Alistair Fate (1994) depicts, presumably, a member of the LGBT community. Catherine Opie is known for her portraits of LGBT, queer, and outsider people; she intends them to come off not as shocking or different, but as human despite their deviance from societal norms. This image is one of several works by Opie in the Kadist Collection that show marginalized people, filtered through the artist’s signature appropriation of formal and classical portraiture in the interest of both documentation and reframing.
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...
Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California results from Lockhart’s prolonged investigation of an agricultural center and community...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
#17 Pink is a photogram, a photographic image produced without the use of a camera...
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
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...
603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors...
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...
The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights...
In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...
Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...
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...
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...
7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...