Catherine Wagner (born January 31, 1953) is an American photographer, professor and conceptual artist. Wagner has created large-scale, site-specific public artworks for the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, and Kyoto, Japan. Her work is represented in major national and international collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Wagner's process involves the investigation of what art critic David Bonetti called "the systems people create, our love of order, our ambition to shape the world, the value we place on knowledge, and the tokens we display to express ourselves." In addition to being a practicing artist, Wagner has been a professor of art at Mills College in Oakland, California, since 1979. She received the Rome Prize in 2013, a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and the Ferguson Award.
Early career
Wagner began her photographic career with Early California Landscapes, photographs of the rapid development of California in the mid-seventies. Mark Johnstone sees in this work "a purity of line, form and shape, [that] are exercised with great clarity, and exemplify her long standing fascination with the materials of architecture." In her departure from the tradition of landscape photography and an imbued interest in constructed, gritty, urban, and even architectural environments rather than natural or sublime environs, Wagner's early works relate to those of the New Topographers (several photographers participating in a 1975 show entitled New Topographics), rather than photographers of the American West such as Ansel Adams, Carleton Watkins, and Timothy H. O'Sullivan.
Wagner has similarly dealt with built environments from the classroom to the theme park in projects including: Moscone Center (1978), American Classroom (1986), Home and Other Stories (1992), Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance (1995), and New Orleans World Exposition (1984–85).
For Home and Other Stories, Wagner photographed the people's home interiors, cataloging individual domestic spaces—refrigerator shelves, bedrooms, foyers, and laundry rooms—without the homeowner in frame. Each home was presented as a photographic triptych. The images display evidence of the occupant's identity from the perspective of an outsider. The series was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1993.
Mid-career
Art & Science: Investigating Matter examined both the laboratories in which scientific research takes place and the materials and instruments native to these environments, such as fruit flies, chemicals, beakers, test tubes, and flasks. The typology of twelve photographs of freezers, -86 Degree Freezer (12 Areas of Concern and Crisis), portrays the isolated subjects of critical scientific research in human health.
Art & Science: Investigating Matter was followed by a series of projects creating parallels between cultural and subjective frameworks of research and the humanities: Museum Pieces (1999), Cross Sections (2001), and Trilogy: Reflections on Frankenstein, the Arctic Circle, and the History of Science (2003). In these works, Wagner photographs the tools and materials used in museums and galleries in a manner that parallels the precision in the scientific study of objects.
In 2001, Wagner further explored the impact of science on culture and notions of artistic accountability. Cross Sections employed the use of medical imaging devices such as the MRI and the scanning electron microscope to photograph familiar organic materials such as corncobs, pumpkins, and shark teeth. Wagner expanded upon this project to create an installation, Pomegranate Wall, consisting of ten 4 by 8 foot light boxes of duplicated MRI scans of pomegranates, and the permanent public art piece at the University of California, San Francisco, Cell Wall II.
In A Narrative History of the Lightbulb, Wagner arranges her lightbulb subjects in a fabrication created for the sole purpose of photographing. This process "borrows from the rich history of the still life with a keen eye toward Giorgio Morandi, utilizing similar strategies of grouping familiar objects in beautiful, compelling installations." Lightbulbs are arranged by color in Ode to Yves and Green Energy; by technological advancement in Early Tungsten and Carbon Filaments 1900–1910; and by era in The Lamps of 1900 and The 1890s.