M E D I A R E L E A S E

MAJOR MID-CAREER SURVEY OF PHOTOGRAPHER CATHERINE OPIE ON VIEW AT THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM Exhibition: Catherine Opie: American Photographer Venue: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York City Dates: September 26, 2008–January 7, 2009 Preview: September 25, 10AM - 12PM

(NEW YORK, NY – September 24, 2008) – Since the early 1990s, Catherine Opie has produced a

complex body of photographic work, adopting such diverse genres as studio portraiture, landscape

photography, and urban street photography to explore notions of communal, sexual, and cultural identity.

From her early portraits of queer subcultures, pristine urban panoramas, and expansive landscapes to her

incisive views of her own domestic life, Opie has offered profound insights into the conditions in which

communities form and the terms by which they are defined. All the while she has maintained a strict

formal rigor, working in lush and provocative color as well as richly toned black and white. Influenced by

social documentary photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and August Sander, Opie

underscores and elevates the poignant yet unsettling veracity of her subjects.

Catherine Opie: American Photographer is organized by Jennifer Blessing, Curator of Photography; with

Nat Trotman, Assistant Curator.

This exhibition is supported by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.

The Guggenheim Museum gratefully acknowledges the Leadership Committee for Catherine Opie:

American Photographer.

The exhibition gathers together significant examples from several of Opie’s most important series in a

major mid-career survey. Though Opie’s photographs have been shown extensively throughout the

United States, Europe, and Japan—including one-person exhibitions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art

Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Artpace, San Antonio; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago;

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach,

California; St. Louis Art Museum; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Photographers’ Gallery,

London—no single exhibition has yet offered an overview of her richly diverse artistic projects.

Catherine Opie: American Photographer serves to fill this void.

Opie first came to prominence with her Portraits series (1993–97), which celebrates the queer community

in San Francisco and Los Angeles, including practitioners of drag, transgendered people, and performance

artists. Set against brilliantly colored backgrounds, these figures confront the viewer with intense gazes,

asserting their individuality and destabilizing conventional notions of gender. Opie describes these sitters,

all of whom she knew personally, as her “royal family”; by adopting a style inspired by portraitists like

the 16th-century German painter Hans Holbein, she offers an affirmative and even tender portrayal of a

subculture often rendered invisible by dominant cultural norms.

Concurrently with the Portraits, in the mid-1990s Opie began to photograph urban landscapes throughout

Los Angeles. Her first city series, Freeways (1994–95), pictures the city’s highways devoid of human

presence, their sweeping slabs of concrete set against the sky. Nearly abstract and printed on an intimate

scale, these photographs are nonetheless analogous to Opie’s portraits in their majesty. As documents of a

primary aspect of daily travel in Los Angeles, the Freeways suggest that the strategies and structures

intended to connect people can in fact divide them.

The Houses series (1995) continued Opie’s urban exploration through crisp, frontal views of Beverly

Hills and Bel Air mansions that, like the Freeways, appear devoid of human presence. Yet each pristine

façade retains as distinct a character as each of the friends Opie portrays—these houses structure and

signify the community within which their occupants exist. Symbols of the archetypal “American Dream,”

they are nonetheless armed with complex security systems, massive doors, and ornate gates, marking an

entirely separate community, one closed off to the artist, the viewer, and the rest of the surrounding city.

Opie’s interests in portraiture and domestic architecture continued to develop, and began to merge, in her

series Domestic (1995-98). Produced during a three-month trip across the country, these large-scale, color

photographs document lesbian families engaged in everyday household activities, in settings varying from

city apartments to country homes. Repositioning these unconventional families within the iconography of

the classic American home, Opie envisions a more inclusive, complex image of the contemporary family.

