Among the most acclaimed artists of her generation, Carrie Mae Weems first rose to fame with her groundbreaking “Kitchen Table” series (1990). For these rich black-and-white photographs, Weems created various tableaux of Black women, and sometimes men, sitting at a kitchen table.
In one image, a woman runs a hair pick through Weems’s hair, two glasses of red wine in front of them. In another, a husband and wife eat dinner, and in a third, a mother applies makeup in front of a round beauty mirror while her daughter mirrors her to the right. Though these images are staged and not strictly documentarian, they showed the ways in which a kitchen table was, is, and continues to be an important space within Black American homes.
In the years since, Weems has continued to ponder what it means to be a Black woman living in this world today, whether by standing in front of major museums, which have historically been repositories of colonial plunder, or by grieving the young Black men and women who have been murdered by the state.
Her genre-defying work moves between installation, performance, and film and video. More recently, Weems has also begun to organize what she calls “convenings,” multiday symposia that gather top intellectuals, writers, poets, and artists.
Weems was last the subject of a career retrospective, “Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video,” when it opened at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville in 2012. The exhibition traveled to four other venues, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2014; she made history then as the first African American artist to have ever mounted a retrospective at the Guggenheim since its founding in 1939.
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