Cindy Sherman is an American artist and photographer known for creating powerful portraits where she transforms herself into different characters. Her work explores themes of identity, gender, and how society shapes the roles people play.

Her most famous series, Untitled Film Stills, features her posing as women from old Hollywood-style movies, highlighting familiar but stereotypical female roles. Later, her work became darker and more surreal, using props, mannequins, and strange costumes to explore themes like beauty, aging, and human fragility.

Sherman is considered one of the most important artists of her time, with her work displayed in major museums worldwide. Her art challenges us to think about who we are and how much of our identity is shaped by outside forces.

Cindy Sherman’s art challenges the way we think about femininity and masculinity by showing that gender roles are like costumes we put on, not fixed parts of who we are.

Femininity

• Questioning Stereotypes: In her famous Untitled Film Stills, she dresses as characters like housewives, movie stars, and “damsels in distress” — roles often seen in old films. By doing this, she highlights how society expects women to fit into certain “types.”
• Challenging Beauty Standards: Later, her work features creepy, aging, or distorted figures, forcing us to question society’s obsession with youth, beauty, and perfection in women.
• Exposing Society’s Gaze: Her work makes us think about how women are often seen as objects to be looked at, especially in media. By controlling how she’s seen, Sherman flips this power dynamic.

Masculinity

• Power and Control: While she focuses more on femininity, Sherman also critiques masculinity. Some of her later works feature clownish, exaggerated “masculine” figures that highlight how fragile and performative power can be.
• Gender as Performance: By using wigs, makeup, and costumes to switch between “male” and “female” roles, she shows that masculinity, like femininity, is just another role people play.

This is a piece that is part of her collection

“This is how I look I guess”

Sherman’s work reveals that gender roles aren’t natural they’re performances shaped by media and culture, this shows especially within this piece. Her art encourages us to think about how much of our identity is real and how much is something we’ve been taught to “act out.”

In this piece she shows very few distinctive feminine aspects and masculine aspects, a very obvious feminine aspect which you can see is her big lips with lipstick on, this is linked primarily to females.

The pieces within the collection all have a creepy look to them, it is people with aged and wrinkly skin with photos of overly feminine lips and different eyes placed over the original photo.

This whole collection is about Cindy Sherman reclaiming her self image, social media encourages people to show flawless and perfect versions of themselves, Sherman takes control in her own way. Her weird, distorted self-portraits fight back against beauty standards, showing that self-expression doesn’t have to be done in a certain way and to society’s standards.