Carrie Mae Weems: WITNESS
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Through November 13, 2021
Carrie Mae Weems
Untitled (Playing harmonica), 1990-1999
© Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and
Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
“Art has saved my life on a regular basis.”— Carrie Mae Weems
Fraenkel Gallery presents a survey of the work of CARRIE MAE WEEMS examining her extraordinary achievement over four decades. WITNESS traces Carrie Mae Weems’s exploration of history, identity, and the structure of power, in photographs and video from many of her most important bodies of work. Carrie Mae Weems’s inaugural show celebrates the gallery’s recently announced representation of the artist.
The exhibition begins with early documentary-style photographs from the series Family Pictures and Stories, depicting Carrie Mae Weems’s own multigenerational family in a joyful and nuanced vision of Black family life. In her iconic Kitchen Table series, Carrie Mae Weems cast herself as a woman at the emotional center of an imagined domestic world, staging photographs that build a rich fictional narrative around her role as a lover, friend, and mother.
In the series Museums, American Monuments, and Roaming, Carrie Mae Weems photographed herself in front of institutions and public spaces around the world, dressed in black and facing away from the camera. Carrie Mae Weems has described the character she depicts as a witness whose presence invites the viewer to consider how power is inscribed in these spaces and which groups are welcomed and represented in them.
Carrie Mae Weems has often used performance marked by highly constructed artifice to explore how history is remembered and created. In Constructing History, Weems worked with college students to re-enact moments of social upheaval from the 1960s, building stage-like photographic tableaux. In the video People of a Darker Hue, Carrie Mae Weems addresses more recent history, pairing footage of buoyant city life and solemn protest with a stark, highly stylized vision of oppression, in commemoration of Black men and women killed by police.
In From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, one of Carrie Mae Weems’s best known and most powerful series, photographs of enslaved men and women and other Black subjects, collected from museum and university archives and other sources, are tinted red and overlaid with heartbreaking and poetic texts. Using important images in American photography to explore not only race, but rather race through the lens of American photographic history, the series takes on both photography and the racist structures it has supported.
CARRIE MAE WEEMS (b. 1953) has been featured in major exhibitions at museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain. This winter, the Park Avenue Armory will host an exhibition and convocation curated by Weems, and in 2022 her work will be exhibited in a solo show at Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, Germany, and in a two-person exhibition with Dawoud Bey at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. She has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including a MacArthur “Genius” grant, the U.S. State Department’s Medal of Arts, the Joseph Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, NEA grants, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, among others. Herwork is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Tate Modern, London.
FRAENKEL GALLERY
49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108
