Art Sonje Center is pleased to present Catherine Opie’s artist talk on July 2. Opie is known for her powerfully dynamic photography that examines the ideals and norms surrounding the culturally constructed American dream and American identity. She first gained recognition in the 1990s for her series of studio portraits, photographing gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals drawn from her circle of friends and artists. Opie has traveled extensively across the country exploring the diversity of America’s communities and landscapes, documenting quintessential American subjects—high school football players and the 2008 presidential inauguration—while also continuing to display America’s subcultures through formal portraits. In dialogue with her series of studio portraits, she will discuss her landscape photographs, which were shot in 2009, when the artist traveled on a container ship from Korea to Long Beach, California. For this artist talk, Opie will mine her archive and brings discrete bodies of work into dialogue to suggest new connections and identify throughlines that have cut across her practice for the last 30 years.

About the artist
Catherine Opie (b. 1961) lives and works in LA. Her selected solo exhibitions include Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2011); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2006); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2002); and the Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO (2000). Selected group exhibitions include Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley, CA (2021); Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany (2020); Hayward Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2019); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2019). Selections from the Permanent Collection: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2017); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2016-2017); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2016).