They possess a graceful allure in their ability to present the mundane and the tragic through a striking lens, in which art, beauty, history, and politics are intertwined - as in life - beyond extraction. Moreover, her compositions have so much style. A tenuous relationship exists in Weems’s work between glamour and guts yet neither attribute suffers on behalf of the other. Her self-portraits are not only revelatory about her inner world, but help us navigate Black womanhood, family dynamics, and history. I pored over it as an undergraduate, enthralled by the artist’s mastery of light and composition as well as her firm grip on emotion, on feeling. Her Kitchen Table Series, specifically, was the first body of artwork that I saw myself in.

Throughout her career, she has approached painful stereotypes with humor and wit she has confronted the alienation and sexism of art history she has reflected on dehumanization and racism over centuries.įor many artists, her photographs were the ground on which we found our footing - we have discovered ourselves staring back in Weems’s images. She is a woman deeply concerned with power and its consequences: in art, in ancestry, in history. How is it used? How has it been manipulated? What is my proximity to it? How do I negotiate it? How do I build pathways around it since I don’t have any, right? And still managed to do that with integrity and honesty and truth and trust.” Carrie Mae Weems, Cyclorama – Conditions, A Video in 7 Parts, installation viewĪt its core, her work addresses exactly these questions, and they are also apparent in her trajectory as an artist. Prior to this, a commission called The Shape of Things was on view at the Park Avenue Armory from December 2 through 31, 2021.Īt the Armory opening, we sat together, and I queried her about her unrelenting career and its motivations, and about seeing the floodgates open up for Black artists in her lifetime, after years of breaking open the doors by force. In January, her exhibition Down Here Below opened at Jack Shainman, her longtime gallery in Chelsea, Manhattan.

Mae weems