Cindy Sherman Research Paper

Shirley Chisholm is the definition of an independent black woman. Chisholm is a model of independence, honesty, and has been a part of many historical issues including civil rights, aid to the poor, and women’s rights. Who Shirley Chisholm is was unknown to me. After days of researching, I have developed a clear understanding of who Shirley Chisholm is. Chisholm was an educator, activist, author, and politician. She is best known as the first African-American woman elected to United States Congress and the first woman and African- American to run for president of the United States.

Cindy Sherman, well known for her photography of her representing issues that commonly represent both the roles of being an artist, being a woman and the two combined. Sherman grew up in a large family that did not have any interest in art. Her knowledge of art growing up was very minimal until she went to college. She, then, started to paint. She quickly realized she did not like painting because of the lack of intimacy or recreation of a particular setting. She did, however love photography and started pursued an interest in that.

Cynthia Ann Parker was a true pioneer of of the west. She was a young girl who lived in the white community, then her life changed in one night. Cynthia parker lived a rough life. She was captured, she was forced back into the white community, the white people kept her locked in her room, her children died of diseases, she refused to eat, then she died of the same disease her child Topsannah did.

Mary Fields was born in 1834 and she passed away in 1914. Mary Fields was the very first African-American women to carry the mail. Mary Fields was born into slavery while she lived in Tennessee, she stopped being a slave when the war ended and slavery had been outlawed. Mary Fields was also known as Stagecoach Mary or Black Mary, she was also an American pioneer. After slavery was outlawed she then began to work for Judge Edmund Dunne in her home. When Mary was a slave her original owner was Judge Edmund Dunne and after slavery was outlawed she still proceeded to work for and with her. Mary Fields was a female African-American pioneer. Mary Fields was said to be one of the most colorful characters in the history of the Great Plains it's also been said that she was six feet tall and she weighed over 200 pounds. She also

Sarah Breedlove which name she was born into on 12/23/1867 in Delta Louisiana on a cotton plantation.Sarah Breedlove parents name was Minerva and Owen Breedlove.Sarah Breedlove had 5 siblings.In all 6 kids Owen and Minerva had,Sarah Breedlove was the first one to be born-free.Sarah Breedlove was born-free because she was born around the war of 1812.

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).

You can never envision the world without Emma Goldman. Emma Goldman passed on May 14, 1940. Emma committed her life to the production of a fundamentally social request. Likewise, she grasped insurgency for its vision; and it offered freedom, concordance, and social equity. Political agitation, in spite of the fact that its foundations are dated considerably before, was conceived only two years after Emma's introduction to the world. Bakunin, a Russia progressive, as Emma was to wind up, split the worldwide socialist development in two, making revolutionaries. She had a profound duty to supreme opportunity and that drove her to embrace a scope of disputable causes. Goldman was a radical scholar. Forty years on she is more than meaningful, she is notorious. The majority of this began with her introduction to the world on June 27, 1869, in Kovno, Lithuania.

Nina Simone was one of the most unique, influential, and gifted singers of her generation. She was born on February 21, 1933 as Eunice Waymon, in Tryon, North Carolina. Her mother was a preacher and she started playing piano at an early age, around 3 or 4 at her mother’s church, as she was playing piano at a local recital she caught the eye of an older white woman willing to give her lessons. Nina went on to studying classical piano for 5 years with the woman, learning the stylings of the classical greats such as Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, and Brahms. As a child she felt so isolated, spending up to 7 hours a day practicing the piano, and growing up in the south in the segregation era, she felt as she could not fit in neither with the white or black community, even when surrounded by other children all they wanted to

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.

Emma Goldman was born into an orthodox jewish family in Kovno, Russia to her parents Taube Bienowitch and Abraham Goldman. She had three brothers named Morris, Louis, and Herman Goldman and two half sisters Helena and Zena Zodikow. At an early age Emma became familiarized with poverty, injustice and women and children abuse. Her hot tempered and impatient father used violence when his children disobeyed him while her mother rarely interfered only to tell Abraham to take his beatings down a notch. Her father whipped Emma the most due to her being the most rebellious child of the bunch and she was an unwelcomed child because of her fathers wanting of a son.

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

Laura Mulvey understands Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills as to be rehearsing this structure of the ‘male gaze’, “The camera looks; it captures the female character in a parody of different voyeurisms. It intrudes into moments in which she is ungraded, sometimes undressed, absorbed into her own world in the privacy of her own environment. Or it witnesses a moment in which her guard drops and she is suddenly startled by the presence, unseen and off-screen watching her.”[v]

No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman's photography is part of the culture and

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.

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