Carrie Mae Weems | |
---|---|
Born | Portland, Oregon, U.S. | April 20, 1953
Education | California Institute of the Arts (BA) University of California, San Diego (MFA) |
Known for | Photography |
Awards | MacArthur Fellowship (2013), Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2007), Rome Prize Fellowship (2006), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in Photography (2002), Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society (2019), Hasselblad Award 2023. |
Website | www |
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. [1] [2] She achieved prominence through her early 1990s photographic project The Kitchen Table Series. Her photographs, films and videos focus on serious issues facing African Americans today, including racism, sexism, politics 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." [3] More recently, however, she expressed the view that "Black experience is not really the main point; rather, complex, dimensional, human experience and social inclusion ... is the real point." [4] She continues to produce art that provides social commentary on the experiences of people of color, especially black women, in America. [1]
Her talents have been recognized by Harvard University and Wellesley College, with fellowships, artist-in-residence and visiting professor positions. She taught photography at Hampshire College in the late 1980s and shot the "Kitchen Table" series in her home in Western Massachusetts. Weems is one of six artist-curators who made selections for Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2019/20. [5] She is artist in residence at Syracuse University. [6]
Weems was born in Portland, Oregon in 1953, the second of seven children to Carrie Polk and Myrlie Weems. [7] She began participating in dance and street theater in 1965. [1] At the age of 16, she gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Faith C. Weems. [8]
Later that year (1970), she moved out of her parents' home and soon relocated to San Francisco [9] 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. [10] 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 really interested in ideas about peace and using dance as a way to bridge different cultures together as a vehicle for multicultural expression...I wasn't really so interested in dance, I just knew how to dance really well. I had a really, I think, deep sense of my body from a very early age." [9] 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." [9]
She decided to continue her arts schooling and attended the California Institute of the Arts, in the Los Angeles metro, graduating at the age of 28 with a BFA degree. She received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. [11] Weems also participated in the folklore graduate program at the University of California, Berkeley. [12]
While in her early twenties, Weems was politically active in the labor movement as a union organizer. [1] Her first camera, which she received as a birthday gift, [13] was used for this work before being used for artistic purposes. She was inspired to pursue photography after coming across The Black Photographers Annual, a book of images by African-American photographers including Shawn Walker, Beuford Smith, Anthony Barboza, Ming Smith, Adger Cowans and Roy DeCarava. [14] This led her to New York City and the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she began to meet other artists and photographers such as Coreen Simpson and Frank Stewart, and they began to form a community. In 1976, Weems took a photography class at the Museum taught by Dawoud Bey and earned money as an assistant to Anthony Barboza. [15] She returned to San Francisco, but lived bi-coastally and was invited by Janet Henry to teach at the Studio Museum [16] and a community of photographers in New York. [14]
In 1983, Weems completed her first collection of photographs, text and spoken word, called Family Pictures and Stories. [17] 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. [14] Her next series, called Ain't Jokin', was completed in 1988. It focused on 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." [14] 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. [13] [18] [19] 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." [14] She has expressed disbelief and concern about the exclusion of images of the black community, particularly black women, from the popular media, and she aims to represent these excluded subjects and speak to their experience through her work. These photographs created space for other black female artists to further create art. Weems has also reflected on the themes and inspirations of her work as a whole, saying,
... from the very beginning, I've been interested in the idea of power and the consequences of power; relationships are made and articulated through power. Another thing that's interesting about the early work is that even though I've been engaged in the idea of autobiography, other ideas have been more important: the role of narrative, the social levels of humor, the deconstruction of documentary, the construction of history, the use of text, storytelling, performance, and the role of memory have all been more central to my thinking than autobiography. [14]
Weems remains 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. [20] [13] [21] [22] Her recent project, Grace Notes: Reflections for Now, is a multimedia performance that explores "the role of grace in the pursuit of democracy." [23] Her recent work Slow Fade to Black (2010) explores the lost image and memory of African-American female entertainers, including singers, dancers, and actresses, in the twentieth century by playing on the idea 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. [24] The series of photos features a number of prominent female African-American artists from the last century, such as Marian Anderson and Billie Holiday, who faded out of our collective memory. [24] The blurred images of the artists serves as metaphor of the on-going struggle for African-American entertainers to remain visible and relevant. In 2023 Weems became the first black woman to win the Hasselblad Award. [25]
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. [26]
In 2024, Bottega Veneta commissioned Weems to create an ad campaign that starred the rapper A$AP Rocky and his sons. [27]
Weems has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since 2008. [28]
The first comprehensive retrospective of her work opened in September 2012 at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, [13] [39] as a part of the center's exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video. Curated by Katie Delmez, the exhibition ran until January 13, 2013, and later traveled to Portland Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Cantor Center for Visual Arts. The 30-year retrospective exhibition opened in January 2014 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. [13] [40] This was the first time an "African-American woman [was] ever given a solo exhibition" at the Guggenheim. [41] Weems' work returned to the Frist in October 2013 as a part of the center's 30 Americans gallery, alongside black artists ranging from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Kehinde Wiley. [42] In 2021, Weems presented The Shape of Things exhibit at the Park Avenue Armory. [43]
Her first solo exhibition in Germany, shown in 2022 at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, is titled The Evidence of Things Not Seen. [44]
In 2023, the Barbican Centre in London hosted Weems' first major UK exhibition, titled Reflections for Now and featuring photography and video installations from over three decades. [45] Her work was also featured in the group show Spirit in the Land organized and exhibited with accompanying publication at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in 2023, which later traveled to the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2024. Carrie Mae Weems presented about her career trajectory at the Scholl Lecture Series, an artist's talk series, presented by PAMM, in February of 2024. [46] [47] [48] [49]
Weems lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, [76] and Syracuse, New York, with her husband Jeffrey Hoone.
