Archive

For much of the 1990s, I made work by handing myself over to others — police sketch artists, courtroom illustrators, magazine writers, art students, a Barbie coloring-book illustrator — each rendering me through the conventions of their trade. My identity became something built from the outside, beyond my control. In the work that followed, I turned that attention outward — toward the women, myths, and social worlds around me.

"Proof that identity is not fixed, that one's persona and possibly even one's self are malleable and fluid, capable of continual adjustment."
— Roberta Smith, The New York Times, 1994