Catherine Opie (US)

Over the past twenty years, Catherine Opie (1961- ) has created a boldly original and complex body of photographic work that explores notions of communal, sexual, and cultural identity. Tackling such diverse genres as studio portraiture, landscape photography, and urban street photography, she has offered profound insights into the conditions in which communities form, and the terms in which they are defined. Keenly aware of art-historical standards and contemporary political attitudes, Opie purposefully creates photographs that function as objective records and subjective interpretations. Opie has in this fashion produced some of the most striking and important photographs of the 1990s and 2000s.

Opie works as a tenured Professor of Photography at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and has exhibited widely in museums and galleries internationally. Her 2008 mid-career survey at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Catherine Opie: American Photographer (2009), was accompanied by a major monograph. Recent solo exhibitions include Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2016), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2016), MOCA Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood, CA (2016, traveled to several institutions), Henie Onstad Art Center, Høvik, Norway (2017), Centro Internazionale di fotografia, Palermo, Italy (2018), and moCa Cleveland, Cleveland, OH (2019).