Role Models: Feminine Identity in Contemporary American Photography features the work of two generations of artists whose portraiture, self-portraiture, and narrative photographs have indelibly inflected our understanding of gender and identity over the past 30 years. More specifically, it focuses on how role models and role-playing have been central to the art, meaning, and social function of contemporary photography.

The exhibition begins with the 1980s, a time when many American women artists and photographers realized that they could be both the creator and the subject of their work. Influenced by photographers such as Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander and liberated by the feminist and civil rights movements of the 1970s, these women sought to develop a place for their work within “the big picture” of identity construction.

Some, like Cindy Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems, and Lorna Simpson, were postmodern artists who used external images as cultural mediators of identity in their work. Others, such as Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, and Mary Ellen Mark were documentary photographers who sought to depict the varied roles that girls try on as part of the internal, subjective struggle to find a gendered identity that fits.

Over the past twenty years, of course, their photography became established, and their concerns were recognized as central to the practice of contemporary art and photography. The exhibition also considers how, by the mid-1990s, this first generation had become exemplars for a new cadre of younger women artists. It also will make clear that this new generation, including Anna Gaskell, Justine Kurland, and Nikki S. Lee, have made their own contributions by collapsing the old boundaries between postmodern and documentary photography, establishing new sensibilities that are post-feminist, and evolving more fluid and nuanced concepts of female identity.