Catherine Opie’s candid photograph Cathy (bed Self-portrait) (1987) shows the artist atop a bed wearing a negligee and a dildo; the latter is attached to a whip that she holds in her teeth. Opie is known for her honest portraits of diverse individuals, from LGBT people to football players, and the self-portrait has also been a long-standing and important part of her practice. Instead of hiding her sexuality and interest in sadomasochism, Opie wears it proudly. Photographed at a time when artistic freedoms were generally under attack in America, Opie’s full-frontal reveal is a kind of revolutionary moment, signifying that expression cannot and will not be suppressed.
Since the 1990s, Catherine Opie has been recognized for her use of documentary photography to address issues of community and queerness, and the ways in which identity is shaped by architecture. Particularly resonant during the Culture Wars of the 1980s and early 1990s—a time in which the religious right tried to impose itself as a political force and cultural censor—Opie’s photographs privilege the representation of specific communities, whether the LGBT, teenagers, surfers, football players, or her group of friends who engage in sexual role playing, tattooing, and piercing.
Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination...
Herculine’s Prophecy by Juliana Huxtable features a kneeling demon-figure on what appears to be a screen-print, placed on a wooden table, which has then been photographed and digitally altered to appear like a book cover, with a title and subtitle across the top, and a poem written across the bottom...
The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...
Welling employs simple materials like crumpled aluminum foil, wrinkled fabric and pastry dough and directly exposes them as photograms, playing with the image in the process of revealing it...
Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination...
In the six-minute single-channel video Higher Horse , Kate Gilmore perches herself on top of a tall pile of plaster blocks, in front of a pink colored wall with vein-like streaks of red...
Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
In this photographic series, Yto Barrada was interested in the logos of the buses that travel between North Africa and Europe...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
To explore the boundaries between artwork and audience, Gimhongsok created a series of sculptural performances in which a person wearing an animal costume poses in the gallery...
Black Curl (CMY/Five Magnet: Irvine, California, March 25, 2010, Fujicolor Cyrstal Archive Super Type C, EM No 165-021, 05910) is a visually compelling photogram...
Untitled (City Limits) is a series of five black-and-white photographs of road signs, specifically the signs demarcating city limits of several small towns in California...
7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...
Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco...
Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely...
Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)...
The Last Post was inspired by Sikander’s ongoing interest in the colonial history of the sub-continent and the British opium trade with China...
Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...