Kerry Kilburn Weekly Artist Post 5 2/15/16

Catherine Opie
Hammer Projects: Catherine Opie: Portraits
Wexner Center for the Arts: Catherine Opie: Portraits and Landscapes
"I Do Like to Stare: Catherine Opie on Her Portraits of Modern America" (NPR)

Catherine Opie

Catherine Opie was born in 1961 in Sandusky, Ohio and received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985 and her MFA from CalArts in 1988. Since 2001 she has been on the faculty at UCLA. Her work has appeared in major museums across the United States and she has won a number of prestigious awards, including the President’s Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Women’s Caucus for Art (2009). Her photography covers a wide range of subjects and styles, from formal portraiture inspired by the old masters of European art to documentary images of everything from the queer and S&M communities to pure Americana to landscapes. As her entry in the ART 21 website states, "Working between conceptual and documentary approaches to image making, Opie examines familiar genres—portraiture, landscape, and studio photography—in surprising uses of serial images, unexpected compositions, and the pursuit of radically different subject matters in parallel. Many of her works capture the expression of individual identity through groups (couples, teams, crowds) and reveal an undercurrent of her own biography vis-à-vis her subjects." According to the NPR article linked above, "(s)he has made her lifelong project to document all kinds of American identities and landscapes..."

I was first drawn to Opie's formal studio portraits and dreamy, abstract landscapes. The two genres share the same contemplative feel; they make me slow down to take in the subtleties of the light and forms that make up the images. Her documentary crowd work is interesting in some ways - I enjoy the irony in a lesbian taking pictures of a crowd of Boy Scouts (the third image from the top) or the Notre Dame football team leaving the field (see the NPR article linked above). Mostly, I am astonished at the diversity of her work and the power of all of her images, no matter the subject or style.  I only wish she had a website so I could explore her various series in more depth!