The American artist Carrie Mae Weems, born in 1953 in Portland, invites viewers to explore questions of race, gender and class. For the past thirty years, she has used her art to highlight the daily lives of society’s marginalized people and to understand her own community, African-Americans, to create awareness and support to the struggle for equality and justice. Weems uses several photo and video processes to create fictional scenes, of which she is often one of the subjects, or to examine the identity of real people. Through May 14th, 2014, there is a retrospective of her work on two floors of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Although her main subjects are members of the African-American community, Carrie Mae Weems has always wanted, “people of color to stand for the human multitudes,” and for her work to be accessible to all. The exhibition revisits all the stages of her career, from her early documentary photographs and more autobiographical series to her conceptual and philosophically complex work, which has made her a major figure in contemporary art. She attempts to understand the present through a close examination of history.
The exhibition features mainly photographs, including her famous Kitchen Table Series (1990), where she appears in different staged scenes with different people, exploring contemporary black identity and social relations. A woman sits at the kitchen table, a point of reference through which the role of women throughout the community is explored, and the viewer is invited to take a seat, as in a private theatre.
From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-96), a vibrant combination of portraits, a red filter and text, is certainly more political. Weems uses historical portraits to approach prejudices against African-Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries, investigating the causes and effects of racism, slavery and imperialism, motivated by several trips across the United States.
EXHIBITION
Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video
Through May 14th
Solomon Guggenheim Museum
1071 5th Ave
New York, NY 10128
(212) 423-3500
