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Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video
SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
NEW YORK CITY
JANUARY 24-MAY 14, 2014
Carrie Mae Weems: The Museum Series
STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM
NEW YORK CITY
JANUARY 30-JUNE 29,2014
Over the past two decades, Carrie Mae Weems has become widely recognized for her poetic twist on documentary aesthetics in photographic explorations of personal history, African American female experience, and the African diaspora. Her two-year travelling retrospective, organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts (Nashville) and ending at the Guggenheim, illuminated a strong formal and thematic continuity in her oeuvre to the present, and offered a chance to view her best-known individual images in their original serial contexts.
The earliest works shown, completed while Weems was in graduate school, were small-scale black-and-white photographs, several with captions, from the autobiographical series Family Pictures and Stories (1978-84). An accompanying soundtrack of first-person commentary by the artist reinforced the personal dimension of the intertwined individuals depicted. At the time it was created, the series challenged (and still challenges) lingering stereotypes of African American families by bringing candid shots of her own family into public view as subject matter for contemporary art. It also betrays Weems's early inspiration in the subjective journalism of Harlem photographer Roy DeCarava, and her solid grounding in the traditional photographic techniques and composition that have largely remained her stock-in-trade.
The artistic and emotional implications of Family...