SJMA acquires major Catherine Opie photograph

July 14, 2010 by San Jose Museum...

The San Jose Museum of Art recently acquired a major photograph by Catherine Opie, a gift of the Lipman Family Foundation.  Melissa & Lake, Durham, North Carolina is from the “Domestic” series, which Opie produced while traveling for two months across the country in her motor home. Opie captured lesbian couples engaged in commonplace activities—sitting around the kitchen table or lounging in the backyard pool. Many scenes evoke art-historical precedents such as seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings of young men and women engaged in courting rituals. Opie straddles a fine line between the ordinariness and the “otherness” of her subjects. She resists a voyeuristic approach and instead focuses on the psychological tensions and complex nature of intimacy and domestic partnership.