Carrie Mae Weems

Bryleigh Pierce
Oct 7
2 min read

(United States of America, 20/04/1953 -)

After picking up a camera for the first time at the age of 20, Weems set out to give a voice to those who have been silenced or ignored by capturing the beauty of the everyday, the ordinary and the mundane. Through connecting the narratives of her subjects with wider social structures, Weems not only allows the viewer to identify with the subject but also shows that the personal is, indeed, political.

Over the previous 50 years, Weems has used photographs, performance art, video and textiles to challenge the status quo and explore how history is created, and by whom. In doing so, she elevated the lives of Black communities, women in particular, to the status of ‘art’ beyond their historical status as Other and has inspired generations of artists, including the likes of Mickalene Thomas, to do the same.

Weems reflected on the absence of the everyday lives of Black women and the impact of her Kitchen table series in 2016, saying, “There’s still sort of a dearth, a lack of representational images of women. And not, you know, like strong, powerful, and capable, that kind of bullshit, but rather just images of black women in the world, in the domain of popular culture”.

The first major retrospective of her work was held in 2012 and, in January 2014, she became the first African-American woman to receive a solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. In the previous decade, Weems’s has continued to receive international acclaim and has had major solo exhibitions in Germany and the U.K.