Following the Freeways, Opie has also continued to investigate the ways communities form and display

themselves within urban settings, in an extended series of panoramic black-and-white photographs called

American Cities (1997–present). Exploring the urban environments of Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New

York, Chicago, and St. Louis, among others, Opie reveals the variety of communities that exist within

each city. For example, the Mini-Malls, the group of photographs that initiated American Cities, focuses

insistently on the billboards, signs, and architectural elements that identify various ethnic and cultural

groups in each eponymous setting. Characteristically, all the series’ photographs are emptied of human

presence. With their romantic purity, each of the American Cities becomes an iconic, ideal platform for

potential community interaction.

Ever seeking to diversify her artistic work, Opie has also turned away from the city, looking toward

nature and the itinerant communities that exist upon it. In Icehouses (2001), she turns to the brightly

painted structures built by ice fishers on frozen lakes in Minnesota. Viewed from afar, surrounded by an

infinite vista of misty snow and atmosphere, the patchy assemblage of icehouses seems diminutive and

immaterial. Similarly, the subjects of Surfers (2003) are virtually engulfed in the vast and gloomy

shoreline of Malibu, where they watch and wait to be swept up by oncoming waves. Picturing their

changing positions over the course of fourteen photographs, Opie presents a rich visual metaphor for the

shifting and contingent nature of community itself, as it exists in any environment.

More recently, Opie has returned to these themes in the series In and Around Home (2004–05),

investigating her own domestic life and its relationship to its surrounding environments, both local and

global. The series forsakes the rigid seriality of her previous projects, establishing a fluid narrative that

alternates between shots of her daily home life, views of the surrounding neighborhood, and small groups

of Polaroids shot off the television screen, which highlight perhaps the most common portal between the

home and the outside world: the television news media. The careful construction of this series grants it a

coherence that allows viewers to wander through its narrative and emerge with a nuanced understanding

of that most integral of communities, the family.

Catalogue

Catherine Opie: American Photographer is accompanied by a major publication, the first to gather all of

Opie’s various projects in one volume. Each of the artist’s series is reproduced in full color plates made

under the artist’s supervision, including works beyond those displayed in the exhibition, in order to give

the most complete overview of Opie’s work ever available. The catalogue features a lead essay by

Jennifer Blessing, the Guggenheim’s Curator of Photography, which surveys Opie’s artistic career and its

historical contexts, as well as a series of interviews with the artist by Russell Ferguson. In addition the

museum has commissioned a brief personal reflection by internationally renowned novelist Dorothy

Allison, whose work explores concerns similar to Opie’s. Finally, the catalogue includes introductory

essays on each of the artist’s series by Nat Trotman, Assistant Curator at the Guggenheim, as well as a

newly researched, exhaustive exhibition history and bibliography. Together, the exhibition and catalogue

will prove to be the primary source for an understanding of Opie’s work, providing audiences with a

valuable opportunity to examine firsthand the interconnections between the artists’ various styles and

subjects.

Public Programs and Education

A full roster of educational programs will be presented under the auspices of the Sackler Center for Arts

Education during the run of the exhibition. For updated information contact the Box Office at 212 423

3587 or visit www.guggenheim.org/education.

