A collection of students and professors shuffled into the Shapiro Theater Wednesday night for a screening of Art:21, a PBS documentary series exploring art in the 21st century. Now in its third season, it is the only series on television to focus exclusively on visual art and artists from the United States.Each episode showcases four different artists in their studios or venues of creation, capturing the entire artistic process-from preparation to procedure to completion-through the point of view of each of the documentary's subjects.

There were a few problems now and then: the introduction, featuring a man in a hot dog costume, was a little too absurdist, and a guest-host appearance by basketball player Grant Hill (apparently an avid consumer of contemporary art) felt somwhat misplaced.

Once it got underway, however, the episode-the theme of which was "play"-treated its subjects with respect, maintaining a level of objective distance.

Each artist told his or her own story-not once was an interviewer or art expert allowed to come to the episode's forefront.

The four artists were Jessica Stockholder, Ellen Gallagher, Arturo Hererra and Oliver Herring. Each segment of the documentary became a story of one of the artists as a person, and the meticulous, even tedious, processes they use to craft their art.

Despite vastly different media-plastics, paper scraps, home items, clippings from Ebony magazine-the artists all acknowledged some element of playfulness in their work.

At first, I wasn't drawn to every artist's aesthetic, but by the close of each vignette, I found myself looking at their works in a new light, enjoying them on an entirely different level after catching a glimpse at the creative process.

A discussion followed featuring Prof. Pamella Allara (FA), acting Rose Art Museum director Raphaela Platow, Stphanie Molinard, the museum's director of education, and visiting Prof. Katy Siegel, curator of the the Rose's "'Post' and After" exhibit. They fielded questions from the audience on modernism and post-modernism, Western art and the rest of the world and the presence of the media in contemporary art.

All in all, it was a thought-provoking screening, and the rest of the series, airing through October on PBS, promises more of the same.