Carrie Mae Weems by Jerry Klineberg
Carrie Mae Weems
Award-winning artist Carrie Mae Weems works with a variety of mediums, including photography, video, and text, to explore themes of racism, sexism, and personal identity in her work.
As of April 2020, Carrie Mae has worked on the Resist Covid Take 6! project with frequent collaborator Pierre Loving. Carrie Mae and Pierre have created a variety of items, such as billboards, bags and buttons, which provide information about the pandemic and educate people about its disproportionate effect on people of colour.
Beginning at Syracuse University, where Carrie Mae is Artist in Residence, the project has since spread across the USA with the support of museums and sponsors. Carrie Mae hopes that excess sponsorship money will assist the project’s spread into communities that aren’t able to sponsor it themselves.
If you’d like to dip into some critical reading, have a look at this essay which explores Carrie Mae’s Kitchen Table Series (1990) from a Black feminist perspective. It discusses the ways her intertextual storytelling challenges the ‘Eurocentric, male, race myth’ – written by our Projects Manager, Vanessa, for her MA History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London.