On View in the Sackler Center Catherine Opie Selects: Pictures and Words In this digital age, photographs have become increasingly public and open to many interpretations. More than ever before, it is not only the photographer who defines an image’s meaning, but also the audience. Catherine Opie Selects: Pictures and Words offers an opportunity for visitors to participate in this circuit of interpretation and contribute stories of their own. For this exhibition, Opie has selected images from the Guggenheim Museum’s photography collection and organized them into three sections drawn from themes in her own work: Self-Portraits, Landscapes, and Portraits. Coupled with these images are questions meant to prompt written responses in the form of essays, poems, stories, or personal reflections. Displayed together in the Sackler Center gallery, these contributions constitute a community of voices, expanding the meaning of each picture and possibly altering the ways we understand photography itself. The exhibition is on view through January 7, 2009. Panel Discussions Identity and its Aftermaths Thursday, October 2, 6:30 pm Moderator: Liz Kotz, Assistant Professor, University of California, Riverside Participants: Coco Fusco, Jennifer Gonzalez and Simon Leung After a period recognized as Reagan’s America, marked by the art of appropriation, more avowedly political and openly dissenting currents emerged by the late 1980’s. On the occasion of the Catherine Opie survey, this panel reconsiders that moment of activism and “identity politics” and its implications on art making now. Opie & Performance: The Theater of the Portrait Thursday, October 16, 6:30 pm Peggy Phelan, The Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts and Professor of Drama and English, Stanford University Opie’s collaboration with the performance artist Ron Athey marks an important intervention in both photographic portraiture and live art. Analyzing the challenges and the achievements of the collaboration, this talk explores the complicated visual, sexual, and aesthetic politics that make this work so dramatically compelling. Conversations with Contemporary Photographers Monday, December 9, 6:30 pm Participants: Gregory Crewdson and Catherine Opie Moderator: Jennifer Blessing, Curator of Photography While one references staged photography and the other documentary, Gregory Crewdson and Catherine Opie similarly address the construction of pictorial narrative and the social dynamics of American suburbs. The artists reflect on the medium’s complex relationship to truth, their individual contexts within its history, and the many possibilities for its future.

Readings Rebecca Solnit The Blue of Distance Tuesday, October 7, 6:30 pm Limited seating Set amidst the photographic landscapes of Catherine Opie’s series Icehouses and Surfers, this reading by award winning author Rebecca Solnit draws from a body of work that interweaves personal encounters with nature, exploration of new territory, and the impact of photography on our experience of time and place. Solnit’s work includes River of Shadows (2004) and A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005). A. M. Homes In and Around Home Wednesday, November 5, 6:30 pm Limited seating The critically acclaimed novelist and critic A. M. Homes reads a selection of her work amidst Catherine Opie’s series In and Around Home. Homes, like Opie, documents a contemporary America of changing families, suburban culture, and shifting identities. Her most recent books include the memoir The Mistress’s Daughter (2007) and the novel This Book Will Save Your Life (2006). Admission and Museum Hours:

$18 adults, $15 students/seniors (65+), children under 12 free. Admission includes audioguide. Saturday to Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 5:45 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m. to 7:45 p.m. Closed Thursday. On Friday evenings, beginning at 5:45 p.m., the museum hosts Pay What You Wish. For general information, please call 212 423 3500, or visit w.guggenheim.org.

#1085

March 14, 2008

Updated September 24, 2008

FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION CONTACT:

Lauren Van Natten, Senior Publicist

Claire Laporte, Associate, Media Relations

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Phone: 212 423 3840

E-mail: pressoffice@guggenheim.org

For publicity images go to http://www.guggenheim.org/press_office.html.

User ID = photoservice

Password = presspass

� | Catherine Opie

Publicity Images for Catherine Opie: American Photographer

Solomon R. Guggenheim MuseumSeptember 26, 2008 – January 7, 2009

Online Photo Service for Press ImagesImages for current exhibitions may now be downloaded free of charge through our Web site. • Visit www.guggenheim.org/press_office.html. • Click on the red Photo Service icon. • Select an exhibition. • When prompted, please enter the following username and password: Username: photoservice Password: presspassAll images cleared for press are in tiff format. They are accompanied by full caption information. To request an image that is not on the Web site, please call 2�2 423 3840 or e-mail PressOffice@Guggenheim.org.

