Carrie Mae Weems (born April 20, 1953) is an American artist working in text, fabric, audio, digital images and installation video, and is best known for her photography. She achieved prominence through her early 1990s photographic project The Kitchen Table Series. Her films, photographs and videos are focused on serious issues facing African Americans, such as racism, sexism and personal identity.
She once said, “Let me say that my primary concern in art, as in politics, is with the status and place of Afro-Americans in the country.” More recently however, she expressed that “Black experience is not really the main point; rather, complex, dimensional, human experience and social inclusion … is the real point. “ She continues to produce art that provides social commentary on the experiences of people of color, especially black women, in America.
Weems was one of six curators who selected Artistic Licence: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for 2019/20.
Weems is Syracuse University’s Artist in Residence. She lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn and Syracuse, New York with her husband Jeffrey Hoone.
Table of Contents
- 1 Biography
- 1.1 Early life and education (1953-1980)
- 1.2 1980-2000
- 1.3 2000-present
- 1.4 Carrie Mae Weems (October Files)
- 1.5 Carrie Mae Weems: Strategies of Engagement
- 1.6 Carrie Mae Weems: Speaking of Art
- 1.7 Carrie Mae Weems: Recent Work, 1992-1998
- 1.8 Carrie Mae Weems: Kitchen Table Series
- 1.9 Carrie Mae Weems: Social Studies
- 1.10 Carrie Mae Weems: The Usual Suspects
- 1.11 Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video (Guggenheim Museum, New York: Exhibition Catalogues)
- 1.12 In Real Life: Six Women Photographers
- 1.13 To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes
Biography
Early life and education (1953-1980)
Weems was born in Portland, Oregon in 1953, the second of seven children to Carrie Polk and Myrlie Weems. She began participating in dance and street theater in 1965. At the age of 16, she gave birth to her first and only child, a daughter named Faith C. Weems.
Later that year (1970), she moved out of her parents’ home and soon relocated to San Francisco to study modern dance with Anna Halprin at a workshop Halprin had started with several other dancers, as well as the artists John Cage and Robert Morris. Weems recalled, “I started dancing with the famous and extraordinary Anna Halprin. I was in Anna’s company for I suppose, maybe a year or two…experimenting with very deep parts of dance and ideas about dance. Anna was very interested in ideas about peace, using dance as an avenue for multicultural expression. I wasn’t so much interested in dance. I had a really, I think, deep sense of my body from a very early age.” Thirty years later in 2008, Weems circled back to dance in her project Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment, at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, noting “I’m just beginning this project of looking at blues and flamenco, and ideas about dance and movement. “
She chose to continue her arts education and attended the California Institute of the Arts Valencia. She graduated at the age of 28, with a B.A. She earned her MFA at the University of California in San Diego. Weems also participated in the folklore graduate program at the University of California, Berkeley.
While in her early twenties, Weems was politically active in the labor movement as a union organizer. Her first camera, which she received as a birthday gift, was used for this work before being used for artistic purposes. After seeing The Black Photography Annual (a collection of images from African-American photographers such as Shawn Walker and Adger Cowans), she was inspired to take up photography. She was then able to travel to New York City, Harlem and to the Studio Museum, where she met other artists and photographers like Coreen Simpson, Frank Stewart and Ming Smith, and formed a community. Weems attended a class in photography at the Museum with Dawoud Begy in 1976. She returned to San Francisco, but lived bi-coastally and was invited by Janet Henry to teach at the Studio Museum and a community of photographers in New York.
1980-2000
Weems’ first collection of photos, text, and spoken words was Family Pictures and Stories. It was completed in 1983. The images told the story of her family, and she has said that in this project she was trying to explore the movement of black families out of the South and into the North, using her family as a model for the larger theme. Her next series, called Ain’t Jokin‘, was completed in 1988. It was about racial jokes, and internalized racism. Another series called American Icons, completed in 1989, also focused on racism. Weems has said that throughout the 1980s she was turning away from the documentary photography genre, instead “creating representations that appeared to be documents but were in fact staged” and also “incorporating text, using multiples images, diptychs and triptychs, and constructing narratives.” Sexism was the next focal point for her. It was the topic of one of her most well known collections called The Kitchen Table series which was completed over a two-year period (1989 to 1990), and has Weems cast as the central character in the photographs. About Kitchen Table and Family Pictures and Stories, Weems has said: “I use my own constructed image as a vehicle for questioning ideas about the role of tradition, the nature of family, monogamy, polygamy, relationships between men and women, between women and their children, and between women and other women–underscoring the critical problems and the possible resolves.” She expressed concern at the lack of images of black people, especially black women, in popular media. Her goal is to show these subjects through her art and to share their experiences. These photos created space for black female artists to create new art. Weems also spoke out about the inspirations and themes in her entire work.
2000-present
Weems continues to remain active in the art world with her recent photographic project such as Louisiana Project (2003), Roaming (2006), Museums (2006), Constructing History (2008), African Jewels (2009), Mandingo (2010), Slow Fade to Black (2010), Equivalents (2012), Blue Notes (2014-2015) and the expanded bodies of works including installation, mixed media, and video project. Her recent project, Grace Notes: Reflections for Now, is a multimedia performance that explores “the role of grace in the pursuit of democracy.” The recent work Slow Face to Black (2010) examines the loss of image and memory among African American female entertainers. It plays on the notion of cinematic fade. The freeze frame of a camera lens makes it impossible for us to tell whether or not those images are fading in or fading outs. The series of photos features a number of prominent female African American artist from the last century such as Marian Anderson and Billie Holiday that faded out of our collective memory. The blurred images of the artists serves as metaphor of the on-going struggle for African American entertainers to remain visible and relevant. For the season 2020/2021 at the Vienna State Opera Weems designed the large-scale picture (176 sqm) Queen B (Mary J. Blige) as part of the exhibition series Safety Curtain, conceived by museum in progress.
Last update 2021-08-06