Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems (born April 20, 1953, in Portland, Oregon) is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores history, identity, power, race, gender, and the structures that shape social life. Working across photography, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video, Weems examines personal experience and institutional history through staged narrative, archival intervention, conceptual portraiture, and poetic visual language.  Weems earned a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and also continued her studies in folklore at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work often engages Black history, representation, family, gender, politics, and historical memory, using serial image-making, self-performance, text panels, and appropriated archival imagery to consider how power operates through images and institutions. Major series such as The Kitchen Table Series and From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried are central to her practice and legacy.  Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Getty Center, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Grand Rapids Art Museum, among many others. She has received major honors including the MacArthur Fellowship, the U.S. State Department’s Medal of Arts Award, the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal, the Artes Mundi Prize, the Bernd and Hilla Becher Prize, and the Hasselblad Award. Carrie Mae Weems lives and works in Syracuse, New York.