Christine Osinski

(Chicago, Illinois, 1948 - )

American

Christine Osinski was born in 1948 and grew up in brick bungalow in a working class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. She describes the environment as harsh and tough and recalls that most of her uncles worked in the same factory. Osinski went on to earn a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1971 and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 1974. The artist came to focus on photography late in her time at SAIC, having first studied painting, drawing, and printmaking. She describes a lecture given by Walker Evans, a visit by Robert Frank, and a history of photography class taught by Hugh Edwards (the Art Institute’s photography curator) as three events that pointed her towards camera work. While at Yale, she encountered Evans yet again, along with Robert Heinecken, Philip Guston, Emmet Gowin, and Michael Lesy. Osinski describes herself as generally shy and self-effacing, but she found that with a camera she could be more adventurous. In her own words, “The camera became a transition object for me—a way to navigate the world.” After completing her studies Osinski lived in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania for a short time before moving to New York City, and she has continued to live in or around New York since then. After teaching at the Pratt Institute, she began working at The Cooper Union in the early 1980s and remained a photographer and professor in its School of Art for over 30 years. In 2005, Osinski became a Guggenheim Fellow and she received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation inaugural photography grant in 2015. Her work has also received support from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Graham Foundation and Lightwork among other grants.

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