CARRIE MAE WEEMS

Awards, Honours and Recent Major Exhibitions

Among the most highly honoured artists of her generation, Weems received the National Medal of Arts in 2024 from President Joe Biden, the highest artistic distinction awarded by the U.S. government. Her accolades also include the Hasselblad Award (2023), Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship (2016), W.E.B. Du Bois Medal (2015), MacArthur Fellowship (2013), U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts (2012), Bernd and Hilla Becher Prize (2011), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation photography grant (2002) and a Smithsonian Fellowship (1987).

Recent museum projects underline the scope of Weems’s influence: Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin (2025), a major retrospective developed with Aperture; Carrie Mae Weems: Remember to Dream at the Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard (2024); The Shape of Things at LUMA Arles (2021–22); and The Evidence of Things Not Seen, organised by Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart and travelling to Kunstmuseum Basel.

Weems’s artwork is represented in the collections of leading museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, underscoring her central place in recent art history.

Early Life, Education and Artistic Formation

Born in 1953 in Portland, Oregon, Weems initially trained as a dancer, studying modern dance with Anna Halprin in San Francisco in the early 1970s before turning to photography in her twenties. A first camera, given as a birthday gift, led to early projects such as Environmental Profits and the long-running series Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84), intimate photographs that trace the lives of her relatives and the movement of Black families from the U.S. South to the North. Encounters with The Black Photographers Annual and time spent at the Studio Museum in Harlem—where she studied with Dawoud Bey and worked with photographers including Anthony Barboza—gave her both a community and a model for a critically engaged practice.

Weems went on to earn a BFA from California Institute of the Arts (1981), an MFA from the University of California, San Diego (1984), and an MA in folklore from the University of California, Berkeley (1987), training that underpins her lifelong interest in narrative, oral history and the politics of representation.

Practice: photography, narrative and power

From the late 1970s onwards, Weems has used staged and documentary images, sound, text and moving image to construct layered narratives about race, gender, class and authority. Early series such as Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84), Ain’t Jokin’ (1987–88) and American Icons (1988–89) confront stereotypes, racist humour and internalised prejudice, using images and captions to expose how ideology circulates through everyday language and popular culture. By the late 1980s she had turned away from straight documentary toward constructed scenes, diptychs and triptychs that “look like documents but are in fact staged,” using herself and others as performers within carefully choreographed tableaux.

Breakthrough ‘Kitchen Table Series’ and Key Photo-Text Works

Weems’s breakthrough Kitchen Table Series (1990) stages a sequence of black-and-white photographs in which she plays a woman negotiating love, motherhood, friendship and solitude around a single, spotlighted kitchen table. The work uses a modest domestic set to address broader questions of intimacy, gender roles and power, and has become a landmark in both her career and feminist image-making more broadly.

Subsequent projects extend this inquiry into history and institutions. In From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–96), Weems re-photographs and tints archival portraits of enslaved and colonised subjects, overlaying them with searing textual commentary that turns ethnographic images into sites of mourning and political critique. The Hampton Project (2000) revisits photographs from a historically Black college to question narratives of uplift and assimilation, while The Museum Series (2006–ongoing) places Weems’s silhouetted figure before the facades of major Western museums, asking who is included in or excluded from dominant cultural histories. More recent works such as The Shape of Things (2021), Painting the Town (2021) and A Land of Broken Dreams (2021–22) respond directly to the 2020 racial-justice protests and the ongoing violence of white supremacy, turning boarded-up storefronts, news images and theatrical installations into meditations on protest, grief and resistance.

Education, Activism and Performance-Based Projects

Education and activism are integral to Weems’s practice. She frequently works in civic and academic contexts—from billboards and public squares to universities—using art as a platform for public dialogue about race, gender and democracy. At Brown University she led Varying Shades of Brown (2023), a campus-wide project addressing race and institutional memory through exhibitions, performances and conversations. Her multi-disciplinary performances and films—including Grace Notes: Reflections for Now (2016) and The Baptism (2020)—extend her visual language into sound, music and theatre, exploring the idea of grace and collective mourning in the face of anti-Black violence.

Key Solo Museum Exhibitions

• Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video (2013–14), Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville; travelled to Portland Art Museum; Cleveland Museum of Art; Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
• Carrie Mae Weems: The Museum Series (2014), Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.
• Carrie Mae Weems: The Shape of Things (2021), Park Avenue Armory, New York; version later shown at LUMA Arles, France (2021–22).
• Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now (2023), Barbican, London—her first major UK survey.
• Carrie Mae Weems: The Evidence of Things Not Seen (2023–24), Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart; travelled to Kunstmuseum Basel.
• Carrie Mae Weems: Remember to Dream (2024–25), Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson.
• Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter (2025–26), Gallerie d’Italia, Turin; travelling to FOMU Antwerp.

Important Group and Two-Person Museum Exhibitions

• Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue (2021–23), Grand Rapids Art Museum; travelled to Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg; Seattle Art Museum; Getty Center, Los Angeles; Tampa Museum of Art.
• A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration (2022–23), Mississippi Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum.
• Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023), Sharjah Art Foundation.

Awards and Honours

• National Medal of Arts, United States (2024).
• Hasselblad Award (2023).
• W.E.B. Du Bois Medal, Harvard University (2015).
• MacArthur Fellowship (2013).
• U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts (2012).
• Bernd and Hilla Becher Prize (2011).
• Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship (2016).
• Pollock-Krasner Foundation photography grant (2002).
• Smithsonian Fellowship (1987), alongside earlier NEA grants, the Rome Prize, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Collections and Current Practice

Weems’s work is held in major public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and many others. Based in Syracuse, New York, where she has long been associated with the photography organisation Light Work, she continues to develop new bodies of work and large-scale institutional projects while mentoring younger artists and serving in academic and civic roles.

Through her sustained investigation of history, representation and power, Carrie Mae Weems has profoundly reshaped understandings of photography and lens-based art, influencing generations of artists and viewers and redefining how images participate in the politics of seeing.

Carrie Mae Weems FAQs

Ocula | 2026