The Coming of Age: Cindy Sherman, Feminism, and Art History (2014)

In the final essay in the book, Solomon-Godeau tracks the diminishment of feminist approaches to Cindy Sherman’s photographic work. Since the late 1990s, Sherman has focused on three aspects of aging as it relates to a major artist whose work has been centrally concerned with the imagery of femininity, fetishism, and the problem of sexual difference. Thus, the aging of feminism, the aging of the artist herself, and the image of aging women that Sherman produced in two different series are all considered as they inform her work. In this essay, Solomon-Godeau focuses on this later work to argue that the “problem” of the (white, middle-class) woman’s aging can be treated as a political issue for artmaking (as in the theoretically informed work of Mary Kelly) or, alternatively, in the case of a brilliantly intuitive artist such as Sherman, risk the reduction of the subject to parody or social satire.