Catherine Opie

Catherine Opie (born 1961 in Sandusky, Ohio) is an American fine-art photographer. She studies the relationships between mainstream and infrequent society, with a large emphasis on sexual identity, specializing in portraiture, studio, and landscape photography. Through photography Opie documents the connections between the individual and the space inhabited. She lives and works in West Adams, Los Angeles. She is well known for her work of portraits exploring the Los Angeles leather-dyke community. Opie is currently a professor of photography at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

Opie was influenced early in life by photographer Lewis Hine. At the age of nine she received a Kodak Instamatic camera, immediately capturing her family and community. Opie spent her early childhood in Ohio, but her family moved near San Diego when she was 13 years old. She studied childhood education for a year as an undergraduate, but soon went to the San Francisco Art Institute to earn her bachelor of fine arts degree. She completed a Masters of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 1988. Her thesis project Master Plan (1986–88) examined the planned communities of Valencia, California, from construction sites and advertisement schemes, to homeowner regulations and the domestic interiors of residents' homes. In 1988 Opie moved to Los Angeles, California and began working as an artist, supported herself by accepting a job as a lab technician at the University of California, Irvine.

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

Dusty by Opie, 2007

Opie's work is characterized by a combination of formal concerns, a variety of printing technologies, references to art history, and social/political commentary. An example of formal concerns include addressing issues of the horizon line in the "ice house" and "surfer" series. She has printed photographs using chromochrome, 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. A common social/political theme in her work is the concept of community. Opie has investigated aspects of community, making portraits of many groups including LGBT community; surfers; and most recently high school football players. Opie is interested in how identities are shaped by our surrounding architecture. Her work is informed by her identity as an out lesbian. Her works balance personal and political. Her assertive portraits bring queers to a forefront that is normally silenced by societal norms.

Drawing inspiration from transgressive photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, and sex radicals, who provided a space for liberals and feminists, Opie has also done work ranging from the studies of master-plan communities to S/M erotica for lesbian owned sex magazines. Her portraits often document the queer community.

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 of the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. 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.

Opie collaborated with filmmaker Lisa Udelson on a 2011 documentary, Same Difference, showing how the inability of their parents to marry affected children of same-sex couples. In 2013, she created Edie, a photographic portrait of Edith Windsor, whose lawsuit figured in the 2013 Supreme Court decision on United States v. Windsor.

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

• Freeways. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
• Catherine Opie, essays by Kate Bush, Joshua Decter & Russell Ferguson. The Photographers' Gallery, London
• Catherine Opie: In between here and there, essay by Rochelle Steiner. Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, ills.
• Catherine Opie. The Photographers' Gallery, London, 2000
• Catherine Opie: Skyways and Ice Houses. Walker Art Center 2002
• 1999 / In and Around Home. The Aldrich Contemporary Museum of Art, Ridgefield, CT, and the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, 2006
• Chicago (American Cities), curated by Elizabeth T.A. Smith, published by Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2006
• Catherine Opie: An American Photographer. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, 2008
• "Catherine Opie" This is Not to be Looked At. Morse, Rebecca. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, 2008,
• Catherine Opie: Empty and Full, Molesworth, Helen, ed. Hatje Cantz, Stuttgart, 2011.

• Catherine Opie, The Photographers' Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
• Catherine Opie: American Photographer, Guggenheim Museum, New York City, 26 September 2008 – 7 January 2009. It included an encyclopedic exhibition catalogue of all of Opie's almost 200 works since 1988, loosely divided into two sections: portraits and landscapes.
• Somewhere in the Middle, 2011. Permanent installation in the Hillcrest Hospital Cleveland Clinic. The original work was created to engage hospital visitors, employees, and patients during difficult moments in their life.
• Catherine Opie: Empty and Full, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2011.
• Catherine Opie: 700 Nimes Road, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2016.

• Forester, Ian (3 March 2015). "Catherine Opie: Cleveland Clinic" (Video). Art21. Art21 Annual Fund Contributors. Retrieved 7 March 2015. 
• ICA. "Catherine Opie" (Web). Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Mark and Marie Schwartz, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, Sandy and Les Nanberg, and Regen Projects. Retrieved 7 March 2015. 
• "A Catherine Opie moment in Los Angeles at MOCA and the Hammer". latimes.com. Retrieved 2016-03-05. 

• Citibank Private Bank Emerging Artist Award (1997)
• Washington University Freund Fellowship (1999)
• CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts (2003)
• Larry Aldrich Award (2004)
• San Francisco Art Institute President's Award for Excellence (2006)
• United States Artist Fellowship (2006)
• Women's Caucus for Art: President's Award for Lifetime Achievement (2009)

• Mike Boehm (October 26, 2010), Herb Alpert-funded awards will pay five artists $75,000 each Los Angeles Times.
• Regen Projects, Catherine Opie. "Biography". Regen Projects. Retrieved 2012-11-26.