Black Contemporary American Artists : Carrie Mae Weems

While best known for her photography, Carrie Mae Weems began her artistic career in modern dance. Carrie Mae was born in 1953 in Portland, Oregon. She was the second child of a large family of seven children. Carrie Mae’s family later moved to San Francisco where she studied dance under Anna Halprin. In the 1980s Weems enrolled into the Folklore Studies program at the University of California, Berkeley. Here she would be introduced into social sciences that would later influence her photographic compositions. While Weems has a large body of work, she is best known for her Kitchen Table series that was created and exhibit in the early 1990s. In this series Carrie Mae questions the role of women and societal roles of domesticity in addition to racialized violence, sexual assault, and poverty. Weems included herself in many of her portraits. In an interview with Dawoud Bay, a fellow photographer, she stated that she wanted her work to “simultaneously” have a feeling of “being in it” and “of it.” Weems continues to take photographs, most recently a large-scale photographic work of Mary J. Blidge for the Vienna Opera House in a series produced by the private art association, Museum in Progress.  

Ryan, C. (2021). Carrie Mae Weems. Museum of Modern Art. https://www.moma.org/artists/7177#fnref:1 

Dawoud Bay’s interview of Carrie Mae Weems for Bomb magazine: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/carrie-mae-weems 

Carrie Mae Weems, Mourning, 2009, archival pigment print, 61 × 51 1/5 in, Galerie Barbara Thumm, https://bthumm.de/artists/carrie-mae-weems/ 

Carrie Mae Weems, Repeating the Obvious, 2019, 39 digital archival prints of various sizes, Galerie Barbara Thumm, https://bthumm.de/artists/carrie-mae-weems/ 

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Woman and daughter with makeup), 1990, gelatin silver print, 27 1/4 × 27 1/4 in, Guggenheim Museum, https://www.artsy.net/artwork/carrie-mae-weems-untitled-woman-and-daughter-with-makeup-from-kitchen-table-series