“I am trying to make other people recognize something of themselves rather than me.” -Cindy Sherman

In photographs such as "Mrs. Santa Claus," Sherman uses makeup, wigs, costumes, props and settings to turn the camera on herself and seamlessly transform her features into a wide variety of recognizable female archetypes. From photo to photo, the artist becomes virtually unrecognizable causing these works to become voyeuristic performance art, rather than traditional self-portraits. As a result, an entire language of how women see and think about themselves through their pervasive representations in popular culture is exposed.

Cindy Sherman (B. 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey) is a contemporary American artist who specializes in photography, films, and performance art. Through her unique exploration of the countless constructions of the female identity in our culture, Cindy Sherman has become one of the most prolific and influential photographers of her generation. Her work explores assumptions of gender, sexuality, and social constructs, through intensely reflective self-portraits based on ambiguous characters Sherman creates. As intuitive and creative as she is, Sherman is able to suggest incredibly complex lives and narrations surrounding her ‘subjects,’ in just a few frames of photographs. Sherman has received numerous awards including the Guild Hall Lifetime Achievement Award for Visual Arts in 2005, the National Arts Award in 2001, and the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1995. The Museum of Modern Art mounted a major retrospective exhibition of Sherman's 35-year career in February 2012. For more than three decades, Sherman’s work has simultaneously imitated and confronted various representational stereotypes in advertising, cinema, and art history, causing her to become an icon for contemporary concerns regarding feminism and postmodernism.

Selected Public Collections:
Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY)
Australian National Gallery (Canberra, Australia)
Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France)
Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid, Spain)
Corcoran Gallery (Washington, D.C.)
Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, Germany)
Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY)
Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA)
Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY)
Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden)
Tate Gallery (London, U.K.)
Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY)