Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine is an American artist renowned for her contributions to photography, painting, and conceptual art. A significant portion of her oeuvre comprises precise photographic reproductions of the works of other photographers.

Biography of Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine was born in 1947 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. However, the Midwest greatly influenced her upbringing, as she spent the majority of her childhood and teenage years in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri.

Levine credited her mother, an enthusiast of painting, for igniting her passion for art at the age of eight by frequently taking her to the St. Louis Art Museum. Additionally, her mother's habit of regularly attending art house films left a lasting impact on Levine's artistic vision.

Following her high school graduation in 1965, she spent eight years in Wisconsin, ultimately earning her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1969. Four years later, in 1973, she obtained her M.F.A. from the same institution. After engaging in various roles in commercial art and teaching, Levine relocated to New York City in 1975 to pursue her art career.

Sherrie Levine's art gained prominence in the late 1970s. In 1977, she was featured in Douglas Crimp's influential exhibition "Pictures" at Artists Space in New York. This exhibition played a defining role in shaping the postmodern attitudes of the 1980s art scene, and it brought together a cohort of artists recognized as the Pictures Generation.

She, alongside artists like Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Sarah Charlesworth, Laurie Simmons, and Louise Lawler, employed photography and image appropriation methods to confront patriarchal and capitalist concepts of artistic originality, authenticity, and authorship in an era inundated with images. A significant portion of Levine's work is directly appropriated from well-known modernist pieces by artists including Walker Evans, Edgar Degas, Marcel Duchamp, and Constantin Brâncuși.

Levine's works are housed in various public institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Colby College Museum of Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.