Cindy Sherman and Female Representation in Art
American photographer and artist Cindy Sherman established her decades-long career by focusing her work on a very specific person: herself.
Contents:
Cindy Sherman’s Early Years
The Evolution of Sherman’s Art
Cindy Sherman Today
Cindy Sherman’s Enduring Legacy
Cindy Sherman’s Early Years
Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey in 1954, Sherman grew up primarily in Huntington, New York. Following her graduation from high school in 1972, Sherman enrolled at the State University of New York at Buffalo where she majored in painting and photography. After graduating in 1976, she began work on her landmark exhibit, “Untitled Film Stills,” 1977–1980, which features 69 black-and-white self-portraits of her dressed as B-list movie actresses.
After the success of “Untitled Film Stills,” Cindy Sherman released “Rear Screen Projections” in 1980, followed by “Centerfolds/Horizontals” in 1981. The use of color and larger imagery in both series served as a departure from her well-known black-and-white photos and marked a new era in her career.
The Evolution of Sherman’s Art
Known largely for her self-portraits, Sherman has spent her career making statements about popular constructs of female identity. Whether dressing as a classic movie star or a housewife, the images prompt questions about femininity, identity, and female representation.
Her first major exhibition in Los Angeles in nearly 20 years, “Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life,” was displayed at The Broad art museum from June to October 2016 and included 120 images spanning her career.
Named after a 1959 film directed by Douglas Sirk and curated by Philipp Kaiser, the exhibit explored Sherman’s connection with 20th-century film and pop culture. The exhibit was later shown at the Spruth Magers gallery in Berlin in 2017 as well as at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio.
“The work is what it is and hopefully it’s seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work, but I’m not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff.”
— Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman Today
Sherman has kept turning the camera on herself, and the big retrospectives have kept coming. After a career survey at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2012, she had major exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2019 and at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2020 and 2021.
When Metro Pictures, the New York gallery that had shown her work since the early 1980s, announced its closure in 2021, Sherman joined Hauser & Wirth. The gallery brought “The Women” to Menorca, Spain, in 2025, her first solo show in the country in more than two decades.
Her newest series, “Fabric Matrons,” opens at Hauser & Wirth London from Oct. 13 to Dec. 23, 2026. In these staged portraits, draped fabric, makeup and wigs turn to aging and to the uneven ways women are looked at over a lifetime. Some faces show every line, others look airbrushed, and several characters seem to dissolve into the textiles around them. Nearly 50 years after the “Untitled Film Stills,” she is still asking the same question: what does it take to be seen?
Sherman belongs to a line of women who used their own image as material, from Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore to Francesca Woodman. Her contemporary Barbara Kruger took on the same media images of women with words instead of costumes.
Cindy Sherman’s Enduring Legacy
Although her work is often considered feminist in nature, Sherman emphasizes that this is more of an implicit attribute rather than an explicit one. In a 2003 interview with fellow artist Betsy Berne, Sherman stated that she doesn’t want to have to explain herself and the choices she makes. “The work is what it is and hopefully it’s seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work, but I’m not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff.”
Despite her reticence in this respect, Sherman remains a feminist icon to many, and her critiques of art, gender, and popular culture continue to inspire new generations of artists around the world.
This feature originally appeared in the Body issue. Find more inspiring stories from the Body issue here or check out our Women in History section.