Catherine OpieMike and Sky, �993Chromogenic print20 x �6 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)Edition of 8© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine OpieBo, �99�Chromogenic print and wood frame with metal nameplate�7 x 22 inches (43.2 x 55.9 cm)Edition of 8© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

2 | Catherine Opie

Catherine OpieUntitled #�� (Freeways), �994Platinum print2 �/4 x 6 3/4 inches (5.7 x �7.� cm)Edition of 5© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine OpieJerome Caja, �993Chromogenic print20 x �6 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)Edition of 8© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine OpieUntitled #40 (Freeways), �994Platinum print2 �/4 x 6 3/4 inches (5.7 x �7.� cm)Edition of 5© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine OpieFrankie, �995Chromogenic print20 x �6 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)Edition of 8© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

3 | Catherine Opie

Catherine OpieJoanne, Betsy & Olivia, Bayside, New York, �998Chromogenic print40 x 50 inches (�0�.6 x �27 cm)Edition of 5© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine OpieUntitled #� (Mini-malls), �997Inkjet print (Iris)�6 x 4� inches (40.6 x �04.� cm)Edition of 5© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine OpieHouse #� (Beverly Hills), �995Chromogenic print40 x 50 inches (�0�.6 x �27 cm)Edition of 5© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine OpieDivinity Fudge, �997Chromogenic print60 x 30 inches (�52.4 x 76.2 cm)Edition of 8© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

4 | Catherine Opie

Catherine OpieTammy Rae & Kaia, Durham, North Carolina, �998Chromogenic print40 x 50 inches (�0�.6 x �27 cm)Edition of 5© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine OpieRon Athey/The Sick Man (from Deliverance), 2000Dye diffusion transfer print (Polaroid)��0 x 4� inches (279.4 x �04.� cm)UniqueMarc and Livia Straus Family Collection© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine OpieUntitled #� (Icehouses), 200�Chromogenic print50 x 40 inches (�27.0 x �0�.6 cm)Edition of 5© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine OpieUntitled #9 (Wall Street), 200�Inkjet print (Iris)�6 x 4� inches (40.6 x �04.� cm)Edition of 5© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

5 | Catherine Opie

Catherine OpieSelf-Portrait/Nursing, 2004Chromogenic print40 x 32 inches (�0�.6 x 8�.3 cm)Edition 7/8Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New YorkPurchased with funds contributed by the International Director’s Council and Executive Committee Members, 2005 © 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine OpieOliver in a Tutu, 2004Chromogenic print24 x 20 inches (6� x 50.8 cm) Edition 5/5Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New YorkPurchased with funds contributed by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, 2006© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine OpieUntitled #�0 (Surfers), 2003Chromogenic print50 x 40 inches (�27.0 x �0�.6 cm)Edition of 5© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine OpieChristmas West Adams, 2004Chromogenic print�6 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)Edition of 5© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

6 | Catherine Opie

Catherine OpieMe and Nika by Julie, 2005Chromogenic print24 x 20 inches (6� x 50.8 cm)Edition of 5© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine OpieRainbow Kite, 2005Chromogenic print30 x 40 inches (76.2 x �0�.6 cm)Edition of 5© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine OpieMitch, �994Chromogenic print20 x �6 inchesEdition of 8© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine OpieSelf-Portrait/Cutting, �993Chromogenic print40 x 30 inches© 2008 Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects,Los Angeles

CATHERINE OPIE: AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHER PUBLIC PROGRAMS AND RELATED EVENTS

ON VIEW AT THE SACKLER CENTER Catherine Opie Selects: Pictures & Words SEP 26, 2008– JAN 7, 2009 While celebrated for her role behind the camera, Catherine Opie remains acutely aware of the voices of her subjects, and the diverse readings all images engender. Exploring this circuit of interpretation, Opie has selected images from the Guggenheim Museum’s photography collection to present alongside questions about the works’ themes and meanings, inviting museum visitors to respond with stories of their own. CATHERINE OPIE PROGRAMS Identity and its Aftermaths THU, OCT 2, 6:30 pm Moderator: Liz Kotz, Assistant Professor, University of California, Riverside Participants: Coco Fusco, Jennifer Gonzalez ans Simon Leung After a period recognized as Reagan’s America, marked by the art of appropriation, more avowedly political and openly dissenting currents emerged by the late 1980’s. On the occasion of the Catherine Opie survey, this panel reconsiders that moment of activism and “identity politics” and its implications on art making now. Opie & Performance: The Theater of the Portrait THU, OCT 16, 6:30 pm Peggy Phelan, The Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts and Professor of Drama and English, Stanford University Opie’s collaboration with the performance artist Ron Athey marks an important intervention in both photographic portraiture and live art. Analyzing the challenges and the achievements of the collaboration, this talk explores the complicated visual, sexual, and aesthetic politics that make this work so dramatically compelling. Conversations with Contemporary Photographers MON, DEC 8, 6:30 pm Moderator: Jennifer Blessing, Curator of Photography Participants: Gregory Crewdson; Catherine Opie While one references staged photography and the other documentary, Gregory Crewdson and Catherine Opie similarly address the construction of pictorial narrative and the social dynamics of American suburbs. The artists reflect on the medium’s complex relationship to truth, their individual contexts within its history, and the many possibilities for its future.

