ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses life history of Cindy Sherman, a feminist thinker. As a contemporary artist, a woman artist, a "post-modern" artist she has been labeled all of these things Sherman empowers herself to draw upon the medium of photography and all of the tools and tricks and modes available to her to create her own worlds. Her work, however, has addressed issues of gender, identity, and performance for forty years. In addition to her use of herself as primary subject, her investigation of femininity/ies and masculinity/ies and gender identity/ies as subject, her risk-taking approach to her work since her earliest days in the 1970s makes her a provocateur for and of gender politics. The MoMA exhibition website provides a comprehensive compendium to explore Sherman's work. The experimentation with prosthetics led to a series that riffs on the conventions of historical portraiture in European painting, allowing Sherman to comment on the roots of the genre, with her particular flair for underscoring artifice.
