Since the late 1980s Catherine Opie has been documenting the people and geographies that make up the United States. On the Road with Catherine Opie functions as a survey of the artist’s career, highlighting the many times she has taken to the road to record transformational historical and political moments. This online presentation accompanies Opie’s exhibition Rhetorical Landscapes, on view at Lehmann Maupin in New York through September 26.
Today, amidst the global pandemic, the nation’s devastating rise in unemployment, the Black Lives Matter movement and public uprisings against police violence, and the lead up to the critical 2020 United States presidential election, Opie has once again embarked on a road trip―this time across the country in a newly purchased RV―to document the people, places, and landmarks that have become the visual markers of the country’s upheaval. Along the way, she is recording a series of videologues, offering an inside look into the preparatory side of her practice as well as a deeply personal account of her experience driving cross-country and bearing witness to this moment in time.