Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)

Born in Portland, Oregon, Weems is a photographer, installation and video artist, and printmaker whose socially critical works interrogate the historical and institutional dynamics of gender, race, representation, and power. Educated at CalArts (BA, 1981) and UC-San Diego (MFA, 1984), Weems studied in New York City, taking a course from Dawoud Bey at the Studio Museum, Harlem. Widely praised, her emotionally resonant art ranges from documentary photographs of figures around a Kitchen Table (1990), to the reappropriation of 19th-c. anthropological daguerreotypes of slaves combined with text for Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-96).

Important Source Material:

Piche, Thomas and Thelma Golden. Carrie Mae Weems: Recent Work, 1992-1998. New York: George Braziller; Syracuse, NY: In Association with Everson Museum of Art, 1998.

Gates, Jr., David Henry Louis, Franklin Sirmans, Deborah Willis, and Katie Delmez. Carrie Mae Weems: 3 Decades of Photography and Video. Nashville, TN: Frist Center for the Visual Arts; New Haven: In association with Yale University Press, 2012.

NHS