Catherine Opie

The Aldrich Museum is pleased to announce the 2004 Larry Aldrich Award Exhibition, Catherine Opie: 1999 & In and Around Home, which will be at the Museum from January 22 to May 14, 2006. The exhibition's opening reception will be held on Sunday, January 22, from 3 to 6 pm. Round-trip transportation from New York City is available; please call the Museum at 203.438.4519 for reservations. The exhibition will travel to the Orange County Museum of Art, and then to the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.

In this exhibition, Catherine Opie will debut a new series of intimate and political photographs titled In and Around Home. This new body of work will be shown alongside 1999, a series taken while on a road trip across the U.S. at the millennium. Together, the series are an examination of America through landscape and identity—some images are iconic while others portray a much more intimate look at what America means in the home. This body of work is political in nature and represents the American political landscape from the perspective of a gay artist/mother/activist at an important moment in her career. This work is also very personal and gives the viewer a unique opportunity to see both the private world and public world of the artist through the artist's eyes.

Born in Sandusky, Ohio, Catherine Opie received a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. She is currently a professor of photography at The University of California, Los Angeles, where she lives and works.

Opie was the recipient of the 2004 Larry Aldrich Award, which honors an American artist whose work has had a significant impact on contemporary visual culture during the previous three years. Selected by an independent panel, previous award recipients include Ann Hamilton (1998), Janine Antoni (1999), Doug Aitken (2000), Mark Dion (2001), Fred Wilson (2002), and David Hammons (2003).

The Aldrich Museum and the Orange County Museum of Art will produce a catalogue of the exhibition, which will contain every photograph from the two bodies of work—79 images in all, each on its own page. Notable author A.M. Homes (Safety of Objects, Music for Torching) will write an original piece of short fiction for the catalogue, which will also include interpretive essays by the curators, Elizabeth Armstrong from Orange County Museum of Art, and Jessica Hough from The Aldrich.

Pressetext

Catherine Opie: 2004 Larry Aldrich Award Exhibition
Kurator: Jessica Hough