Carrie Mae Weems
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.
Her photographs, films and videos focus on serious issues facing African Americans today, including racism, sexism, politics and personal identity.
She taught photography at Hampshire College in the late 1980s and shot the "Kitchen Table" series in her home in Western Massachusetts.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