READINGS Rebecca Solnit The Blue of Distance TUE, OCT 7, 6:30 pm Limited seating Set amidst the photographic landscapes of Catherine Opie’s series Icehouses and Surfers, this reading by award winning author Rebecca Solnit draws from a body of work that interweaves personal encounters with nature, exploration of new territory, and the impact of photography on our experience of time and place. Solnit’s work includes River of Shadows (2004) and A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005). A. M. Homes In and Around Home WED, NOV 5, 6:30 pm Limited seating The critically acclaimed novelist and critic A. M. Homes reads a selection of her work amidst Catherine Opie’s series In and Around Home. Homes, like Opie, documents a contemporary America of changing families, suburban culture, and shifting identities. Her most recent books include the memoir The Mistress’s Daughter (2007) and the novel This Book Will Save Your Life (2006). GALLERY TALKS Talks are free with museum admission. No advance reservations required. Schedules are subject to change. Educator’s Eye Daily at 11 am and 1 pm Join Guggenheim Museum educators for interactive tours of current exhibitions, the permanent collection, and the Frank Lloyd Wright building. Assistive listening devices available. Curator’s Eye Catherine Opie: American Photographer Friday October 17 and November 21 at 2 pm OCT 17 Jennifer Blessing, Curator NOV 21 Nat Trotman, Assistant Curator Join Guggenheim Museum curators for tours of current exhibitions. Conservator’s Eye Catherine Opie: American Photographer NOV 7 at 2 pm: Jeffrey Warda, Associate Conservator Join Guggenheim Museum conservators for tours of artists’ work on view focusing on their materials and techniques as they pertain to preservation. Mind’s Eye Catherine Opie: American Photographer OCT 6 at 6pm Space is limited. RSVP to: 212 360 4355 or access@guggenheim.org Join Guggenheim Museum educators Georgia Krantz and Guthrie Nutter for a tour, discussion, and private reception. Programs for partially sighted and blind visitors presented through verbal imaging and touch; separate programs for deaf visitors presented in American Sign Language.

Fall Family Day SUN, NOV 16, 2–5 pm For families with children ages 4–10 $15 per family, $10 members, free for Family Members, Cool Culture participants, and Guggenheim partner schools. Includes admission for 2 adults and up to 4 children ($5 for each additional participant); no advance reservations required. Join us for a family day celebrating the architecture of the museum, the permanent collection, and the fall exhibitions, including Catherine Opie: American Photographer and theanyspacewhatever. Engage in conversations, art-making activities, performances, and storytelling. Digital Photography for Families 5 SUNS BEGINNING OCT 5, 11 am–1 pm For adults with children ages 9–12 $250 per family, $175 members, $150 Family Members Participants must bring a digital camera that both parent and child can use to the museum. Space is limited; one adult and one child per family. Taking inspiration from Catherine Opie: American Photographer, parents and children work together to create a series of photos representing their own home and community through in class activities and weekly assignments. During class, parent/child partners pair up on Mac computers to upload, edit, and discuss their photographs.

