Walker Art Gallery
Catherine Opie (b.1961, Sandusky, Ohio, United States) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She is an internationally renowned photographer whose work in the areas of portraiture and landscape has been shown in exhibitions around the world. Recent solo shows include Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA (2012), The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2011), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2010) and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2008).
Opie came to critical attention in the early 1990s with a body of portraits of gay, lesbian and transgendered men and women drawn from her circle of fellow artists and intimates in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Working across a wide range of subjects, from LA freeways and house facades to high school football players, surfers in Malibu and ice fishers in Minneapolis, Opie explores notions of identity and community and the way they shape one another.
The Gang is part of Opies’ Girlfriends series, black-and-white square-format photographs she made in the 1980s and 90s documenting what she refers to as ‘these little moments of sexy desire and memory’. The Gang is one of the more light-hearted photographs in the series, and is an ideal work to address the Walker Art Gallery’s ambition to collect work related to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered themes and communities.
Presented by the Contemporary Art Society with the support of the Walker Art Gallery, 2014