Cindy Sherman at the Museum of Modern Art

Cindy Sherman’s (1954-) innovative artwork has allowed her to become one of the most influential artists of our time. Her work, an exploration of identity, individuality and representation, places her as one of the premier women of art as she transforms herself into an array of personas and characters. At the Museum of Modern art, 170 photographs of Sherman’s work will be on display through June.  This work covers her film stills from the late 1970s, her European art-history portraits, and her more current work with the representation of youth and aging.

Throughout the exhibit the viewer is given a glimpse into Sherman’s long and strong career. Cindy Sherman gives the term “photographer” an entirely different definition. Since she is in almost every single one of her photographs, she is no longer just the person who physically takes the photograph, but the person who designs what goes into the lens. Sherman completes all her photographs independently in her studio. She uses a variety of makeup and prosthetics to transform herself into many different characters.

Upon entering the exhibition, the viewer sees Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills.” These small, black-and-white photographs were taken from 1977-1978 and are comprised of many of the female clichés and stereotypes seen in movies during the 1950s. In these photographs her subjects take on an array of identities such as the housewife, the tourist, the lost loner and the temptress. They force us, as the viewer, to question the roles that women were given throughout film and the impression that these clichés leave on our culture. Sherman explores different identities to better understand them.

After the “Untitled Film Stills,” the work morphs into a larger and grander scale. In her Fashion series, Sherman mocks the industry’s projection of glamour and sex as a way to define beauty. The capricious photographs force us to realize the impression that the fashion industry leaves with us by showing how the female identity is so easily manipulated through industry and what that means for women as a whole. Sherman plays on the way men depict women and makes us aware the definitions inflicted by gender.

In Sherman’s history photographs she considers the relationship between the subject and the artist and how that effects representation and stereotypes. She plays the classic roles of the milkmaid, the aristocrat, Madonna with child and many male roles. Throughout the retrospective, Sherman uses theatricality to expose how society marginalizes and defines individuals. Her work speaks to the importance of how women see themselves and necessity of female impowerment. Overall her retrospective is inspirational and a must-see.

Cindy Sherman has created a niche for herself within art that has solidified her important role in history. This show will be on the 6^th floor of the Museum of Modern Art through June 11^th.   Do not miss it!

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) was a twentieth-century pioneer in sculptural contemporary art.  Her work, consisting primarily of grouping organic and often abstract shapes, has a unique style that transformed Bourgeois into a legend and leader in the art world. Bourgeois uses art to express her relationships with her family as well as the important role that sexuality has played in her life both within and outside of her family.

Born in Paris in 1911 to parents that owned an art gallery that sold tapestries, Bourgeois grew up surrounded by art. Throughout her childhood, Bourgeois was constantly exposed to and affected by the art around her.  At 13, Bourgeois discovered that her father was having an affair with her baby-sitter and her teacher. Resentment for her father continued to grow abetted by his constant disapproval due to her inability to succeed. She constantly had to deal with his verbally abusive behavior. The resentment she had for her father took expression in some of the art she produced.

Bourgeois studied at several art schools such as the Ecole du Louvre, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Académie Julian, and under Fernand Leger. When her mother died in 1932 Bourgeois immersed herself further into her art.

Bourgeois met Robert Goldwater, her future husband, when he came to purchase prints from her family’s store. Goldwater was a highly regarded art historian from America who worked in the field of primitive art. Together in 1938, Bourgeois and Goldwater moved to New York where she continued her studies at the Arts Students League of New York.

During the 1940’s and 1950’s Bourgeois found herself immersed in the Abstract Expressionist movement although she had a different process and inspiration than the other Abstract Expressionists. She was influenced by her childhood and the tensions and resentment that existed as she grew up.

She continued to work throughout the 1960’s and in 1974, Bourgeois created one of the most important works of her career. This work, entitled Destruction of the Father, reflects the relationship between children and an overbearing father. The piece is a womb-like structure that inside looks like a crime scene. Within the structure exists the abstract structures of children who have destroyed their overbearing father by murdering and eating him. This work depicts her own inner-struggle to deal with her father.

In the 1990’s, Bourgeois began to use spiders throughout her work. She created several spider sculptures that are done on a gigantic scale. These sculptures, called Maman, are found in the Tate Modern. They reflect the strength and nurturing nature of her mother. Bourgeois used her work to speak up for LGBT equality issues. In 2010, Bourgeois died of heart failure in New York City.

Loretta Lux

Loretta Lux (1969-Present) is one of a few artists (Cindy Sherman is a prime example) who has been able to transform the way I see digital photography. Loretta Lux is testament to how the digital age has brought great things to art. Her works usually depict surreal portraits of young children.

