Cindy Sherman

Art Brokerage: Cindy Sherman American Artist: b. 1954 Cindy Sherman was born January 19, 1954, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. She emerged onto the New York art scene in the early 1980s as part of a new generation of artists concerned with the codes of representation in a media-saturated era. Having graduated from State University College, Buffalo, New York, in 1976, Cindy moved to New York the following year, at a time when the authority of the Modernist paradigm was coming under increasing scrutiny. Amid debates surrounding authorship and the role of originality, the condition of the photographic image, and the increasing commodification of art, Sherman's work was quickly embraced in the early 1980s and framed within the contemporary feminist critique of patriarchy. Sherman's reputation was established on the basis of her Untitled Film Stills, a series of black-and-white photographs from the late 1970s in which the artist depicted herself dressed in the guises of clichéd B-movie heroines. In photograph after photograph, Sherman was ever present, and yet never really there her ready adaptation of a range of personae highlighting the masquerade of identity. Cindy Sherman's appropriation of the space on both sides of the lens destabilized the traditionally gendered opposition between artist and model, object and subject one that had been theorized by film critics in terms of spectatorship and its gendered codes of looking.