F A C T S H E E T

Exhibition: Catherine Opie: American Photographer Venue: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York City Dates: September 26, 2008–January 7, 2009 Overview: Since the early 1990s, Catherine Opie has produced a complex body of

photographic work, adopting such diverse genres as studio portraiture, landscape photography, and urban street photography to explore notions of communal, sexual, and cultural identity. From her early portraits of queer subcultures to her expansive urban landscapes, Opie has offered profound insights into the conditions in which communities form and the terms by which they are defined. All the while she has maintained a strict formal rigor, working in stark and provocative color as well as richly toned black and white. Influenced by social documentary photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and August Sander, Opie underscores and elevates the poignant yet unsettling veracity of her subjects.

Highlights: Catherine Opie: American Photographer will gather together significant examples

from several of Opie’s most important series in a major mid-career survey. Though Opie’s photographs have been shown extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan—including one-person exhibitions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Artpace, San Antonio; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California; St. Louis Art Museum; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Photographers’ Gallery, London—no single exhibition has yet offered an overview of her richly diverse artistic project. Catherine Opie: American Photographer will serve to fill this void. Opie first came to prominence with her Portraits series (1993–97), which celebrates the queer community in San Francisco and Los Angeles, including practitioners of drag, transgendered people, and performance artists. Set against brilliantly colored backgrounds, these figures confront the viewer with intense gazes, asserting their individuality and destabilizing conventional notions of gender. Opie describes these sitters, all of whom she knew personally, as her “royal family”; by adopting a style inspired by portraitists like the 16th-century German painter Hans Holbein, she offers an affirmative and even tender portrayal of a subculture often rendered invisible by dominant cultural norms. Concurrently with the Portraits, in the mid-1990s Opie began to photograph urban landscapes throughout Los Angeles. Her first city series, Freeways (1994–95), pictures the city’s highways devoid of human presence, their sweeping slabs of concrete set against the sky. Nearly abstract and printed on an intimate scale, these photographs are nonetheless analogous to Opie’s portraits in their majesty.

As documents of a primary aspect of daily travel in Los Angeles, the Freeways suggest that the strategies and structures intended to connect people can in fact divide them.

The Houses series (1995) continued Opie’s urban exploration through crisp, frontal views of Beverly Hills and Bel Air mansions that, like the Freeways, appear devoid of human presence. Yet each pristine façade retains as distinct a character as each of the friends Opie portrays—these houses structure and signify the community within which their occupants exist. Symbols of the archetypal “American Dream,” they are nonetheless armed with complex security systems, massive doors, and ornate gates, marking an entirely separate community, one closed off to the artist, the viewer, and the rest of the surrounding city. Opie’s interests in portraiture and domestic architecture continued to develop, and began to merge, in her series Domestic (1995-98). Produced during a three-month trip across the country, these large-scale, color photographs document lesbian families engaged in everyday household activities, in settings varying from city apartments to country homes. Repositioning these unconventional families within the iconography of the classic American home, Opie envisions a more inclusive, complex image of the contemporary family. More recently, Opie has turned to her own domestic life in the series In and Around Home (2004–05), in which she photographs her own family and friends amidst the diverse cultural setting of her Los Angeles neighborhood. Following the Freeways, Opie has continued to investigate the ways communities form and display themselves within urban settings, in an extended series of panoramic black-and-white photographs called American Cities (1997–present). Exploring the urban environments of Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Chicago, and St. Louis, among others, Opie reveals the variety of communities that exist within each city. For example, the Mini-Malls, the group of photographs that initiated American Cities, focuses insistently on the billboards, signs, and architectural elements that identify various ethnic and cultural groups in each eponymous setting. Characteristically, all the series’ photographs are emptied of human presence. With their romantic purity, each of the American Cities becomes an iconic, ideal platform for potential community interaction. Ever seeking to diversify her artistic work, Opie has also turned away from the city, looking toward nature and the itinerant communities that exist upon it. In Icehouses (2001), she turns to the brightly painted structures built by ice fishers on frozen lakes in Minnesota. Viewed from afar, surrounded by an infinite vista of misty snow and atmosphere, the patchy assemblage of icehouses seems diminutive and immaterial. Similarly, the subjects of Surfers (2003) are virtually engulfed in the vast and gloomy shoreline of Malibu, where they watch and wait to be swept up by oncoming waves. Picturing their changing positions over the course of fourteen photographs, Opie presents a rich visual metaphor for the shifting and contingent nature of community itself, as it exists in any environment.

