Sherrie Levine (born 1947) is an American photographer, painter, and conceptual artist. Some of her work consists of exact photographic reproductions of the work of other photographers such as Walker Evans, Eliot Porter and Edward Weston. Early life and education Sherrie Levine was born in Hazleton, Pennsylvania in 1947. The Midwest, however, shaped her identity, as she spent most of her childhood and adolescence in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri. Levine recalled her mother—who enjoyed painting—sparking her interest in art at eight years old, as she would take Levine to the St. Louis Art Museum. Levine's mother would also take her to see art house films on a regular basis, which later influenced her work. After graduating high school in 1965, she spent eight years in Wisconsin, received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1969. In 1973, she earned her M.F.A. from the same institution. After working odd jobs in commercial art and teaching, Levine then moved to New York City in 1975 to pursue her art career. Work Artworks Much of Levine's work is explicitly appropriated from recognizable modernist artworks by artists such as Walker Evans, Edgar Degas, Marcel Duchamp, and Constantin Brâncuși. Appropriation art gained notoriety in the late 1970s, although it can be traced to early modernist works, specifically those using collage. Other appropriation artists such as Louise Lawler, Vikky Alexander, Barbara Kruger, and Mike Bidlo came into prominence in New York’s East Village in the 1980s. The importance of appropriation art in contemporary culture lies in its ability to fuse broad cultural images as a whole and direct them towards narrower contexts of interpretation. When coming under criticism with her appropriated works, most notably, Walker Evans' depression-era images, the role of appropriation within Levine's work also helped her to link the 'rarefied art object' and 'mass-produced' works to the extent that she perceived her appropriated works to be 'no less products of mass culture than the images of Elvis or Liz Taylor appropriated and reproduced by Andy Warhol.' In 1977, Levine participated in the exhibition Pictures at Artists Space in New York, curated by Douglas Crimp. Other artists in the exhibition included Robert Longo, Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, and Philip Smith. Crimp's term, "Pictures Generation," was later used to describe the generation of artists in the late 1970s and early 1980s who were moving away from minimalism and towards picture-making. Levine