Cleopatra with a Snake and a Cigarette

I like how this image of me as “Cleopatra with a Snake and a Cigarette” portrays her/ me as a sexy, strong bad ass woman in control of her own destiny and death. I am Boulder, Colorado conceptual artist Sherry Wiggins. I made this performative photograph with my creative partner, Portuguese photographer Luís Filipe Branco, in 2023. Luís and I have been working together on performative photographs with me as the subject since 2015. Our work questions stereotypical constructs of the aging (and invisible) older woman with our portrayals of me as a funny, complicated and unrelenting female matriarch and sometimes femme-fatale. Our Cleopatra portrait is part of the ongoing HEROINES project. For this project I select significant women from biblical, classical, literary and historic sources to study and portray. I do intensive research on these heroines such as: Eve, Salome, Helen of Troy, Sappho, the goddess Aphrodite, Cleopatra and other ancient female figures. I then embody these heroines in my somewhere-in-my-sixties-form and Luís Branco takes photographs of me. Our staged photographs purposely reinterpret the fictions, histories and the misogynist viewpoints that have been imprinted on these women. You can see other works from the HEROINES series on my website: sherrywiggins.com and on Instagram @sherrywigginsart.