for just 16 days in 2005, paid for by the artists themselves, and Bill Viola's The Crossing shows a man consumed by fire on one side of a screen and water on the other, using slow-motion video to suggest death and renewal.