It’s an aesthetic thing blackness is an affront to the persistence of whiteness. “Black people are to be turned away from, not turned toward-we bear the mark of Cain.
“Weems’s black-and-white photographs are like mirrors, each reflecting a collective experience: how selfhood shifts through passage of time the sudden distance between people, both passable and impassable the roles that women accumulate and oscillate between how life emanates from the small space we occupy in the world,” writes Jacqui Palumbo.įrom Here I Saw What Happened, and I Cried by Carrie Mae Weems. In The Kitchen Table Series (1989-90), Carrie Mae Weems foregrounds the kitchen, a familiar space residing in the domestic sphere, through storytelling and a series of intimate contemporary black and white photographs reminiscent of film noir, to record the unfolding of fictional, yet universal and prevalent occurrences.
The kitchen is a space of nurture and nostalgia-known for binding subjects in shared experience and offering respite in the midst of struggle. Investigating the politics of spatial accessibility that may invite or exclude, Weems creates apposite yet seminal moments of racial and gendered representation. Born a woman of colour in the United States of America, Weems has invariably been concerned with questions of power and its relation to cultural identities formed by race, class and gender. Carrie Mae Weems lives and works in Syracuse, New York.Carrie Mae Weems is an influential African American artist most renowned for her visually compelling photography that combines text and audio to capture the particularities of past and contemporary African American life. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University (2007) Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown (2000) and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1998) among others. Weems’s work has appeared in major exhibitions at Savannah College of Art and Design (2008) W. Awards include the MacArthur Fellowship (2013) Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2007) Skowhegan Medal for Photography (2007) Rome Prize Fellowship (2006) and the Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant in Photography (2002) among others. She has received honorary degrees from Colgate University (2007) and California College of the Arts (2001). Whether adapting or appropriating archival images, restaging famous news photographs, or creating altogether new scenes, she traces an indirect history of the depiction of African Americans of more than a century. Eliciting epic contexts from individually framed moments, Weems debunks racist and sexist labels, examines the relationship between power and aesthetics, and uses personal biography to articulate broader truths.
Weems’s vibrant explorations of photography, video, and verse breathe new life into traditional narrative forms: social documentary, tableaux, self-portrait, and oral history.
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