Cindy Sherman

mural-sized chromogenic print, mounted, framed, signed, dated, and editioned '4/6' in ink and with Buhl Collection, Guggenheim Museum exhibition, and Metro Pictures labels on the reverse, 1991

Metro Pictures, New York, 1994

New York, Thread Waxing Space, Collection in Context: Selected Contemporary Photographs of Hands from the Collection of Henry M. Buhl, September - October 1996, and 8 other national and international venues through 1999 (see Appendix 1)

New York, Guggenheim Museum, Speaking with Hands: Photographs from The Buhl Collection, June - September 2004, and 4 other international venues through 2007 (see Appendix 1)

Marianne Courville, Collection in Context: Selected Contemporary Photographs of Hands from the Collection of Henry M. Buhl (New York, 1996), pl. 22 (this print)

Jennifer Blessing, Speaking with Hands: Photographs from The Buhl Collection (Guggenheim Foundation, 2004), pp. 160 and 246 (this print)

Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston's Spoleto Festival (New York, 1990), pp. 111 and 113

Although this photograph has not been examined out of its frame, it appears to be in generally excellent condition, with no apparent fading or loss of color. There are 2 scratches to the frame along the right edge.
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The present photograph is from Civil War, Sherman’s series of 6 images commissioned by Spoleto Festival U.S.A. for its 1991 exhibition Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston.  Over the course of a year, twenty-three contemporary artists, including Christian Boltanski, Lorna Simpson, and Cindy Sherman, visited Charleston to study its rich history and cultural past.  The 17 subsequent large-scale installations throughout the city explored Charleston’s relation to slavery, race, religion, and the Civil War, as well as conceptions of the new American South.  Sherman’s mural-sized photographs from this commission were originally hung at the Gibbes Museum of Art.

In this series, Sherman, whose career was built on self-portraiture, steps out of view of the camera, focusing instead on close-ups of artificial body parts.  In her essay for Places with a Past, to which this entry is indebted, Mary Jane Jacob suggests that Sherman was influenced by Ambrose Bierce’s Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) and the Civil War photographs by Timothy O’Sullivan, Mathew Brady, and Alexander Gardner.  Sherman's images from this series are entirely believable representations of the legs, hands, and feet of soldiers fallen on the battlefield.  Outside of the context of the exhibition and the history of the South, however, these haunting images more largely reflect the consequences of any deadly war.