Uta Barth is a contemporary German-American photographer whose work addresses themes such as perception, optical illusion and non-place. Her early work emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s, "inverting the notion of background and foreground" in photography and bringing awareness to a viewer's attention to visual information with in the photographic frame. Her work is as much about vision and perception as it is about the failure to see, the faith humans place in the mechanics of perception, and the precarious nature of perceptual habits. Barth's says this about her art practice: “The question for me always is how can I make you aware of your own looking, instead of losing your attention to thoughts about what it is that you are looking at." She has been honored with two National Endowments of the Arts fellowships, was a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004‑05, and was a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. Barth lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Tina Barney is an American photographer best known for her large-scale, color portraits of her family and close friends in New York and New England. She is a member of the Lehman family.
Graciela Iturbide is a Mexican photographer. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and is included in many major museum collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The J. Paul Getty Museum.
Sarah Edwards Charlesworth was an American conceptual artist and photographer. She is considered part of The Pictures Generation, a loose-knit group of artists working in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, all of whom were concerned with how images shape our everyday lives and society as a whole.
The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) is a college-affiliated art museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It is located on the Williams College campus, close to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and the Clark Art Institute. Its growing collection encompasses more than 14,000 works, with particular strengths in contemporary art, photography, prints, and Indian painting. The museum is free and open to the public.
Sama Raena Alshaibi also known as Sama Alshaibi is a conceptual artist, who deals with spaces of conflict as her primary subject. War, exile, power and the quest for survival are themes seen in her works. She often uses her own body in her artwork as a representation of the country or an issue she is dealing with.
Dawoud Bey is an American photographer, artist and educator known for his large-scale art photography and street photography portraits, including American adolescents in relation to their community, and other often marginalized subjects. In 2017, Bey was named a MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and is regarded as one of the "most innovative and influential photographers of his generation".
Deborah Willis is a contemporary African-American artist, photographer, curator of photography, photographic historian, author, and educator. Among her awards and honors, she is a 2000 MacArthur Fellow. She is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts of New York University. In 2024, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Nic Nicosia is an American artist using photography, sculpture, and drawing in his practice. He received a BS in radio-television-film, with a concentration in motion pictures, from the University of North Texas in 1974. He was awarded a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant in 1984 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010. Nicosia was born in Dallas, Texas. He lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico between 2004 and 2015. Nicosia currently lives and works in Dallas, Texas.
The participation of women in photography goes back to the very origins of the process. Several of the earliest women photographers, most of whom were from Britain or France, were married to male pioneers or had close relationships with their families. It was above all in northern Europe that women first entered the business of photography, opening studios in Denmark, France, Germany, and Sweden from the 1840s, while it was in Britain that women from well-to-do families developed photography as an art in the late 1850s. Not until the 1890s, did the first studios run by women open in New York City.
Light Work is a photography center in Syracuse, New York. The artist-run nonprofit supports photographers through a community-access digital lab facility, residencies, exhibitions, and publications.
Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) is a non-profit organization dedicated to art education based in Rochester, New York, in the Neighborhood of the Arts. VSW supports makers and interpreters of images through education, publications, exhibitions, and collections. VSW houses a bookstore, microcinema, exhibition gallery, and research center, and hosts artists-in-residence.
Catherine Lord is an American artist, writer, curator, social activist, professor, scholar exploring themes of feminism, cultural politics and colonialism. In 2010, she was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal.
Barbara Crane was an American artist photographer born in Chicago, Illinois. Crane worked with a variety of materials including Polaroid, gelatin silver, and platinum prints among others. She was known for her experimental and innovative work that challenges the straight photograph by incorporating sequencing, layered negatives, and repeated frames. Naomi Rosenblum notes that Crane "pioneered the use of repetition to convey the mechanical character of much of contemporary life, even in its recreational aspects."
Deanna Bowen is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes films, video installations, performances, drawing, sculpture and photography. Her work addresses issues of trauma and memory through an investigation of personal and official histories related to slavery, migration, civil rights, and white supremacy in Canada and the United States. Bowen is a dual citizen of the US and Canada. She lives and works in Montreal.
Deana Lawson is an American artist, educator, and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is primarily concerned with intimacy, family, spirituality, sexuality, and Black aesthetics.
Nona Faustine is an American photographer and visual artist who was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York.
Janet Henry is a visual artist based in New York City.
Endia Beal is an African-American visual artist, curator, and educator. She is known for her work in creating visual narratives through photography and video testimonies focused on women of color working in corporate environments.
Adger Cowans is an American fine arts photographer and abstract painter.