The Museum of Modern Art will present the exhibition Cindy Sherman, a retrospective survey tracing the groundbreaking artist’s career from the mid 1970s to the present, from February 26 through June 11, 2012. The exhibition will bring together more than 180 key photographs from a variety of the artist’s acclaimed bodies of work, for which she created myriad constructed characters and tableaus. The first comprehensive museum survey of Sherman’s career in the United States since 1997, it will draw widely from public and private collections, including the collection of The Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Associate Curator, with Lucy Gallun, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential artists in contemporary art. Throughout her career, she has presented a sustained, eloquent, and provocative exploration of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation, drawn from the unlimited supply of images from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet, and art history. Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting. To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and wardrobe mistress. With an arsenal of wigs, costumes, makeup, prosthetics, and props, Sherman has deftly altered her physique and surroundings to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters, from screen siren to clown to aging socialite.

Highlighted in the exhibition are in-depth presentations of her key series, including the groundbreaking Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), the black-and-white pictures that feature the artist in stereotypical female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, and European art-house films; her ornate history portraits (1989–90), in which the artist poses as aristocrats, clergymen, and milkmaids in the manner of old master paintings; and her larger-than-life society portraits (2008) that address the experience and representation of aging in the context of contemporary obsessions with youth and status. The exhibition will explore dominant themes throughout Sherman’s career, including artifice and fiction; cinema and performance; horror and the grotesque; myth, carnival, and fairy tale; and gender and class identity. Also included are Sherman’s recent photographic murals (2010), which will have their American premiere at MoMA.

A fully illustrated publication will accompany the exhibition, and will include a principal essay by Ms. Respini, a contribution by renowned scholar and art historian Johanna Burton, and an interview with the artist conducted by filmmaker and artist John Waters. In conjunction with
the exhibition, Sherman has selected films from MoMA’s collection, which will be screened in MoMA’s theaters during the course of the exhibition. A major publication will accompany the exhibition.

Cindy Sherman will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (July 14–October 7, 2012), and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (November 3, 2012–January 27, 2013).