Lux grew up in Dresden, East Germany moving to Munich shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  From 1990-1996, Lux studied as a painter at the Academy of Visual Arts in Munich. It was not until 1999 that Lux began to take photographs. As a budding photographer, Lux began with self-portraits and eventually evolved into photographing young children. She enjoyed dolling up her young models, often children of friends, in well-devised hairdos and placing the children into formal poses and positions. Lux’s work in painting inspired her to use computer manipulation with her photographs. Lux would take photographs and then transform, blur and distort her subjects. Throughout 2000-2003, Lux worked and showed almost exclusively in Europe. In 2004, Lux had a debut exhibition at the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York City. The Yossi Milo show transformed Lux’s career and the sale of her work began to take off.

Lux’s work is both unique and bold. She claims to photograph children as she finds them to be the most honest of subjects. Lux has complete control over the outcome of her photographs from imposing a background to manipulating the children’s features and even choosing their poses.  Lux has transformed the photograph into a canvas through her use of computer manipulation. As there is no exact meaning to her work, it is easy to struggle with how such work should be interpreted.   I see Lux’s work as a reflection of the metaphors seen throughout childhood. Lux has received the International Center of Photography’s prestigious Infinity Award and, in 2007, showed her work at the Guggenheim Museum.

Annie Leibovitz

Annie Leibovitz, born in Connecticut in 1949, is currently one of America’s most important and influential photographers. The daughter of a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, Leibovitz was forced to move from town to town as her father was moved to different Air Force bases. Throughout high school Leibovitz became increasingly interested in the arts and eventually attended the San Francisco Art Institute where she initially studied painting before falling in love with photography.

In 1970, Leibovitz was hired as a staff photographer for the just launched Rolling Stone magazine. Three years later, Leibovitz was named Rolling Stone’s chief photographer, a position she would hold for 10 years. While at Rolling Stone, Leibovitz recognized that while she worked as a photographer for a magazine it was also important that she pursue her own personal visions. It is her personal work that creates a rich narrative of Leibovitz’s life.  Leibovitz was the concert-tour photographer for the Rolling Stones Tour of the America’s in 1975. In this series she gained recognition for her now famous photograph of Mick Jagger in an elevator.

On December 8^th, 1980, Leibovitz was sent to do a photoshoot with John Lennon for Rolling Stone. It was in this shoot that she captured John Lennon with Yoko Ono in a photograph that revealed their relationship to the world. In the photograph we see Lennon exposed, nude, and vulnerable, holding on tightly to the strong and serious Yoko Ono. This photograph was taken spontaneously and was the last photograph ever taken of John Lennon. Later that day, John Lennon was shot and killed outside his home. In 2009, Lennon’s son Sean Lennon recreated that very same photograph posing with his girlfriend Charlotte Kemp Muhl. The only difference between the two photographs was that in Sean’s rendition, Sean and Kemp reversed the roles played by John and Yoko in the original photograph (Sean was clothed, Kemp was naked). Another series of photographs that Leibovitz is renowned for are the Alice in Wonderland for Vogue works. These photographs exemplify Leibovitz’s ability to work successfully in the realm of fashion photography. The series is a quirky and unique body of work.

Annie Leibovitz is known for her innovative use of light and color to create bursting photographs of celebrities. Leibovitz was the first woman to ever have a show at the National Portrait Gallery and, in 2007, a major retrospective of her work was presented at the Brooklyn Museum. Leibovitz is still known to take photographs that expose and reveal celebrities for the people they truly are. Her photographs are provocative, honest and sometimes even crude.  Over the years she has photographed for Vanity Fair and several other recognized publications. As Leibovitz’s career continues to soar, she remains one of today’s most influential living photographers.

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965), considered to be one of America’s most influential photojournalists and documentary photographers, is best known for her works that humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and the Japanese-American internment of World War II. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, as Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn, Dorothea assumed her mother’s maiden name (Lange) after her father abandoned the family when she was 12 years old. Lange’s upbringing was never easy. At the age of 7 Lange contracted polio which left her with a permanent limp. Lange faced significant struggles growing up but eventually attended Columbia University and apprenticed in photography studios throughout New York until she moved to San Francisco in 1918. Over the next 10 years. Until the onset of the Great Depression, Lange worked primarily as a portrait studio photographer.

