CATHERINE OPIE

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Catherine Opie: Figure and Landscape, featuring recent work by the internationally renowned and LA-based photographer Catherine Opie. On view July 25 through October 17, the show’s primary focus is high-school football, a subject that allowed Opie to explore issues of masculinity, community, and national identity.

Keenly aware of art-historical standards and contemporary political attitudes, she purposefully creates photographs that function as objective records and subjective interpretations. Shown in conjunction with LACMA’s exhibition Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins, Opie’s work similarly addresses conventions of idealism and realism in the depiction of male athletes. Like photography itself, sports are associated with decisive moments. Even so, Opie finds moments of stasis: on the football field between plays or after practice, in the calm ocean between waves—all the while capturing the athletes’ capacity for complete absorption and heightened physical and mental awareness.

THOMAS EAKINS
       
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins, on view from July 25 to October 17, 2010. The exhibition celebrates the museum’s acquisition of Eakins’s last great sporting painting, Wrestlers (1899)—one of the single most important American paintings acquired in the history of LACMA. Featuring around 60 oil paintings, drawings, watercolors, photographs, and sculpture by the great American master, the exhibition will serve as a rare opportunity to examine for the first time the entire range of sporting images by this iconic American artist.

Thomas Eakins, 'Wrestlers,' 1899,
Gift of Cecile C. Bartman and The Cecile and Fred Bartman Foundation
Photo © 2010 Museum Associates/LACMA