Catherine Opie (b. Sandusky, Ohio, 1961)
Catherine Opie engages with subjects that are not traditionally represented in the history of art. Whether documenting the Los Angeles queer community, nondescript mini-malls, California’s surfing subculture, Middle America’s high school football teams, or scenes from her own domestic life, Opie has dedicated her work to portraying the people and places around her with dignity and compassion.
The artist gained widespread recognition in the 1990s for her images depicting gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals in her own S&M community in California. The work constitutes both an intimate record of Opie’s inner circle and a conscious political response to the culture wars raging in the United States at that time. As right-wing polemicists condemned artistic representations of homosexuality, Opie – alongside Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz, and others – defiantly asserted queer identity in her art.
In an early series Being and Having, 1991, the artist took headshots of her female friends. They conform to a traditional portrait format, but the sitters wear artificial beards and mustaches, resisting heteronormative gender roles. Opie followed this project with Portraits, 1993–97, a group of fifty studio images in which the artist positioned her models against bright, solid-colored backgrounds in the tradition of the Northern Renaissance court painter Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98–1543). Wearing a tank top and jeans and sporting a half-shaved hairstyle, the eponymous sitter in Diane di Masa, 1994, stares away from the camera with an introspective, intense gaze. Her punk sensibility and open body language—one arm held behind her head with elbow flared, legs spread open to the camera—communicates confidence and strength. The green backdrop is dazzling—a formal convention Opie uses to elevate and enhance the visibility of Diane di Masa, an individual and a member of a community rendered marginal, if not invisible, by mainstream society.
Opie’s work is a document of its time in America, inviting viewers to look closely at people and places that may be unfamiliar. In celebrating singular identities, her images underscore the connections between us.
Catherine Opie, Diane di Masa, 1994. Chromogenic print. 20 × 16 inches. Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum purchase, The Friends of Art Endowment Fund. © Catherine Opie