Cindy Sherman - Photographs from the Martin Z. Margulies Foundation New York Thursday, April 4, 2024 | Phillips

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  • In 1976, as a recent graduate of Buffalo State College, Cindy Sherman received a commission to produce an art installation that would be displayed on the city’s public buses. At this early stage in her career, Sherman had already produced a fascinating body of work that explored identity and gender through the medium of self-portraiture. The bus project allowed her to extend these explorations, and to do so in a public venue that would be seen by a wider audience than she had previously enjoyed.   

     

    A consummate planner, Sherman mapped out how she would approach the project, conceptualizing imagery, producing sketches, and assembling props and costumes before photographing. The photographs were to be displayed in the space typically reserved for advertisements running the 24-foot length of the bus’s interior, at eye level with standing passengers. This long linear exhibition space implied a narrative flow which Sherman both exploited and resisted as she created the cast of characters she would embody. In a nice bit of post-modern interpolation, she took bus riders themselves as her subject matter, so that passengers would be faced with representations of themselves as they rode the bus.  

    “I was trying to make it seem like you were watching both sides of the bus, as if the bus was transparent and you could only see the passengers.”
    —Cindy Sherman

    Much of Sherman’s work during this period involved intensive post-production manipulation of her camera images. The story panels in Murder Mystery (1976), for example, consisted of meticulously trimmed and collaged photographs; her characters and settings were all culled from separate images that came together as a whole. In contrast, Bus Riders shows Sherman working closer to what would become her mature style in which the emphasis is on full conceptualization in front of the camera.  

     

    Sherman’s preliminary sketch for Bus Riders, 1976

    Sherman’s preliminary sketch for Bus Riders shows her formulation of a very large cast of characters; when she realized this was more than would fit in the space allowed to her, she trimmed the cast down to around 30. Working with a full arsenal of costumes, wigs, makeup, and props, against the plain background of her studio, Sherman inhabited each character before her camera. Some are seated, others stand and grip the (invisible) handholds. The figures portray a full array of types, genders, and ages. As always with Sherman’s work, her immersion into these characters is complete. Each of Sherman’s bus riders is a nuanced portrayal of an individual.  

     

    Sherman’s Bus Riders debuted in October of 1976. One side of the bus showed the full panoramic scope of Bus Riders, and the other side featured work by photographer Ellen Carey. The project was an unlikely collaboration between the artist collective CEPA Gallery (Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts) and the Niagara Frontier Transit Authority, and when the exhibition ‘opened’ on Metro Bus 535 it received coverage in the Buffalo Evening News. Although Bus Riders was conceived and executed at the beginning of her artistic career, the themes that Sherman would continue to explore in subsequent decades are present within it, and the series is seminal in every respect.

     

    Bus Riders on exhibition on Metro Bus 535, October 1976, Ellen Carey (left) and Cindy Sherman (right), Buffalo Evening News, 4 November 1976

     

    • Provenance

      Metro Pictures, New York

    • Exhibited

      Through You: Photography Selections from the Martin Z. Margulies Collection, Charles Addams Fine Arts Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 4 September – 24 October 2008 (select images)

    • Literature

      Schor, Cindy Sherman: The Early Works 1975-1977, a Catalogue Raisonné, Cat. rais. 50.1-15, pp. 226, 228-237, and cover
      The Museum of Modern Art, Cindy Sherman, fig. 3
      University of Pennsylvania, Through You: Photography Selections from the Martin Z. Margulies Collection, exhibition catalogue, p. 13 (select images)

    • Artist Biography

      Cindy Sherman

      American • 1954

      Seminal to the Pictures Generation as well as contemporary photography and performance art, Cindy Sherman is a powerhouse art practitioner.  Wily and beguiling, Sherman's signature mode of art making involves transforming herself into a litany of characters, historical and fictional, that cross the lines of gender and culture. She startled contemporary art when, in 1977, she published a series of untitled film stills.

      Through mise-en-scène​ and movie-like make-up and costume, Sherman treats each photograph as a portrait, though never one of herself. She embodies her characters even if only for the image itself. Presenting subversion through mimicry, against tableaus of mass media and image-based messages of pop culture, Sherman takes on both art history and the art world.

      Though a shape-shifter, Sherman has become an art world celebrity in her own right. The subject of solo retrospectives across the world, including a blockbuster showing at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and a frequent exhibitor at the Venice Biennale among other biennials, Sherman holds an inextricable place in contemporary art history.

      View More Works

46

Untitled (Bus Riders I)

1976
A sequence of 15 gelatin silver prints, printed 2000.
Each 7 3/8 x 5 in. (18.7 x 12.7 cm)
Each signed, dated, and numbered 16/20 in pencil on the verso.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$150,000 - 250,000 

Sold for $190,500

Contact Specialist

Caroline Deck
Senior Specialist, Photographs
cdeck@phillips.com

Vanessa Hallett
Worldwide Head of Photographs and Chairwoman, Americas
vhallett@phillips.com

Photographs from the Martin Z. Margulies Foundation

New York Auction 4 April 2024