With the Great Depression Lange began to document what was going on in the streets focusing on the many homeless and unemployed people struggling to survive. In 1935 she was hired by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) where she devoted the majority of her time to photographing the plight of displaced families and migrant workers bringing their causes to the public’s attention. Lange’s work for the FSA brought the struggles of America’s forgotten to each American’s doorstep. Her images are considered icons for that era. One of Lange’s best-known works is called Migrant Mother.

In 1941, Lange was given a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work in photography. With this grant, she began to document the Japanese American internment camps that began to pop up in California after the attack on Pearl Harbor.   Lange’s haunting images presented the atrocities that were occurring in America throughout World War II.  Many of her images were so controversial that the Army impounded them.

In 1945, Ansel Adams offered Lange a position in the first fine art photography department at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), now renamed the San Francisco Art Institute, and in 1952, Lange became one of the co-founders of the influential photography magazine Aperture, which remains one of today’s most influential photo magazines.  She continued to work, teach, and produce until her death in 1965. Lange died of esophageal cancer at the age of 70.

Georgia O’Keeffe

A legend and a master in the field of painting, Georgia Totto O’Keeffe is one of the most renowned American artists who achieved such success in a time before women had access to proper art training. O’Keeffe (1887-1986) is responsible for creating a greater acceptance for females in the artistic field of painting that was, at the time, dominated by men.

O’Keeffe was born in Wisconsin and her parents were both farmers. O’Keeffe was one of seven children and, as the first daughter, was given great responsibility. By age 10 O’Keeffe decided that her destiny was to become an artist. She studied under local watercolorist Sara Mann.

From 1905-1906, O’Keeffe studied at the School of Art Institute in Chicago and in 1907 she transferred to the Arts Students League in New York City. O’Keeffe studied under William Merritt Chase and, in 1908, was awarded the Arts Students League’s William Merritt Chase Still Life prize for her oil painting Mona Shehab. Her award was to study at the League’s summer school at Lake George. Before leaving for the summer, O’Keeffe met her future husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

Throughout the next couple of years, O’Keeffe held herself back from success believing she could not thrive in the art field because she was a woman. Instead of focusing on making art she taught in public schools and Universities.

O’Keeffe did keep in constant contact with Stieglitz. Eventually in 1916, Stieglitz convinced O’Keeffe to move to New York and to devote all of her time to her work. In 1918, O’Keeffe came to New York and shortly after, moved in with Stieglitz who was 23 years her senior. She began to work intensely at Stieglitz’s family home in the village of Lake George. In 1924, the two were wed and she can be seen in many of Stieglitz’s greatest photographs.

In 1929, O’Keeffe spent her first of many summers in New Mexico painting where she explored the rugged mountains and unique scenery and where she completed her famous painting, The Lawrence Tree. O’Keeffe spent at least a portion of the next twenty years in New Mexico.  Her work is subject to many interpretations, the flower paintings often evoke feminist ideas or feminine allusions.

In 1936, O’Keeffe became interested in a site known as The Black Place in New Mexico. She did an extensive series of paintings there and later pursued another series from the White Place. Though O’Keeffe continued to paint for nearly the next 35 years in 1972 macular degeneration, lead to the loss of her central vision. She continued working aided by her peripheral vision until 1984. She also began to work with clay and watercolors.

In 1977, President Gerald R. Ford awarded O’Keeffe The Presidential Medal of Freedom and in 1985; O’Keeffe was awarded the National Medal of Arts. When O’Keeffe died in 1986, she had become a legendary artist.

Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin, an active member of the photography community for the last 40 years, has created a career based around raw, honest, intimate, and exposing photographs. Her work pushes beyond the boundaries of what we, as a society, expect to see in art.

Goldin (1953-Present) was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Washington, D.C.. Shortly thereafter, her family moved into a suburb of Boston.In 1965, Goldin was transformed after her sister, Barbara Holly Goldin, committed suicide at only 18 years old. After this horrific experience, Goldin lost faith in the traditional family, moved in with a series of foster families, and enrolled in the  Satya Community School, an alternative school. During this time, the memory of her sister began to grow hazy and so Goldin began to photograph her friends and families to preserve the present. Photography created an opportunity for Goldin to never lose her memories. Goldin continued to photograph her friends throughout the 1960s. During the early 1970s, Goldin was introduced to the drag subculture in Boston. She began to photograph drag queen beauty contests and felt that drag was an opportunity to for an individual to reinvent oneself. Goldin like to play with the idea of perception and used photography to confront how the viewer defined the individual.

