CARRIE MAE WEEMS

Witness History, Identity & Power

Cover & Above image: Carrie Mae Weems

BY: Ramona Duoba

For more than 40-years, American artist Carrie Mae Weems has examined the many facets of contemporary American life by creating installations that combine photography, audio, and text. The exhibition WITNESS at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco traces Weems’s exploration of history, identity, and power structure. In addition, the exhibit highlights early documentary-style photographs from the Family Pictures and Stories series, depicting Weems’s own multigenerational family and vision of Black family life.

Carrie Mae Weems

 

Perhaps her best-known work, Kitchen Table (1990), is a series of photographic vignettes of Weems at the center of a fictional world. In a talk at the American Museum of Art, Weems explained her vision behind Kitchen Table, “I wanted to present women in a certain kind of way, and I wanted to talk about the family in a certain kind of way, and the dynamic, the family dynamic, and the relationship between women and women, between women and men, between women and themselves.”

Carrie Mae Weems

 

Weems received a camera for her 20th birthday and began taking pictures immediately. She was inspired to pursue photography after coming across The Black Photography Annual, a book of images by African-American photographers including Shawn Walker, Beuford Smith, and Anthony Barboza. She would eventually become Barboza’s assistant. As her career unfolded, she became an influential artist whose work gave voice to people whose stories were silenced or ignored, “The focus of my work is to describe simply and directly those aspects of American culture in need of deeper illumination.”

Carrie Mae Weems

 

In the series Museums, American Monuments and Roaming, the images portray Weem as herself in front of institutions and public spaces worldwide. Weem has described her character “as a witness whose presence invites the viewer to consider how power is inscribed in the architecture of these spaces. The series asks viewers to think about who is welcomed and represented in the museums she records.”

Carrie Mae Weems

 

The exhibition spans four decades of work and includes notable projects such as Constructing History and the powerful From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, which focuses on photographs of enslaved men and women collected from museums and universities archives. The images are tinted red and overlaid with heartbreaking and poetic texts. Her use of the photographs explores not only race but race through American photographic history. She reveals the role photography has played in supporting and shaping racism. Weems said, “I’m trying to construct a new prism for looking at certain aspects of African-American culture and gender relationships— as James Baldwin said, ‘searching for the evidence of things unseen’.”

Carrie Mae Weems

 

Carrie Mae Weems, WITNESS at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, through November 13, 2021.

Carrie Mae Weems