Cindy Sherman Research Paper

The odds were against Sherman Alexie on that day in October 1966. Not only was he born a minority, but he was also hydrocephalic. At the age of 6 months, he had a brain operation, but was not expected to live. Though he pulled through, doctors predicted he would be severely mentally retarded. Fortunately, they were wrong, but he did suffer through seizures and wet his bed throughout his childhood ("What" 1).

I have chosen Sally Mann as my artist as she is an extraordinary photographer that went against the grain to create something completely different. She has a strange way of making outstanding, personal imagery. She inspires my own work because of her ability to see things others would not.

Roger Sherman is someone that you may say is the forgotten founding father, so let’s change that. Roger Sherman was a very influential politician and lawyer, being admired by some of greatest and brightest men of this time.

Every girl growing up always use to play dress up in clothes as a childhood past time for fun. Cindy Sherman used that passed time as a way to create art with photography and is known for her talent of this act and taking self-portraits of it. Her ideas come stereotypes of women throughout past and present society. These self-portraits are known to “confront and explore the representations of women in society.” (Jankauskas).

Three, two, one sitting on the edge of your coach every Thursday what for the starting credit of how to get away with murder. Waiting for Viola Davis to speak, she was born into a humble farm family in 1965 and raised in Rhode Island. It was a young great actor, but teal her 1996 award win day Broadway show seven guitars did she shine. Where Viola Davis has become the new face black women in Hollywood with strong female roles.

One artwork that I have chosen to write about is Harriet Tubman by Aaron Douglas. I have selected this artwork because I am drawn to its color. In addition, I have a strong admiration for the subject matter. Looking at this artwork relaxed me and made me feel at peace as I was emotionally hypnotized by the color green. Even after looking at this artwork for a prolonged period of time, my admiration for it did not change. This artwork seems to represent freedom and being at peace.

Terror and mockery come together in the portraits of Cindy Sherman on display at the Crocker Art Museum. Walking into the large, dimly lit ballroom, one may begin to feel a slight sense of trepidation as the viewer looks around to find nine sets of beady eyes watching one’s every move. Sherman produced her History Portraits during the late eighties and early nineties, nine of which are displayed at the museum. In her portraits she uses lush fabrics, lavish jewelry, and false body parts to decorate herself in these self-portraits. Her portraits have been know to cause discomfort in the viewers who find the general stereotypes, depicted in her portraits, amusing, yet confusing and terrorizing.

Mary Cassatt is known world-wide for her impressing art in which she focuses mainly in the everyday life of women and children. She is an American artist born in Pennsylvania on May 22, 1844, but later relocates to Europe in 1866 to pursue to work in art. This was mainly due to her family’s and society’s objections to women in the field of art. There she met and befriended famous Impressionist Edgar Degas. Because of her close friendship with Degas, she grew courage to continue to do art in her own way. She continued to paint until she slowly began to lose her eyesight and later died in 1926. Cassatt was part of the Impressionist style movement, in which she painted portraits unlike many others who painted landscapes (biography.com). Her artwork

Born on October 16, 1960, in Colgate, Jamaica and later moved with her family to Scarsdale, New York. Renée Cox began studying photography at Syracuse University and received her master’s degree at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. After completing her MFA, Cox participated in a year-long Whitney Independent Study program. From the very beginning, her work showed a deep concern for social issues. In her first show at a New York gallery in 1998, Cox created a superhero named Raje who tried to overturn stereotypes such as in the piece “The Liberation of Lady J and UB,” where Raje is with Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. In her next photographic series, “Flipping the Script,” Cox took a number of European religious masterpieces, including Michelangelo’s David and The Pieta, and reinterpreted them with contemporary black figures.

Cindy Sherman the American photographer is known as the queen of the self because of her self-portraits and her extravagant dresses.

The characters Sherman portrays, lighting, clothing and expressions are cliché of what is present in cinema, so much that viewers of her work have told Sherman that they ‘remember the movie’ that the image is derived from, yet Sherman having no film in mind at all.[iv] Thus showing that her word has a pastiche of past cinematic genres, and how women are portrayed in cinema and photography and how Sherman has manipulated the ‘male gaze’ around her images so they become ironic and cliché.

Cindy Sherman began her famous series of "Untitled Film Series" at the end of 1977. The small black and white photographs are of Sherman impersonating female character types from old B grade movies, which speak "to a generation of baby boomer women who had grown up absorbing these glamorous images ay home on their televisions, taking such portrayals as cues for their future" (Thames and Hudson 1). Upon graduation of college in 1977, Cindy Sherman and her fellow student Robert Longo moved to Manhattan, New York together. She continued with her interest in role-playing and dressing up as different characters, and began to photograph herself in these different guises among different locations such as her apartment Untitled Film Still #10, in the Southwest in Untitled Film Still #43, and in Long Island in Untitled Film Still # 9. Sherman's manipulation of lighting, makeup, and dress make it difficult to believe that all of the characters represented were indeed the same person (Heller 225). All of the portraits are of her but none of the works are in any way a self-portrait of

Cindy Sherman’s, Untitled Film Stills from 1977 are a series of 69 total photographs that were comprised in order to appear as though they were actually taken from film reels. Sherman appears in every one of these shots, and finds a way to create a common thread throughout each of them despite the fact that the characters that she is portraying are vastly different from one another. She accomplishes this by using similar clothing, lighting, setting, and compositions as those that would be found in American B-movies from the 1950s and 1960s.

thoughts. Over the years of history, artists such as Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and many

Perception of the Female in the Modern Era: Gender Identity and the Act of "Becoming" in Cindy Sherman's History Portraits