Carrie Mae Weems

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The first photo makes the biggest impact on me because it shows what an influence parents have on their kids, that children are likely to imitate what they grow up around which can be a good or bad thing. Which one of these photos makes the biggest impact on you? Discuss below. (All photos found on carriemaeweems.net)

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Her photography is supposed to send a message to whomever is viewing it, this is an example of one message she was trying to get across. (Photo from: http://newblackman.blogspot.com/2011/02/art-that-matters-carrie-mae-weems-takes.html?m=1)

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Weems has long been one of our most effective visual and verbal rhetoricians. When she tackles complex subjects in complex ways, the results are... Deeply stirring.

Holland Cotter, The New York Times

[carriemaeweemsproject]

Storytelling is fundamental to my work, a way to best express the human condition that has been a focus of my art from my earliest documentary photographic series, Family Pictures and Stories (1978-1984). This characteristic continued through increasingly complex and layered works such as Ain’t Jokin’ (1987-1988), Colored People (1989-1990), and the Kitchen Table series (1990). In these series, I endeavored to intertwine themes as I have found them in life—racial, sexual, and cultural identity and history—and presented them with overtones of humor and sadness, loss and redemption. Throughout the 1990s, I broadened both the geographical scope and the forms of my expression. I explored the African diaspora beginning in America with the Sea Islands series (1991-1992). I visited Africa and out of this journey came several series from 1993: Africa, Slave Coast, and Landed in Africa. A commission to investigate a body of historical photo-images of blacks from the Getty Museum in 1995 led to an extension of this interest in the diaspora in the series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, a feverishly toned polemic that integrated photograph and text.

carriemaeweems.net

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ABOUT CARRIE MAE WEEMS:

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"During the past twenty-five years, I have worked toward developing a complex body of art that has at various times employed photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and, most recently, video. My work has led me to investigate family relationships, gender roles, the histories of racism, sexism, class, and various political systems. Despite the variety of my explorations, throughout it all it has been my contention that my responsibility as an artist is to work, to sing for my supper, to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the roof-tops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment."

Carrie Mae Weems was born in Portland, Oregon in 1953. 

She moved out of her parents' home at the age of 16, and she soon moved to San Francisco to study modern dance with Anna Haplin. She decided to continue her arts schooling and attended the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. She graduated at the age of twenty-eight with her BA. She received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Weems also participated in the graduate program in folklore at the University of California, Berkeley.

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These photos are from Carrie Mae Weems' exhibit "From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried." This exhibit shows the painful history of Black people through a series of photos. To see the full exhibit, click here --> http://carriemaeweems.net/galleries/from-here.html

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One photograph done by Carrie Mae Weems. What do you think about it? Discuss below.

[carriemaeweemsproject]

Informational video about Carrie Mae Weems.