Goldin’s first solo show was held in Boston in 1973. This show was based on her journey through Boston’s transsexual community. In 1978, Goldin graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University. After graduation, Goldin moved to New York where she began to document the new-wave music scene. Her photographs depict the hard-living lifestyle found at the time in New York. In the 1980s, Goldin documented the excessive abuse of alcohol and drugs as well as the abusive relationships seen throughout Goldin’s circle of friends. Goldin created an incredibly detailed and intense portrait of her group of friends. By 1988, Goldin herself began to suffer from drug and alcohol abuse. She entered a detoxification and rehabilitation clinic. Throughout her time in the clinic, Goldin began to experiment with self-portraiture. This was the first time in Goldin’s career that she had created such an intense portrait of herself. After leaving the clinic, Goldin continued to face personal struggles which included watching several of her friends die from AIDS.  Goldin created a series of photographs (The Cookie Portfolio) documenting one of her closest friends Cookie Mueller. The photographs were taken at parties they attended growing up and ended at her funeral, after Cookie died of AIDS in 1989.

In 1994, Goldin created a series of photographs with her old friend David Armstrong called A Double Life. In this series, Goldin and Armstrong each took portraits of the same person using their own unique styles and techniques. In 1996, The Whitney held a retrospective of Goldin’s work. There was also a retrospective of her work at the Pompidou in 2002. Her work has been shown throughout the globe and in 2007 she was presented the The Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. Goldin is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.

Artemisia Gentileschi

Considered one of the most accomplished painters of the Baroque era, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652) succeeded in an era when female painters were barely accepted by the art community. Her content almost always consisted of strong and suffering women, usually taken from the bible or older myths. Her specialty was the story of Judith Beheading the Holofernes. She was one of the most progressive artists of her generation, whose life and upbringing created a style for which she is still renowned today. Gentileschi was born in Rome and raised around her father, painter Orazio Gentileschi’s workshop. Gentileschi was highly influenced by her father and his contemporary, and inspiration, Caravaggio’s styles. As a woman of the time, she had to take an unique approach to creating her own style, Gentileschi created works that were much more naturalistic than her fathers and sought  to create the viewers psychological and emotional response. Her style became heightened and transformed after her experiences with Agostino Tassi in 1612. After her father hired Tassi to tutor Gentileschi, Tassi raped Artemisia. At the time, Gentileschi assumed that their relations would lead to marriage, but instead Tassi denied her wishes. This created a large scandal in which Tassi was sued by Gentileschi’s father and eventually was sentenced to one year of imprisonment, although he never served the time. The trial and her personal trauma became important influences throughout Gentileschi’s art. Throughout 1612, Gentileschi created the painting Judith beheading Holofernes which went on display at the Museum of Naples and gained a lot of attention for the striking violence the work portrayed. The viewer could feel the effects of the trial and the rape on Gentileschi through looking at the aggressive and violent content of her art. Eventually her father arranged for Gentileschi to marry Pierantonio Stiattesi, and artist from Florence. Soon after, the couple moved to Florence where Gentileschi began to receive commissions to paint from the Medici family and Charles I. She became an incredibly successful court painter and was the first woman accepted into the Academia delle Arti del Disegno (Academy of the Arts of Drawing). Eventually in 1621, Gentileschi decided to return to Rome.  She continued to work in Rome and paint for around 20 years. In 1638, Gentileschi moved to London to join the court of Charles I of England. Gentileschi, alongside her father, worked for the royal family. After her father died a year later, Gentileschi remained in England for only a brief period of time. For the rest of her life, Gentileschi continued to paint and produce work that contained strong and emotionally affected women. She died in 1652 and is considered one of the most important female painters of all time.

Hannah Wilke

As a part of the feminist artistic movement, Hannah Wilke spread her message through exploration of almost every art medium the world had to offer. She was a painter, a sculptor, a photographer, a performance artist, and a video artist. Wilke is one of the most remembered and renowned artists from the feminist art movement.

In 1940, Hannah Wilke was born in New York City. Wilke attended public school in Queens and graduated from Great Neck High School in 1957. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Stella Elkins Tyler School of Fine Art, Temple University in Philadelphia. After college, Wilke taught art at several high schools and eventually became a  faculty member at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York. At SVA, Wilke taught sculpture and ceramics, though these were not the only mediums in which she worked.  Her work in the early 1960s started to gain a lot of press after she released her “vulval” terra-cotta sculptures. These sculptures, considered the first explicit imagery of the female body done by a woman, became Wilke’s signature work that she recreated in multiple sizes, styles, and mediums.