Curators: Jennifer Blessing, Curator of Photography; with Nat Trotman, Assistant Curator Catalogue: Catherine Opie: American Photographer will be accompanied by a major

publication, the first to gather all of Opie’s various projects in one volume. Each of the artist’s series will be reproduced in full color plates made under the artist’s supervision, including works beyond those displayed in the exhibition, in order to give the most complete overview of Opie’s work ever available. The catalogue will feature a lead essay by Jennifer Blessing, the Guggenheim’s Curator of Photography, which will survey Opie’s artistic career and its historical contexts, as well as a series of interviews with the artist by Russell Ferguson. In addition the museum has commissioned a brief personal reflection by internationally renowned novelist Dorothy Allison, whose work explores concerns similar to Opie’s. Finally, the catalogue will also include introductory essays on each of the artist’s series by Nat Trotman, Assistant Curator at the Guggenheim, as well as a newly researched, exhaustive exhibition history and bibliography. Together, the exhibition and catalogue will prove to be the primary source for an understanding of Opie’s work, providing audiences with a valuable opportunity to examine firsthand the interconnections between the artists’ various styles and subjects.

Education: A full roster of educational programs will be presented under the auspices of the

Sackler Center for Arts Education during the run of the exhibition. For updated information contact the Box Office at 212 423 3587 or visit www.guggenheim.org/education.

Sponsorship: This exhibition is supported by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc. The

Guggenheim Museum gratefully acknowledges the Leadership Committee for Catherine Opie: American Photographer.

Admission and Museum Hours: $18 adults, $15 students/seniors (65+), children under 12 free. Saturday to Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 5:45 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m. to 7:45 p.m. Closed Thursday. On Friday evenings, beginning at 5:45 p.m., the museum hosts Pay What You Wish. For general information, please call 212 423 3500, or visit www.guggenheim.org. FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION CONTACT: Lauren Van Natten, Senior Publicist Claire Laporte, Associate, Media Relations 212 423 3840 or pressoffice@guggenheim.org For publicity images go to http://www.guggenheim.org/press_office.html User ID = photoservice Password = presspass

E X H I B I T I O N C U R A T O R S

Jennifer Blessing joined the curatorial staff in 2002, after previously working at the museum from 1989–97. She recently organized Jeff Wall: Exposure for the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, and True North, which opened there in February 2008. In addition to curating photo-based exhibitions, she is responsible for developing the museum's photography collection. During her tenure with the museum she has curated the touring exhibitions Family Pictures; Speaking with Hands: Photographs from The Buhl Collection; and Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography. She has contributed to numerous other museum exhibitions and catalogues, including Marina Abramović’s performance series Seven Easy Pieces; Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition; Premises: Invested Spaces in Visual Arts, Architecture & Design from France, 1958–1998; The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968; Art of This Century; and Guggenheim Museum Collection: A to Z. Nat Trotman joined the curatorial staff in 2001. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and a graduate of the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program, where he co-curated the exhibition Homeland. He has served as curatorial assistant on the exhibitions Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle; Constantin Brancusi: The Essence of Things; John Baldessari: Somewhere Between Almost Right and Not Quite (With Orange); Richard Serra: The Matter of Time; David Smith: A Centennial; and Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History. He served as assistant curator on Felix Gonzalez-Torres: America and Catherine Opie: American Photographer; as co-curator of The Shapes of Space; and as curator of Installations: Selections from the Guggenheim Collections.