Catherine Opie: Catherine Opie on the Built Environment

Catherine Opie (b. 1961, Sandusky, OH; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA), is an artist working primarily in photography. She was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow recipient and recently returned from the American Academy in Rome as the Robert Mapplethorpe Resident in Photography for 2021. In September of 2008, the Guggenheim Museum in New York opened a mid-career exhibition titled, Catherine Opie: American Photographer. Her first monograph, Catherine Opie, was recently published by Phaidon in June of 2021. Opie received a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in 1988. She holds the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Endowed Chair in Art at UCLA where she is also Chair of the Department of Art

For over thirty years, Catherine Opie has captured often overlooked aspects of contemporary American life and culture. One of the most important photographers of her generation, her subjects have included early seminal portraits of the LGBTQ+ community, the architecture of Los Angeles’ freeway system, mansions in Beverly Hills, Midwestern icehouses, high school football players, California surfers, and abstract landscapes of National Parks, among others.