September 2, 2025 — On Wednesday, October 22, 2025, the RISD Museum will welcome acclaimed American photographer Catherine Opie for the 47th Annual Gail Silver Memorial Lecture. The program, titled Catherine Opie: State of Being, will take place at 6:30 p.m. in the RISD Auditorium.
Opie, recognized as one of the most significant voices in contemporary photography, will reflect on her expansive body of work documenting the evolving social, political, and physical landscapes of America. Known for her deeply personal and politically charged imagery, Opie explores themes of identity, community, and belonging through portraits, urban scenes, and domestic spaces. In this talk, she will share how her practice has served as both witness and participant in moments of cultural transformation. From LGBTQ+ communities to American suburbia, her photographs capture the tensions and beauty within contemporary life. Through visual storytelling, Opie invites audiences to consider what it means to exist—and to resist—in a constantly shifting nation.
Born in 1961, Opie lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has been presented in exhibitions at major institutions worldwide, including a mid-career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum. Opie is a professor at UCLA, a former board member at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art Medal. Her enduring impact will be further recognized with a major solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2026.
Opie’s photograph Norma & Eyenga, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1998 is part of the RISD Museum’s permanent collection and was featured in the 2021–2022 exhibition Any distance between us in the Farago Gallery.
About the Gail Silver Memorial Lecture
The Gail Silver Memorial Lecture at the RISD Museum was endowed by Gail Silver’s family after her death to share her love of art and learning with the entire community. An avid traveler and student of art and antiquities, she served as a RISD Museum docent for 12 years, especially enjoying her work with schoolchildren.
Following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Gail used works of art from the Museum's collection to create and present an illustrated lecture highlighting the contributions of Black artists to American art—a groundbreaking effort at the time—which she delivered to regional schools as a volunteer. Later, she earned her MFA from Brown University with a thesis on ancient Greek ceramics. Gail Silver died in 1974 at the age of 59, and her legacy endures through this annual lecture that brings leading voices in art and design to Providence for public engagement and dialogue. Past lecturers include: Patti Smith, Shahzia Sikander, Dale Chihuly, Adrian Piper, Okwui Enwezor, Roz Chast, Jenny Holzer, Nick Cave, Rose B. Simpson, Robert Storr, Dave Hickey, Nicole Eisenman, and Lorna Simpson.