Artist Talk: Catherine Opie

Catherine Opie received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985, and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia in 1988. Catherine Opie’s photographs include series of portraits and American urban landscapes, ranging in format from large-scale color works to smaller black and white prints. Moving from the territory of the body to the framework of the city, Opie’s various photographic series are linked together by a conceptual framework of cultural portraiture. Recent solo exhibitions have been organized by the Museum of Contemporary art in Los Angeles, The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Opie was a recipient of the Julius Shulman Excellence in Photography award in 2013 and a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006. Opie lives and works in Los Angeles and is a Professor of Photography at UCLA.