Carrie Mae Weems — LLMpedia

Carrie Mae Weems
Name	Carrie Mae Weems
Birth date	1953
Birth place	Portland, Oregon
Nationality	American
Occupation	Artist, photographer, educator
Notable works	Kitchen Table Series, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried
Awards	MacArthur Fellowship, Hasselblad Award, National Medal of Arts

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Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist and photographer known for work that interrogates race, gender, family, and history. Her practice spans photography, textile art, video art, performance art, and installation art, engaging institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Tate Modern. She has produced influential series including the Kitchen Table Series and From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried and received honors like the MacArthur Fellowship and the National Medal of Arts.

Early life and education

Weems was born in Portland, Oregon in 1953 and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. She trained initially in dance with influences from companies like the José Limón Company and studied theater in community settings before turning to visual art. She attended Syracuse University and studied textile arts at the University of California, San Diego and later completed an M.F.A. at the California Institute of the Arts. Early mentorships and residencies connected her with figures and institutions such as Diahann Carroll, Harry Belafonte, the National Endowment for the Arts, and regional arts organizations.

Weems emerged during the late 1970s and 1980s alongside contemporaries associated with movements and institutions including Black Arts Movement, AfriCOBRA, and galleries in New York City like P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Her breakthrough project, the Kitchen Table Series, uses staged domestic scenes to examine relationships and social roles, engaging pictorial strategies seen in the work of Gordon Parks, Diane Arbus, August Sander, and Walker Evans. In From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried she recontextualized 19th-century daguerreotypes and cartes-de-visite to critique visual archives, a practice resonant with interventions by scholars at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other major works include multichannel video pieces shown alongside programming at the Brooklyn Museum and public commissions for institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Weems’ work addresses history through portraiture, narrative sequencing, and text overlays, dialoguing with scholars and artists at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Getty Research Institute, and the Library of Congress. Recurring themes include the afterlives of slavery, representations of African Americans in visual culture, and domestic labor, explored through strategies comparable to those used by Hank Willis Thomas, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and Glenn Ligon. Methodologically she combines theatrical staging, found photographs, oral histories drawn from archives like the Newberry Library and the Howard University Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, and performance approaches related to practitioners at the Apollo Theater and the Schomburg Center. Her use of captions and narrative voice aligns with practices in postmodern photographic critique advanced at venues like the Walker Art Center and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

Weems’ solo and group exhibitions have been organized by leading venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate Modern, the Stedelijk Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and the Hamburger Bahnhof. Notable installations include large-scale projects commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, site-specific works for the World Trade Center memorial initiatives, and traveling retrospectives co-curated by the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her pieces have been included in biennials and triennials such as the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, the Liverpool Biennial, and the Shanghai Biennale.

Weems has been recognized with numerous awards and fellowships including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, the National Medal of Arts, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She has been honored by academic institutions with honorary degrees from universities such as Harvard University, Columbia University, and Yale University, and has received fellowships from organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

Weems has taught and lectured at universities and programs including Yale University, New York University, Brown University, Columbia University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. She has served in residency and advisory roles with institutions such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the New Museum, and the International Center of Photography. Collaborative projects have connected her with musicians and performers affiliated with the Apollo Theater, writers and critics from the New York Times and Artforum, and curators from the Tate Modern and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Weems’ work has influenced generations of artists, critics, and curators including practitioners like Lorna Simpson, Hank Willis Thomas, Kara Walker, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Deana Lawson. Her interventions in photographic archives have shaped curatorial practices at institutions such as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Her pedagogical and public-facing projects have contributed to dialogues at the Smithsonian Institution, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and municipal arts agencies, ensuring a sustained presence in surveys of contemporary art and visual culture.

Category:American photographers Category:African-American artists Category:Artists from Portland, Oregon