In Conversation: Catherine Opie
Celebrated for her powerful and dynamic photographs documenting members of vibrant subcultures, Catherine Opie has long been searching for what she describes as “that fine art Americana image.” This search led to her collaboration with Ron Athey and the creation of her Trojan Whore series. This series of monumental large-format Polaroid portraits captured Athey’s performance work, which explored desire, sexuality, and trauma through BDSM and extreme body art, bringing Los Angeles’ underground queer scene to the mainstream.
Join Opie, in conversation with Tom King, Associate Professor of English at Brandeis University, for a discussion of her collaboration with Athey, her interest in probing Americans’ culturally constructed identities, her artistic practice, and explorations of queer communities.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Tom King is associate professor of English at Brandeis University, where he offers courses in theater and performance studies, queer and gender studies, and early modern literature. He is active in the interdisciplinary minor in Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation (CAST) and was a founder of the minor in Sexuality and Queer Studies (SQS), both at Brandeis. His two-volume study The Gendering of Men 1660-1750 investigates theatricality and sodomy as performance practices foreclosed with the emergence of cisheteronormativity by the later eighteenth century in England and consequently opening opportunities for queer agency. More recently, he has been working toward justice for all life forms as a community-engaged theater artist with Climate Change Theatre Action and the Artists’ Theater of Boston.
Catherine Opie (b. 1961, Sandusky, OH) is an American fine art photographer and educator. She lives and works in Los Angeles as a professor of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles. By specializing in portraiture, studio, and landscape photography, Opie documents the relationship between the individual and the space inhabited to explore the American identity, probing the tensions between the constructed American dream and the diverse realities of its citizens. Her work is in numerous international public and private collections, including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Art, The Broad, Los Angeles, CA; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Mexico; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; National Portrait Gallery, London, United Kingdom; National Portrait Gallery, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.