This Artist Uses Makeup and Photography to Become Everyone, And Anyone

Born to a bigoted engineer in the midst of the Second Wave feminist movement and a special education teacher, and being the youngest of five by at least 19 years, Sherman established herself in her family at a young age. Often dressing up in costume-like attire, Sherman approached family with the thinking that her parents and siblings had formed the familial connection with each other far before her. The clothes served her eagerness to please and be welcomed in. This obsession with looking anew followed Sherman into her teen years before it established her as an artist. Surrounded by the imagery of the 60s coined diva-woman, teenaged Cindy did her hair and makeup like the pin-up girls for a rest easy day at home. Then influenced by the new wave of feminism and wanting to be seen as liberated from patriarchy, makeup and glamour were demonized. The social politics of Sherman's formative years, while not direct, are visibly present in Sherman's works and in her exploration of her sense of self. Photo by Cindy Sherman Courtesy of Google Fueled by over saturation of images in advertising and media cultures, 1974 brought the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Pictures Generation to life. A grand name to the bracket of artists included in this show, Sherman's photographic works and the works of other exhibited photographers are embedded with the same basic principles. The Pictures Generation comprised of artists of experimental media, photography, and film, who used literacy in Minimalism, Conceptual art, and Pop-Art as means of pushing postmodernism to encompass social critique on the influence of mass media. For this generation of artists, photography would no longer to be bound by the assignment to capture subjects purely based on reality; rather, photography would become a means for capturing ideas, concepts, and delving into intellectual frameworks. Like many artists of the Pictures Generation, Sherman was firstly trained in a traditional discipline, painting. Sherman has been a woman with overdrawn red lips and too wide eyes, a scared young girl, a Caravaggio, a Botticelli. Stepping behind a lens began as an exercise of discomfort, not a natural draw. Sherman first began taking photographs of herself in preparation for an art school exercise, gallivanting naked in the woods as others took pictures that never came. Feeling as if everything that could have been painted has been painted, and every new pain