Catherine Opie

American, b. 1961, Sandusky, Ohio; lives and works in Los Angeles

Catherine Opie’s humanistic portraits of both architecture and people trace the diverse, shifting contours of the American community from the West Coast to the East. An early series from 1993 consisted of color portraits of friends in the lesbian and gay leather community in Los Angeles. She eventually extended this series across America to New York, Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Minnesota, documenting lesbian couples, friends, and families in her series Domestic. The artist has also captured the individual character of vernacular architecture in her studies of Beverly Hills homes, Los Angeles mini-malls, and Minnesota ice fishing houses. In 1994, she photographed highway overpasses in Los Angeles for her Freeway series. Shot with a banquet-format camera, Opie’s panoramas capture mysteriously empty highways that cut bold paths across the frame or stand as majestic testaments to one of America’s largest infrastructural ventures rendered in stark shadow and light. The artist has said that she was inspired by photographs of the Old West and ways that they helped form this country’s identity. In the Freeway series, she wanted to capture the contemporary landscape in the same expansive, grandiose way that conveyed a similar sense of place. Opie’s work has been widely exhibited and is included in the collections of institutions such as the Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.