Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine (born 1947) is an American conceptual artist best known for her photography and sculpture based on the appropriation of existing works. Although she is described as a painter, photographer and conceptual artist, her name is associated with the current that, from the late 1970s, questioned authorship and originality.

Born in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, she grew up mainly in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri. Her interest in art was awakened at the age of eight, when her mother took her to the St. Louis Art Museum; her mother also took her regularly to art films. She studied at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, earning a bachelor's degree in 1969 and an M.F.A. in 1973, and moved to New York City in 1975.

Her best-known work, After Walker Evans, shown in 1981 at Metro Pictures gallery, consists of photographs of Evans's images rephotographed from an exhibition catalogue and presented as her own. The series led to a copyright dispute and ended up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Levine also remade works by Marcel Duchamp and Constantin Brancusi, such as her bronze Fountain of 1991, and took part in the 1977 exhibition Pictures, which gave rise to the term "Pictures Generation".

Her legacy lies in showing how copying and reinterpretation can challenge the idea of the original, and her work is linked to the theoretical feminism of the 1980s.