At the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, contemporary North American artists have produced a diverse range of artwork that responds to contemporary cultural conditions. Artists have considered the formal developments of the last half-century, including the rise of Minimalism and the predominance of abstraction. Multiculturalism has grown increasingly crucial, and artists look to multiple global sources for inspiration. North American artists also consider important cultural and political issues like the Iraq War, the Arab Spring, and the fight for LGBT rights.

After the turn in the last century against traditional painting, artists have again embraced the medium in the first decades of the twenty-first century. These painters create works both representational and abstract that simultaneously accept and challenge the limitations of the flat canvas and the rectangular picture plane. Los Angeles based artist Laura Owens synthesizes influences as varied as Color Field painting, Baroque art, and textile art in her large and unabashedly painterly canvases. American artist Nicole Eisenman has been credited with aiding in the return to figuration with her paintings and prints that delve into human themes of sexuality and comedy. Artist Mark Bradford moves past a traditional definition of painting with his palimpsest-like canvases comprising layers of collaged and painted material that the artist sands, slices, and lacquers.

Multimedia art has become more common in the twenty-first century, exemplified by artists like Canadian Janet Cardiff. Cardiff uses sound to craft dimensional installations that mutate as the viewer interacts with them. Her Forty-Part Motet represented a reworking of a piece of English Renaissance choral music played out of forty speakers arranged in an ellipse, each voice playing from an individual speaker. Other contemporary North American artists include Allison Miller, Gabriel Aterriza, Irene Mamiye, Linn Meyers, and Walton Ford.