Catherine Opie: ‘All people have the right to exist’

By Fiona Sinclair Scott, CNN

London (CNN) — In Trump’s America, the question of what art is shown in national galleries and museums is a potent one, and Catherine Opie believes she knows when she’s not welcome.

“There’s absolutely no way the Smithsonian will show me right now,” she says while overseeing the final installation of her highly anticipated new exhibition in London, at the UK’s National Portrait Gallery. It would be reasonable to assume a show like this, which displays photos of American people from the ’90s to now, might eventually make its way to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC but no, she says. “Absolutely not.”

Opie, one of America’s foremost photographers, has turned her lens on a wide range of subjects from Elton John to high school football players, and her own friends and family. A lot of her work challenges gender stereotypes and shines light on marginalized, queer-identifying people, through formally staged portraiture akin to paintings by Renaissance masters like Hans Holbein the Younger, who she often references.

She started making art during a complicated time in the US, amid the culture wars of the ’90s and the latter years of the AIDS crisis. But 2026 is no less complicated, in Opie’s eyes. “What we’re seeing right now is literally the worst of the worst, and I couldn’t have imagined this. I couldn’t have written this. This is a terrible dystopic novel,” she says, drawing stark contrasts between the optimism she felt during Barack Obama’s presidency versus today.

She may not have been able to imagine it, but notes that she’s certainly been a witness to critical preceding events across the political spectrum. Beyond staged portraiture, Opie documents life outside her studio – she’s photographed conservative Tea Party rallies, Obama’s presidential inauguration, Boy Scout jamborees and women’s marches.

She’s also turned the camera on herself. Three self-portraits are some of her most recognized works: “Self-Portrait/Cutting” (1993) shows Opie, back turned, with a childlike scene of a house and two figures holding hands cut into her. “Self-Portrait/Pervert” (1994) shows Opie in a leather gimp mask, needles piercing her arms and this time with the word “pervert” etched into her bare chest. Ten years later, she photographed herself in “Self-Portrait/Nursing” while feeding her infant son. Traces of “pervert” are still visible as a scar. (When her son would start to ask her what the letters mean, she’d tell him they say “perfect.”)

The ability of a single image to evoke feelings of hope and acceptance in some viewers while unsettling others is a fascinating reality of our culture and one Opie is unbothered by. “So guess what, I’m a disrupter,” she says when asked the question while standing in front of a series of portraits of women wearing cheap store-bought mustaches, staring down the camera with looks that might make the male gaze go weak at the knees. “Men don’t like to be toyed with, apparently,” she laughs.

Opie addresses the topic of masculinity in many ways throughout her work – she subverts it, performs it and celebrates it (there’s a particularly beautiful photo of her newborn grandson being cradled by his father in the show), and she’s not done with it yet. She hints at a new project about cowboy culture. She has questions for these men she calls the “Taylor Sheridans” of the world, referring to the creator of popular show “Yellowstone.”

“I invite him to sit and I would love to talk about masculinity with him in terms of representation,” she says.

She’s open about her “own problem” with masculinity and how that played out after she gave birth to a baby boy, her son Oliver. “I had such a hard time fitting into the world as a girl,” says Opie, explaining that when she realized she was going to be a mother to a boy her mind went to matchbox cars and light-up dinosaur shoes but, “I actually had a young boy who loved pink and tutus … so it was fascinating that as a lesbian mom, I had to question my own kind of masculinity that I was trying to place on my child, which wasn’t there.”

Before opening the show in London, Opie had been in Germany installing another solo exhibition at the Fridericianum museum in Kassel.

So, how does it feel to be an American artist out in the world right now? Well, she misses her C-SPAN, for one, but she says the experience has been a healing one: “I get to bring a message to the world.” And the message? “All people have the right to exist.”

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“Catherine Opie: To Be Seen,” runs 5 March – 31 May at the National Portrait Gallery in London.