To create her photographs, Sherman shoots alone in her studio, assuming multiple roles as author, director, make-up artist, hairstylist, wardrobe mistress, and model. Sherman works in series, typically photographing herself in a range of costumes. Along with artists like Laurie Simmons, Louise Lawler, and Barbara Kruger, Sherman is considered to be part of the Pictures Generation. It was in Buffalo that Sherman encountered the photo-based conceptual works of artists Hannah Wilke, Eleanor Antin, and Adrian Piper. Sherman was also exposed to the contemporary art exhibited at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the two Buffalo campuses of the SUNY school system, Media Studies Buffalo, and the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts, and Artpark, in nearby Lewiston, N.Y. In 1974, together with Longo, Charles Clough and Nancy Dwyer, she created Hallwalls, an arts center intended as a space that would accommodate artists from diverse backgrounds. This was the beginning of her Untitled Film Still series. At college she met Robert Longo, a fellow artist who encouraged her to record her process of "dolling up" for parties. Though Sherman had failed a required photography class as a freshman, she repeated the course with Barbara Jo Revelle, whom she credited with introducing her to conceptual art and other contemporary forms. But if we're going to have to go to the woods I better deal with it early.’ Luckily we never had to do that." She spent the remainder of her college education focused on photography. "I was meticulously copying other art, and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead." Sherman has said about this time: "One of the reasons I started photographing myself was that supposedly in the spring one of my teachers would take the class out to a place near Buffalo where there were waterfalls and everybody romps around without clothes on and takes pictures of each other. "here was nothing more to say ", she recalled. Frustrated with what she saw as the limitations of painting as a medium of art, she abandoned it and took up photography. During this time, she began to explore the ideas which became a hallmark of her work: She dressed herself as different characters, cobbled together from thrift-store clothing. In 1972, Sherman enrolled in the visual arts department at Buffalo State College, where she began painting. Sherman has described her mother as good to a fault, and her father as strict and cruel. Her mother taught reading to children with learning difficulties. Her father worked as an engineer for Grumman Aircraft. Shortly after her birth, her family moved to the township of Huntington, Long Island. Sherman was born in 1954, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, the youngest of the five children of Dorothy and Charles Sherman. In the 1980s, she used color film and large prints, and focused more on costume, lighting and facial expression. Her breakthrough work is often considered to be the collected Untitled Film Stills, a series of 70 black-and-white photographs of herself evoking typical female roles in performance media (especially arthouse films and popular B-movies). Cynthia Morris Sherman (born 1954) is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters.
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