Performance Artist Cindy Sherman
Controversial performance artist Cindy Sherman lives and works in New York and has been the subject of countless major global exhibitions for a spectrum of multi genred work, from performance to painting and sculpture to photography and video and beyond
While her physical presence figures prominently in her work, Sherman is more aligned to utilizing photography as the key to her artistic expression, harnessing it as a conduit to convey her artistic message. One of her most noted pieces includes a series of staged grade “B” movie stills, starring none other than herself. In the images Sherman poses in different roles and settings, rekindling American film noir of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s
Sherman’s weighty portfolio of shows has included work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Chicago , Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (1997-2000); the Serpentine Gallery, London and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2003), and the Jeu de Paume, Paris (2006).
Born on January 19, 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey Cindy Sherman actually gew up in the township of Huntington, Long Island. She first displayed interest in the visual arts at Buffalo State College, where she began painting.
She later made the transition to photography after becoming bored with the traditional medium” A key series of her photographic work that gained international accolade included the series Untitled Film Stills, 1977–1980. It included of 69 black-and-white photographs.
Frustrated with painting’s limitations, she abandoned the form and took up photography, of which she confided, “There was nothing more to say through painting, I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do this. But if we’re going to have to go to the woods.”
She added of her transition to photography, “I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.” Sherman has said about this time: “One of the reasons I started photographing myself was that supposedly in the Spring one of my teachers would take the class out to a place near Buffalo where there were waterfalls and everybody romps around without clothes on and takes pictures of each other.”
Though she failed a required photography class as a freshman, she repeated the course with Barbara Jo Revelle, whom she credits with introducing her to conceptual art and other contemporary forms