In 1972, Wilke was given her own one-woman gallery exhibitions in both New York and Los Angeles. Four years later, at University of California, Irvine, Wilke was given her own one-woman museum exhibition. Hannah Wilke’s content was both explicit and empowering. In 1975, Wilke began to work on a photographic body art piece entitled S.O.S – Starification Object Serieswhere she created tiny vulvul sculptures out of chewing gum and photographed herself covered in them. She photographed herself in various model-like and pin-up-like poses in order to create a contrast between glamour and something that, to her, resembled a tribal sacrifice. Eventually recreated this work in a performance setting live at the Galerie Gerald Piltzer, Paris by having her audience chew gum which she then sculptured and then placed onto papers which she hung from the wall. The Centre Pompidou in Paris acquired the S.O.S – Starification Object Series: An Adult Game of Mastication, 1975 in 2009 for the permanent collection.

In 1980, Wilke received an National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant for performance as well as grants for sculpture from the Alaska Council for the Arts (she had previously received grants from the NEA in 1976 and 1979 for sculpture). Throughout the 1980s, she continued to exhibit her works until 1987, when she was diagnosed with lymphoma. She underwent extensive treatment in an effort to treat her disease including a bone marrow transplant. While undergoing treatment, she received Pollock-Krasner Grants for Art in 1987 and 1992 and continued to exhibit her unique work. At this time Wilke began to work on a project she named “Intravenus.” “Intravenus” was a group of photographs to document her illness and treatments. The photographs were taken by her husband Donald Goddard and consisted of Wilke progressing from her normal self into a bald and destroyed individual. “Intravenus” was eventually  published posthumously.

Throughout her career, Wilke’s art was striking for its risky content and motivation to empower women. The unique qualities of her work allowed Wilke to be widely exhibited, while remaining highly controversial. Her work confronts gender stereotypes, female sexuality, and promotes female power. Her work can be currently found in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney.

Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus has been given the label “freak photographer,” a phrase she always feared being called. In reality, Arbus was determined to document society’s most marginalized people and those whose normality seemed ugly or surreal. Arbus spent her short life documenting giants, transvestites, nudists, dwarfs, and circus performers. Her photographs were bold, her work was defiant, and she was one of the most talented photographers of all time.
In 1923, Diane Arbus was born into a wealthy Jewish New York family. Her family owned Russek’s, a famous Fifth avenue department story, and sent Arbus to the Fieldston School for Ethical Culture. Arbus has always experienced a life of isolation because of her wealth. She had always lived a life of luxury and lavishness, even in times when society and the world seemed to be falling apart. Arbus never felt the effects of national issues like the Great Depression while growing up. I941, Arbus married her childhood sweetheart Allan Arbus at the young age of 18. Their daughters Doon and Amy both went off to have successful careers of their own. Also in 1941, the Arbuses visited the gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, sparking an interest in Diane to learn more about photographers of the time. Arbus’s first job was given to her by her own father and she was photographing advertisements for his store throughout the 1940s. Her husband Allan became a photographer for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in World War II.
After the war, in 1946, the Arbuses started “Diane & Allan Arbus,” their own commercial photography business where Diane was the art director and Allan was the photographer. They were hired for large magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Glamour. Though they gained a lot of success, both Arbuses detested the fashion world. After 10 years working in the business, with over 200 pages in Glamour and 80 pages in Vogue, Diane Arbus quit working in commercial photography and began to study with Berenice Abbott. She also began to study under Lisette Model and with Model, Arbus began to discover the style that would define her career as an artistic photographer. Soon Arbus began photographing for magazines such as Esquire, and The Sunday Times Magazine. Arbus also switched from working with a 35mm camera to a Rolleiflex which created a different square image.
In 1963, Arbus was awarded for a Guggenheim Fellowship to commence a project on “American rites, manners, and customs,” and was able to have the Fellowship renewed again in 1966. Arbus documented her subjects in their own setting, the place where they were most themselves. It was there that Arbus was able to capture the true essence of people. With her fellowship, she began to document the unfamous. She documented the masses, from a simple couple or a young Republican to the marginalized circus performers and drag queens. This work was placed in the MOMA show New Documents (1967), which beyond all else, established Arbus as an artistic photographer. Her work was considered to have a public consciousness. Arbus’s photographs startle the viewer, and yet they maintain their beautiful aesthetic. Arbus forces us to question what “normal” truly is and whether normal technically constitutes goodness or happiness. The Arbuses divorced in 1969, though they had been separated for over 10 years. Arbus continued to document for the next two years of her life. Her work captured the true essence of the individual. Arbus strove for the viewer to see reality for what it truly was. In 1971, after living a life filled with several depressive episodes, Arbus took her own life.
Though Arbus died a tragic death, in her life she brought life and light into a part of society that had before been life in the dark.