Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems (born April 20, 1953, Portland, Oregon, U.S.) is an American artist and photographer known for creating installations that combine photography, audio, and text to examine many facets of contemporary American life. A prolific artist, she works in a variety of media and has expanded her practice to include community outreach.

Early work and education

Weems, who is probably best known as a photographer, initially studied modern dance. She received her first camera in her 20s. In 1978 she began her first photographic project, called Environmental Profits, which focused on life in Portland, Oregon. That same year she started her first major series, Family Pictures and Stories, intimate and candid photos of her friends and relatives, which she completed about five years later. In 1981 she graduated with a B.A. from the California Institute of the Arts, and she later obtained an M.F.A. (1984) from the University of California, San Diego, and an M.A. (1987) from the University of California, Berkeley.

The Kitchen Table Series

Weems was influenced by the work of earlier African American photographers who documented the Black experience, notably Roy DeCarava. She began to refer to herself as the “image maker.” Weems’s early images explored personal and familial themes and often were accompanied by text and audio recordings. Her seminal work, The Kitchen Table Series (1990), a narrative cycle of staged photographs, depicts seemingly mundane episodes from a woman’s life within the space of her kitchen.

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Later work

As her work developed, Weems became more explicitly political, continuing to explore themes of racism and the African American experience, in such series as From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–96). She also addressed gender issues and the nature of male-female relationships, as in Not Manet’s Type (1997). In the latter series and others, Weems often appeared as a persona. She notably created a black-robed figure that floats through the cityscapes of the series Roaming (2006) and Museums (2006) and later through the sets of television series in Scenes & Takes (2016). Beginning in the late 1990s, she also embraced video technology, though the still image remained central in her work. Her short films included People of a Darker Hue and Imagine If This Were You (both 2017), which consider police brutality against African Americans and violence within Black communities.

Other projects

Weems also taught photography at several colleges, including Syracuse University in New York, where she was an artist-in-residence between 2020 and 2023. With Deb Willis, Dawoud Bey, and Lonnie Graham, she founded Social Studies 101 (2002), an artist collective. It embarked on an anti-violence campaign, Operation Activate (2011), in Syracuse that included billboards, signs, and matchbooks emblazoned with such slogans as “A man does not become a man by killing another man.” In 2012 the Institute of Sound and Style, a mentorship program in the creative fields, was launched. The collective also began the public art campaign Resist COVID Take 6! (2020) to thank essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and to draw attention to the disproportionate effect the virus had on Black, brown, and Indigenous communities.

Exhibitions, collections, and honors

Weems’s work was exhibited frequently and is represented in such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Tate Modern, London. In 2014 she became the first Black woman to have a retrospective (“Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video”) at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City. Weems was also the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation fellowship (2013) and the National Medal of Arts (2022).