Catherine Opie Enters the Culture Wars Once More

The images in Catherine Opie’s breakthrough series Being and Having (1991) were radical. The photographer shot her crew of Los Angeles lesbians wearing fake mustaches from the Hollywood Wig Store as they took on their masc personas from her living room studio, framed in the style of Dutch Masters. Viewers were not accustomed to seeing this community in a formal, regal light, but Opie always operated in her own lane. Two years later, “Self-Portrait/Cutting” (1993) saw the artist photographed from behind, a childlike sketch of a partner and happy home carved into her bleeding back. Then, a friend carved the word “Pervert” in swirling, formal letters on her chest, and Opie sat for “Self-Portrait/Pervert” (1994) wearing a gimp mask and posing in front of a gold brocade background. These works are probably Opie’s most famous. Now, thirty-some years later, they are more salient than ever. “AIDS research, LGBTQ rights, and so on are at risk with our current administration,” says Opie’s gallerist, Shaun Caley Regen, the founder and owner of Regen Projects. “Cathy’s work ensures these communities remain visible and represented. She hasn’t wavered.”

Regen describes even Opie’s most out-there work as “entirely relatable.” They’re also very much part of the art history canon—evidenced by the artist’s 2008 Guggenheim mid career retrospective but also the five major solo shows she’s opening this year. “You don’t ever think as an artist that the real conversation you’re having within your own work will be placed in a museum’s walls,” Opie tells W over Zoom from L.A. “I feel amazed that I’m trusted in this way—to come up with these conversations and know that I’m not doing it out of just easy ways to analyze the history of art. I’m looking for ideas of what longing in history really does to us as human beings.”

Opie is speaking about To Be Seen, which ran at the National Portrait Gallery this spring and opened August 8 at the Royal Scottish Academy. In both shows, Opie’s early photographs sit alongside tender images of high school football players, queer families in their homes, surfers between sets, and British artists, all in conversation with works in the gallery’s respective permanent collections. “The National Portrait Gallery show was a way to talk about the history of portraiture,” Opie adds. “The basic joke among my friends was in the gift shop. They were like, ‘Oh my God, Opie, I’ve made it. I’m a refrigerator magnet.’”

Alongside the two British retrospectives, Opie showed The Pause That Dreams Against Erasure, an ambitious site-specific installation that spans 30 years of LBGTQ portraiture, at Documenta in Kassel, Germany earlier this summer. The exhibition Holding Blue at Regen Projects Los Angeles presented new photographs and sculptures of Norwegian mountains during the “blue hour.” (A group show at David Zwirner also featured Opie alongside other Los Angeles artists this summer.) Finally, PoMo in Trondheim, Norway presents Mountains Don’t Know Their Names, a solo show taken from the same three-week excursion to the fjords, mountain ranges, and isolated winter environments of Norway as Holding Blue that includes photographs and 30 ceramic mountain sculptures.

Caley Regen recalls meeting Opie in 1993 at the suggestion of curator and critic Ralph Rugoff, “She was living in Koreatown in an apartment building she called the Casa de Estrogen,” says the gallerist. “She had very short hair and many piercings. Her studio was her living room, and she showed me her portfolio of her queer portraits on brightly colored backgrounds from an Ilford box. I was immediately struck by her drive and clarity.” The two became fast friends.

For Opie, what began as a way to capture her life and connect to people she was shy to approach became a lifelong language. “I was this baby butch with short hair and glasses in Southern California surfer culture” she recalls. “Are you kidding me? But it was all good. The camera has been my way of writing.” Opie’s new work—the sublime portraits of Norway’s Arctic mountains bathed in blue light—is the beginning of a larger investigation that uses nature as proxy for larger theoretical questions and yearnings in an era of climate change and rising fascism. “I’ve been a really hardcore professor for 32 years,” she says. “So when I retired two years ago, the first road trip was to Norway. Mountains became the focus because I’m interested in how nature participates and stands into our species for larger thoughts about the way we try to be connected in the world. Can’t a mountain be as important as a person right now? How do we mourn for an earth that is disappearing?”

Alongside these images, Opie has also been taking large-format images of trees on her land and developing a film on the lesbian cowboy, works that abstractly connect to the role of lesbians as caretakers during the AIDS epidemic; questions around belief, power, and gender; and what our relationship to nature does to how we see the world. “There are a lot of questions I have to answer, and I have to answer them by 2028. That’s when I want the body of work finished,” Opie says. “I feel fortunate that I got to go through the culture wars and come out the other end and get to go back in the culture wars again. I think artists are scared, and I think some don’t give a fuck, and they’re going to keep pushing the envelope. I’m just going to keep trying to make every idea that I have.”

To Be Seen at the Royal Scottish Academy will be on view through November 1, 2026. Mountains Don’t Know Their Names runs through January 3, 2027.