To My Little Sister: For Cindy Sherman and Untitled #96

This is one of my favorite essays that I wrote while at the College of Wooster. It was the final essay for a course dedicated to the hisotry of the self portrait, and by this point I had already studied and fallen in love with the work of Cindy Sherman. During the course I was exposed to the work of Yasumasa Morimura, and I knew immediately that I wanted to do a deep dive into the connections between the two artists.

For the paper, I compared Yasumasa Morimura’s To My Little Sister: For Cindy Sherman with Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #96, examining how both artists use self-portraiture to question gender, identity, and representation. I argued that Morimura’s work goes beyond imitation—by inserting his own likeness into Western art traditions, he transforms absence into presence and humor into critique, creating a new framework for understanding the “modern” self-portrait.