Carrie Mae Weems
American, 1953
Weems has worked toward developing a complex body of art that has employed photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation and video over the past 25 years. Her work has led her to investigate family relationships, gender roles, and the histories of racism, sexism, class, and various political systems.
She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. A major retrospective of her work, Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, began its run at the Frist Center for Visual Arts in Nashville, and traveled to the Portland Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art and Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, ending at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 2014.
The artist has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships, including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the prestigious Prix de Rome, The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, and the U.S. Department of State’s Medal of Arts.
Weems staged a play, Grace Notes: Reflections for Now in honor of the killings at Emanuel AME Church, at the Spoleto Festival USA and The Kennedy Center among other venues in 2016.
“Despite the variety of my explorations, throughout it all it has been my contention that my responsibility as an artist is to work: to sing for my supper; to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world; to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the rooftops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment.”
Photo by Todd Gray
