Essential Event: Over 30 Years Of Cindy Sherman's Powerful Photography Comes To MoMA

Untitled Film Still #21, 1978 - Courtesy MoMA and Cindy Sherman

Here's the abbreviated version of this post: Cindy Sherman is amazing and you should go see the Museum of Modern Art's new retrospective of her work, which just opened this past weekend and is on view through June 11.

If you're not already out the door and on your way to West 53rd Street, let us elaborate. For the uninitiated: Born in 1954, Cindy Sherman was the youngest of five children. She started painting while attending Buffalo State College, but she ultimately discovered that photography was where it's at. Searching for a unique subject for her work, she didn't have to look far: herself.

To say that she is really the sole "subject" of her photographs, though, barely scratches the surface of her work. In her art Sherman takes on many different identifies, using wigs, wardrobe, makeup and more to pose as everything from a film noir heroine to a frightening clown to the subject of paintings by paintings by Caravaggio and Raphael. "I feel I'm anonymous in my work," she said in a 1990 New York Times article (which aptly opens by calling her "the woman of a thousand faces"). "When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear."

Here's a choice description from Roberta Smith's Times review of the new retrospective:

Unfolding in discrete, chapterlike series, her work has proved to be as formally ambitious and inventive as it is psychically probing. Her photographs are inevitably skewed so that their seams show and their fictive, constructed nature is apparent; we are always in on the trick, alerted to their real-feigned nature. The rough, visible nonchalance with which they are assembled for the camera has expanded the boundaries of setup photography, incorporating aspects of painting, sculpture, film, installation, performance, collage and assemblage.

Smith goes on to say that MoMA's survey, while historic, could have been even more monumental. That's no reason to delay your visit, though. This is a rare chance see the singular work of an amazing and capital-I Important Artist at one of the world's top museums. So get on it folks.

Below, watch a video about the retrospective, and remember: MoMA admission is free on Fridays from 4-8pm. Oh right, if this makes you want to brush up on your photography chops, we've got classes for that!

-- John Ruscher