CARRIE MAE WEEMS

Recent prominent solo exhibitions include Looking Forward, Looking Back, Smithsonian Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (2023); Varying Shades of Brown, Brown University, Providence; The Evidence of Things Not Seen, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Germany (2022), traveled to Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2023); The Shape of Things, LUMA, Arles, France (2023); Lincoln, Lonnie and Me, MACBA, Barcelona, Spain (2022); A Great Turn In The Possible, kBR Mapfre Foto Colectania, and MACBA, Barcelona, Spain (2022); and The Shape of Things, Park Avenue Armory, New York (2021). Weems’s work is in major public collections including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Tate Modern, London, among many others.

Carrie Mae Weems has also been the recipient of many awards and fellowships including a MacArthur Foundation Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts, Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, Washington, D.C. (both 2013); the WEB Dubois Award from Harvard University (2015); the Hasselblad Award (2023); National Artist Honoree, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Aspen, (2016). She has had a longstanding commitment to education, having taught at numerous colleges and universities, and received honorary doctorates from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA (2022) and Smith College, North Hampton, MA (2011) alongside honorary degrees from California College of the Arts, Colgate University, Bowdoin College, the School of Visual Art, and Syracuse University. Weems is currently the first-ever Artist in Residence at Syracuse University, New York.

Carrie Mae Weems was born in Portland, Oregon in 1953. As a young adult, she lived bicoastally, concurrently training as a dancer in San Francisco while exploring photography at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Through studying in New York, she was inspired by and connected with leading Black photographers, including Roy DeCarava and artists from the Kamoinge Workshop. In 1984, Weems enrolled in U.C. Berkeley’s graduate program in folklore studies where the beginnings of a career-long interest in subjectivity and storytelling was born. Weems translated ideas surrounding autobiography into her photographic work of the early 1990s in which she captured the tension between acting as both subject and object, performer and director.

Courtesy Gladstone