Untitled Film Still #30,, 1979. (Via artnet.com)

Art 21 follows MoCP collection artist Cindy Sherman, Yinka Shonibare (MBE) and Paul McCarthy in its recently aired episode "Transformation." These three artists use several tactics and work in many mediums in order to “satirize society & reinvent icons of literature, art history, & popular culture.” As PBS describes, Sherman’s segment “surveys thirty years of untitled works in which the artist photographs herself in various scenes and guises, grouped into informally-named series such as fairy tales, centerfolds, history portraits, Hollywood/Hampton types, and clowns.”

Cindy Sherman insists that her works - from movie stills to modern portraits - are not self-portraits, although they all feature her as the main character. Instead, her photographs are studies of many "different" characters, broadly drawn and bordering on caricature, but still possessing the delicate details that identify them as familiar types. Sherman achieves these images after hours spent changing her costume (including prosthetics at times), hair, eyebrows, makeup, and facial features.

Untitled (Cosmo Cover Girl), 1990-91.

In her segment, Sherman mentions a journal she kept as a child – The Cindy Book – inside which she pinned family snapshots, circled herself in the image, and wrote “That’s me.” The existence of this journal and its resurrection during her college years, revealed to Sherman her own physical transformations and led to her first intentional explorations of the transformational powers of make-up.

Untitled (#464), 2008. (Via artnet.com)

Sherman shares incites into her countless characters, referring to them as separate entities. She admits that, though her characters are versions of Sherman in disguise, the women and men she creates “feel like such real people.” Drawing from a fascination and close relationship with TV and film for inspiration, Sherman strives to create a narrative, whether with several figures, or Sherman alone. Much of her work is intentionally untitled, so that viewers’ imaginations of her narratives are not influenced by a preconceived notion.

Don’t miss a very cool ‘ride-along’ at the end of the segment, as Sherman shops in a thrift store for inspiration for her future characters!

More on Art 21

Sherman in the MoCP collection

View Carrie Mae Weems’s Art 21 segment and the MoCP blog post.