34 Facts About Cindy Sherman

Cynthia Morris Sherman was born on 1954 and is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters.

Cindy Sherman was born in 1954, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, the youngest of the five children of Dorothy and Charles Cindy Sherman.

Cindy Sherman's father worked as an engineer for Grumman Aircraft.

Cindy Sherman's mother taught reading to children with learning difficulties.

Cindy Sherman has described her mother as good to a fault, and her father as strict and cruel.

In 1972, Cindy Sherman enrolled in the visual arts department at Buffalo State College, where she began painting.

Cindy Sherman used costumes and make-up, including blackface, to transform her identity for each image, and the cutout characters were lined up along the bus's advertising strip.

The series Untitled Film Stills, with which Cindy Sherman achieved international recognition, consists of 69 black-and-white photographs.

Cindy Sherman avoided putting titles on the images to preserve their ambiguity.

Cindy Sherman poses either on the floor or in bed, usually recumbent and often supine.

Between 1989 and 1990, Cindy Sherman made 35 large, color photographs restaging the settings of various European portrait paintings of the fifteenth through early 19th centuries under the title History Portraits.

Between 2003 and 2004, Cindy Sherman produced the Clowns cycle, where the use of digital photography enabled her to create chromatically garish backdrops and montages of numerous characters.

Cindy Sherman utilized a variety of photo-correction apps to create her Instagram portraits.

Cindy Sherman created photographs for an editorial in Harper's Bazaar in 1993.

Also in 2010, Cindy Sherman collaborated with Anna Hu on a design for a piece of jewelry.

Cindy Sherman moved from photographs to film with her movie Office Killer in 1997, starring Jeanne Tripplehorn, Molly Ringwald and Carol Kane.

Cindy Sherman has since participated in many international events, including SITE Santa Fe ; the Venice Biennale ; and five Whitney Biennials.

Major traveling retrospectives of Cindy Sherman's work have been organized by the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam ; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which was sponsored by Madonna; and Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, Denmark, and Jeu de Paume in Paris.

In 2012, the Museum of Modern Art mounted Cindy Sherman, a show that chronicled Sherman's work from the mid-1970s on and include more than 170 photographs.

In 2013, Cindy Sherman was invited to organize a show within that year's Venice Biennale.

Many scholars emphasize the relationship Cindy Sherman's work has with the concept of the gaze.

Cindy Sherman herself has identified an uncertainty toward the Untitled series' relationship with the male gaze.

Scholar Michele Meager interprets Cindy Sherman as having been "crowned a resistant celebrity" to feminist theory.

Cindy Sherman's work is often credited as a major influence for contemporary portrait photographers.

Cindy Sherman lived with artist Robert Longo, from 1974 to 1980.

Cindy Sherman married director Michel Auder in 1984, making her stepmother to Auder's daughter, Alexandra, and her half-sister Gaby Hoffmann.

Cindy Sherman was then in a 5-year relationship with Paul Hasegawa-Overacker, creator of a documentary film about Sherman.

Between 1991 and 2005, Cindy Sherman lived in a fifth-floor co-op loft at 84 Mercer Street in Manhattan's Soho neighborhood; she later sold it to actor Hank Azaria.

Cindy Sherman bought two floors in a 10-story condo building overlooking the Hudson River in West Soho, and currently uses one as her apartment and the other as her studio and office.

For many years, Cindy Sherman spent her summers in the Catskill Mountains.

Cindy Sherman later acquired a 19th-century home on a ten-acre waterfront property on Accabonac Harbor in East Hampton, New York.

Cindy Sherman serves on the artistic advisory committee of the New York City-based Stephen Petronio Company and on the Artists Committee of the Americans for the Arts.

Cindy Sherman has been criticized for donning blackface in her early Bus Riders series.

Cindy Sherman is able to give the white characters she impersonates a real range of skin tones and facial features.