Remembering to Dream: Tom Eccles on 5 Works by Carrie Mae Weems

The Hessel Museum director shares insights on five artworks by Carrie Mae Weems, whose exhibition Remember to Dream illustrates a decades-long career concerned with identity, oppression, and social justice in the U.S.

Carrie Mae Weems: Remember to Dream (22 June–1 December 2024) is the third in a suite of momentous international surveys of the American artist, including Reflections for Now (2023) at the Barbican Art Gallery in London and The Evidence of Things Not Seen—referencing the book of the same title by James Baldwin—on show at Kunstmuseum Basel until 4 July.

At the Hessel Museum of Art in New York, Remember to Dream offers an extended look at Weems' practice with a focus on her lesser-known works, including works from the past five years.

Invited by Ocula Magazine, the exhibition's curator Tom Eccles shares five artworks by Weems, beginning with her family photographs from the 1970s and 80s and concluding with an illusory installation telling the story of the artist's grandfather, Frank, in the Jim Crow South, tracing a thread through pivotal moments in U.S. history as Weems lived them.

1. Family Pictures and Stories (1978–1984)

This series of intimate and candid photographs documenting Weems' family comes from the artist's first significant body of work, which she produced as part of her graduate studies at the University of California, San Diego.

With scores of portraits and revealing texts, Family Pictures and Stories conveys Weems' extended family in ways that are at times difficult and painful, but often joyful and intimate. Above all, they document a family like any other—with ups and downs, triumphs and travails.

Taking the form of a family album, the photographs sit in stark opposition to the 1965 Moynihan Report, which argued that poverty in Black communities in the United States was largely due to weak family bonds. At the time, the report's author Daniel Patrick Moynihan was serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Lyndon B. Johnson. The report was widely criticised for being inherently racist as it displaced responsibility for systemic oppression onto the family and shored up harmful stereotypes.

2. Blues and Pinks (2020)

In Remember to Dream, Weems juxtaposes her homage to the Black Panthers with Blues and Pinks, a series of re-purposed, newly arranged and coloured images taken from the original black-and-white photographs by of the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, taken by white Southern journalist Charles Moore.

The march of over 1,000 children challenged segregation in schools and in early May 1963 was met with brutal police suppression. Weems seems to suggest the question of what is an acceptable response to that level of discrimination and violence, and what might have been if the Black Panthers had not been equally suppressed.

3. Land of Broken Dreams: A Case Study (2021)

Weems moved to San Francisco in 1970 and became friends with members of the Black Panther Party. The recreation of a Case Study room—replete with period furniture, portraits, figurine sculptures, and newspapers of the time—invites visitors to sit, read, and look at the material in the room, as part of a reimagining of the Black Panther Party's educational programs of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

4. Painting the Town (2021)

In this series of extraordinary photographs, the viewer is confronted by large-scale images of what appear as abstract paintings. They are in fact photographs of boarded-up shops and storefronts with graffiti crudely painted over.

This tension between what is seemingly abstraction and then realism is underscored by the context in which Weems made the work. Weems returned to her birthplace Portland in 2021 to document the city centre where many of the most disruptive BLM demonstrations and protests took place. The room of photographs, which were taken late into the night, is a ghostly portrait of a battle-scarred city hollowed out in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

5. Leave, Leave Now! (2022)

Leave, Leave Now! is based on Weems's grandfather's life and considers the question of reparations. It takes the form of a Pepper's Ghost—an illusion technique in which an object off-stage is projected to appear in front of the audience—within an old theatre.

The artist and her sister tell the story of their grandfather Frank, a sharecropper who was a member of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and worked the land in Arkansas. In 1936, after being beaten and left for dead in Earle, Arkansas, Frank escaped north to Chicago on foot out of the Jim Crow South, losing his land, and for a time his family.

After the painful description and depiction of her grandfather's life, Weems questions in blunt terms whether he and his family are owed anything. She asks, what might those reparations be? —[O]

Carrie Mae Weems: Remember to Dream is on view at the Hessel Museum of Art in New York from 22 June until 1 December 2024.