b. 1953, Lansing, Mich.

James Casebere was born in Lansing, Michigan, in 1953. He attended Michigan State University from 1971 to 1973 and received a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1976. In 1977, he attended the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in New York, and in 1979 he received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Like his contemporaries Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons, during this early period Casebere created work that foregrounded the artificial nature of photographic representation: as early as the mid-1970s, he began constructing architectural models out of paper and cardboard and photographing them, yielding tableaux somewhere between believability and obvious fabrication, as in Western Street (1985–86). His subject matter has since evolved to focus on the uncanny qualities of institutional and domestic architecture as well as the systems of power inherent to and perpetuated by the built environment, as in Sing Sing (1992), Asylum (1994), Tall Stack of Beds (1997), Monticello (2001), and Luxor (2007).

Casebere has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego (1990), Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama (1991), Ansel Adams Center for Photography in San Francisco (1996), Museum of Modern Art in Oxford (1999), and Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland (2002). He has also participated in group shows such as Fabricated to be Photographed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1979), Wiener Internationale Biennale (1981), Whitney Biennial (1985), Cross-References: Sculpture into Photography at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (1987), Venice Biennale (1996), Supermodel at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams (2000), Moving Pictures at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2002 and 2003), Constructed Realities at the Orlando Museum of Art (2003), and Extra-Ordinary: The Everyday Object in American Art at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville (2008). He has received numerous awards for his work, including fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (1985, 1989, and 1994), National Endowment for the Arts (1986 and 1990), and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1995). He lives and works in New York.