Catherine Opie

Catherine Sue Opie (born 1961) is an American fine-art photographer and educator.

She lives and works in Los Angeles, as a professor of photography at University of California at Los Angeles.

Opie studies the connections between mainstream and infrequent society.

By specializing in portraiture, studio, and landscape photography, she is able to create pieces relating to sexual identity.

Through photography, Opie, documents the relationship between the individual and the space inhabited, offering an exploration of the American identity, particularly probing the tensions between the constructed American dream and the diverse realities of its citizens.

Merging conceptual and documentary styles, Opie's oeuvre gravitates towards portraiture and landscapes, utilizing serial images and unexpected compositions to both spotlights and blur the lines of gender, community, and place, while invoking the formal gravitas reminiscent of Renaissance portraiture and hinting at her deep engagement with the history of art and painting.

She is known for her portraits exploring the Los Angeles leather-dyke community.

Her family moved from Ohio to California in 1975.

She earned her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985.

She later received a Masters of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1988.

Prior to arriving at CalArts, she was a strictly black-and-white photographer.

Opie's thesis project entitled Master Plan (1988) examined a wide variety of topics.

The project looked deeper into construction sites, advertisement schemes, homeowner regulations, and the interior layout of their homes within the community of Valencia, California.

In 1988 Opie moved to Los Angeles, California, and began working as an artist.

She supported herself by accepting a job as a lab technician at the University of California, Irvine.

Opie and her former partner, painter Julie Burleigh, constructed working studios in the backyard of their home in South Central Los Angeles.

Opie first came to be known with Being and Having (1991) and Portraits (1993–1997), which portray queer communities in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

In 2001, Opie gave birth to a boy named Oliver though intrauterine insemination.

At the Hammer Museum, Opie was on the first Artist Council (a series of sessions with curators and museum administrators) and served on the board of overseers.

Along with fellow artists John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger and Ed Ruscha, Opie served as member on the board for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

For example, she explores abstraction in the landscape vis-a-vis the placement of the horizon line in the Icehouses (2001) and Surfers (2003) series.

She has printed photographs using Chronochrome, Iris prints, Polaroids, and silver photogravure.

Examples of art history references include the use of bright color backgrounds in portraits which reference the work of Hans Holbein and the full body frontal portraits that reference August Sander.

Opie also depicts herself with her son in the traditional pose of Madonna and child in Self Portrait/Nursing (2004).

Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and she has won awards including the United States Artists Fellowship (2006) and the President’s Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Women’s Caucus for Art (2009).

Opie was born in Sandusky, Ohio.

She spent her early childhood in Ohio, and was influenced heavily by photographer Lewis Hine.

At the age of nine she received a Kodak Instamatic camera, and immediately began taking photographs of her family and community.

She evolved as an artist at age 14 when she created her own darkroom.

In 2012, she and the others resigned; however, they joined the museum's 14-member search committee for a new director after Jeffrey Deitch's resignation in 2013.

Opie returned in support of the museum's new director, Philippe Vergne, in 2014.

She was also on the board of the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Along with Richard Hawkins, Opie curated a selection of work by the late artist, Tony Greene, at the 2014 Whitney Biennial, in New York.

As of 2017, Opie has her studio at The Brewery Art Colony.

Opie's work is characterized by a combination of formal concerns, a variety of printing technologies, references to art history, and social/political commentary.

It demonstrates a mix between traditional photography and unconventional subjects.

Being and Having looks at the outward portrayal of masculinity and is a reference to 17th-century Old Master portraiture.

It conveyed strong ideals and perceptions based among persons of the LGBT community, referencing gender, age, race and identity; all constructed surrounding identity.

This body of work similarly plays with performative aspects and play.

These works read as iconography, themselves.