Cindy Sherman at the Walker

Well, I am up in Minneapolis shooting this week, so I thought I should make a trip to the Walker while I’m here . I try to make it a point to meet with curators when I travel, but I haven’t met with anyone there in quite a while, as I didn’t think I had enough new work that I was happy with. But, since I felt I had some work that I really liked and that I (personally) thought was strong and since my second round of candidacy is coming up for which I could use the extra practice talking about the work (not to mention hearing some new ideas), I figured now was as good a time as ever for a meeting.

Meeting in the Print Study room

I contacted the curator there with whom I’ve met with several times (and who was responsible for buying my work some years back) and made an appointment. The meeting was absolutely fantastic and really reassured me of what I was doing. Having a curator tell you that you are “doing everything right” and that she “wants to see more” in a few months is great. It’s nice to have someone who’s seeing your work for the first time be really excited by it.

Cindy Sherman at the Walker

The other reason for my coming to the Walker was the Cindy Sherman retrospective. It showed at MoMA a while back, and now it is at the Walker. If I didn’t see it now, I was never going to. And while I am not always a fan of Sherman’s work, I felt it was something I should see.

This is the size I have been thinking about for my own work. It was nice to see it in person.

The show was actually quite good. The scale of the later work was what I really fell in love with. The curator had told me I would love it while we were looking at my work, and she was right. I knew that the “film stills” were quite small, but I had never realized how large Sherman’s later prints were. And even though they are massive, I felt that they dominated the wall in a way they should, in a way that the “film stills” don’t always. (Although they did a good job massing the smaller “film stills” together instead of spreading them out, which helped to make them more of a single piece of work rather than a number of separate pieces.)

All-in-all, it was a really nice visit. As a bonus, the shop had an after-Christmas sale on some books. Score!