Curriculum

In the early 1990s, the British artist Gillian Wearing stopped passersby in South London, asked them to jot down what was on their minds on a large sheet of paper, and then snapped a photograph. “I’m desperate,” a young, well-dressed man wrote. Winner of the Turner Prize in 1997, Wearing, by eliciting confessions from her subjects in her early photographs and videos, anticipated the rise of reality television. In self-portraits made since 2008, she gestures to the masters of portraiture, posing in uncanny, custom-made masks as Diane Arbus, Claude Cahun, and August Sander, the