Carrie Mae Weems. The Evidence of Things Not Seen

About the Artist

Carrie Mae Weems, Portrait by Jerry Klineberg

Carrie Mae Weems, *1953 in Portland, Oregon, USA, lives in Syracuse, New York, USA
www.carriemaeweems.net

Carrie Mae Weems is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

Weems works in and between the realms of photography, video, poetry, performance, and installation and develops collaborative projects for the public space. Additionally, she teaches, curates exhibitions, as well as transdisciplinary events, as an extension and resonant space for her artistic practice. She regularly collaborates with other artists, including Mary J. Blige, Spike Lee, or Carl Hancock Rux.

Since the beginning of her engagement with photography in the late 1970s—marked by the examination of a wide spectrum of artists ranging from Robert Frank to Roy DeCarava—Carrie Mae Weems has been deeply concerned with the limits of photography and the expansion of its canon, including the excluded and the forgotten. Furthermore, she investigates how photography as well as other media and forms of representation produce constructions of race, gender, and class.

A central theme of her work is the body¬—especially the body of the oppressed and marginalized—whose grace, beauty, vulnerability, and strength she celebrates. She examines it in relation to architecture, city, landscape, on the threshold of presence and absence, as an object of optical media or art history, and as a subject of emancipatory processes. Weems herself appears in many of her image series, not as an autobiographical instance, but rather as a witness, companion, or guide who brings us closer to certain places and situations.

Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at U.S. and international museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Frist Center for Visual Art, Nashville; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville.

She has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including the Mac Arthur Fellowship, most recently the Artes Mundi Prize 2021, and is currently an artist in residence with the Park Avenue Armory program.

Weems is represented in public and private collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Tate Modern, London.


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