Sherman, Cindy (1954-…), is an American artist known for creating works based on photographic images. Sherman creates nearly all of her photographs in series. In most of them, she is the lone subject. She has impersonated women in movies, on television, in “girlie” magazines, and in advertisements, as well as characters from fairy tales, paintings, opera, and mythology. Using both black-and-white and color photos, she examines and satirizes how society stereotypes women. Her images range in mood from quiet to sexual to grotesque.
Sherman was born on Jan. 19, 1954, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. She studied art at the New York State University College at Buffalo, specializing in photography, which she believed was the medium best suited to expressing modern life. Sherman graduated in 1976 and moved to New York City in 1977. In that year, she began her first, and best-known, series, a large collection of images called Untitled Film Stills. In this series, she portrayed women in American movies of the 1940’s and 1950’s. Sherman created another famous series, History Portraits, from 1989 to 1990, which feature her in what appear to be classic paintings.
In 1999, Sherman exhibited a series of images focusing on artificial body parts and parts of dolls. In the early 2000’s, she completed a series of images of herself as women from California and a series of images of clowns.
