Cleopatra at Café I, II, III

 You are looking at the series of three photographs titled Cleopatra at the Cafe. I am the woman in the images portraying Cleopatra. I am Boulder, Colorado conceptual artist Sherry Wiggins. I made these images with my creative partner, Portuguese photographer Luis Branco, in a cafe in Portugal in 2023. I imagined myself as a world wary Cleopatra having a beer and a cigarette. Luis captured these images as customers came and went from the cafe.

Luis and I have been working together on performative photographs always with me as a subject since 2015. These Cleopatra portraits are part of our ongoing heroines project. I select significant women from biblical, classical literary, and historic sources to study and portray. I do intensive research on these ancient female figures such as Eve, Helen of Troy, the Goddess Aphrodite, Cleopatra, Mary Magdalene, and other iconic women. I then embodied these heroines in my, somewhere in my sixties form, and Luis Branco takes photographs of me. Our stage photographs purposely reinterpret the fictions, the histories, and the misogynist viewpoints that have been imprinted on these women.

You can see other works from the heroin series on my website, sherrywiggins.com, and on Instagram at Sherry Wiggins Art.