Carrie Mae Weems

Photographer

• Born: April 20, 1953
• Place of Birth: Portland, Oregon

Significance: Carrie Mae Weems is widely considered one of the most notable photographers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her work has been featured in many museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, California, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In addition to working in photography, Weems also has used fabric, text, and video as mediums for her art. Many of her pieces explore issues related to race, female identity, class, and familial relationships.

Background

Carrie Mae Weems was born in Portland, Oregon, on April 20, 1953, into a middle-class African American family. She was the second of seven children born to Myrlie Weems and Carrie Polk. Her father was a laborer and a singer who performed in churches. Her mother managed a barbecue restaurant.

As a young woman, Weems developed an interest in the arts, though photography was not yet on her radar. She took dance lessons and participated in street theater. In 1969, Weems gave birth to her only child, a daughter she named Faith C. Weems. Her sister, aunt, and mother helped her raise Faith.

After graduating from high school, Weems did not immediately attend college. Instead, she joined her best friend, who had gone to San Francisco, California, to study dance with Anna Halprin. While attending a class with her friend, Weems was noticed by Halprin, who offered her a spot in her San Francisco Dancers' Workshop. Weems spent a year and a half there before moving with her daughter to New York to look for work. Not finding any, she returned to San Francisco but traveled between coasts for a time.

Life's Work

When she was twenty, Weems received her first camera from a boyfriend. Soon, she was fascinated by the art of photography. She took photography lessons in New York and studied photography and design at San Francisco City College from 1974 to 1976. By 1979, she had enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts. Weems graduated with her bachelor of fine arts degree in 1981. She then went on to attend graduate school at the University of California, San Diego. Weems earned her master of fine arts from the university in 1984.

That same year, her series Family Pictures and Stories was exhibited at the Multi-Cultural Gallery in San Diego. The series, which features images of Weems's own family, is an effort to challenge stereotypes about Black families by showing Weems's relatives engaged in familial activities such as parenting, arguing, celebrating, and working. Also in 1984, Weems enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied folklore in the graduate program until 1987.

Her training in folklore may have influenced one of her most famous images. Weems's Ain't Jokin' series (1987–1988) features the photograph Mirror, Mirror, in which a young Black woman looks into a mirror to find a White witch staring back at her. The text accompanying the image indicates that the woman asks the witch, "Who's the finest of them all?" The witch calls the woman an expletive and tells her not to forget that the answer is Snow White.

In 1988, Weems completed a residency at Light Work in Syracuse, New York. That same year, she began a series of photographs called American Icons (1988–1989), which focused on inanimate objects that feature Black people in subservient roles. In the work Colored People (1989–1990), Weems featured portraits of Black people of various shades and colored them with various dyes, including bright pink, yellow, and blue.

Weems shot her most famous series in 1990. The Kitchen Table series is a set of staged black-and-white photographs in which the artist portrays a character, who is photographed at a kitchen table with a stark light hanging above it. In the series, the woman sometimes interacts with a lover, friends, or children. Some portraits feature the woman by herself. The photographs are accompanied by text that Weems wrote. The photographer told W that photographing herself for the series made her understand her love for performative art. Weems also noted the power of putting a woman front and center in the series.

Weems photographed ruins on islands off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia in 1991 and 1992 for the Sea Island series. In 1993, she traveled to Africa, where she took photos for her Africa and Slave Coast series. The series The Hampton Project (2000) focuses on historical photos of black and Native American students at the Hampton Institute of Virginia taken in 1900. The pictures are accompanied by audio of Weems reading poetry and images of the Ku Klux Klan. The work is a comment on institutional racism. In the Louisiana Project (2003), Weems again appears in her work, dressed in nineteenth-century attire and pictured roaming a plantation house.

By the mid-2000s, Weems was making videos more consistently, but she continued to take photographs as well. Some of her works during this time included the series Roaming (2006), Constructing History (2008), and African Jewels (2009). In 2010, she worked on the series Mandingo and Slow Fade to Black. Other later photo series included Scenes & Takes (2016), while her video pieces included the 2017 works People of a Darker Hue and Imagine If This Were You.

Weems also continued her social activism in the early twenty-first century. Some of the efforts she was involved in included Operation Activate, an anti-violence initiative in Syracuse launched in 2011; the Institute of Sound and Style mentorship program formed in 2012; and the public art project Resist COVID Take 6! started in 2020.

Impact

After her breakout in the 1990s, Weems came to be widely considered one of the most influential artists of her time. She received many honors and awards for her work over the years. In 2013, she was honored with a MacArthur "Genius" grant and received the US State Department's Medal of Arts Award, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Gordon Parks Foundation Award. In 2014, she received the Lucie Foundation Award and the BET Honors Visual Artist Award. Weems was one of four artists honored at the Guggenheim's 2014 International Gala. Her work was also featured in several major exhibitions, including high-profile solo retrospectives, throughout the 2010s and 2020s. Weems was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in 2020 and earned the Hasselblad Award, a major photography prize, in 2023.

Personal Life

Weems had one daughter, named Faith. Weems met Jeff Hoone in 1986. The two eloped in Mexico in 1995 and settled in Syracuse, New York.

Bibliography

Agovino, Michael J. "Artist Carrie Mae Weems Talks Race, Gender, and Finally Getting the Recognition She Deserves." Elle, 20 Nov. 2013, www.elle.com/culture/art-design/a12622/carrie-mae-weems-profile/. Accessed 26 Sept. 2017.

"Biography." Carrie Mae Weems, carriemaeweems.net/bio.html. Accessed 5 Sept. 2024.

"Carrie Mae Weems." Guggenheim, www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/carrie-mae-weems. Accessed 5 Sept. 2024.

"Carrie Mae Weems." International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, www.iphf.org/hof-carrie-mae-weems?rq=carrie%20mae%20weems. Accessed 5 Sept. 2024.

Cotter, Holland. "Testimony of a Cleareyed Witness." New York Times, 23 Jan. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/arts/design/carrie-mae-weems-charts-the-black-experience-in-photographs.html. Accessed 26 Sept. 2017.

Eckardt, Stephanie. "Carrie Mae Weems Reflects on Her Seminal, Enduring Kitchen Table Series." W, 7 Apr. 2016, www.wmagazine.com/story/carrie-mae-weems-kitchen-table-series-today-interview. Accessed 26 Sept. 2017.

O'Grady, Megan. "How Carrie Mae Weems Rewrote the Rules of Image-Making." The New York Times, 15 Oct. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/t-magazine/carrie-mae-weems-interview.html. Accessed 5 Sept. 2024.

Otfinoski, Steven. "Weems, Carrie Mae." African Americans in the Visual Arts, rev. ed., Facts on File, 2011, pp. 227–8.