Carrie Mae Weems has worked toward developing a complex body of art that has employed photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video over the past thirty years. Her work has led her to investigate family relationships, gender roles, the histories of racism, sexism, class, and various political systems.
Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most recently her work was the focus of a major retrospective, Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video. The exhibition began its run at The Frist Center for Visual Arts in Nashville, travelled to Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, and ended at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in May 2014. Yale University Press published the eponymous accompanying catalogue.
Weems has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships including the prestigious Prix de Roma, The National Endowment of the Arts, the Alpert, the Anonymous was a Woman and the Tiffany Awards. In 2012, Weems was presented with one of the first US Department of State’s Medals of Arts in recognition for her commitment to the State Department’s Art in Embassies program.
In 2013 Weems was not only the recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant, but she also received the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In February of 2014 she was presented with the BET Honors Visual Arts Award.
She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, NY and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Weems has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since 2008. Her exhibitions with the gallery include Slow Fade to Black (2010), Signs Taken for Wonders (2009) curated by Isolde Brielmaier, Carrie Mae Weems: A Survey (2008) and The Whole World is Rotten (2005).
The 2014 Art For Life Art Auction will feature works by a variety of artists including this by Carrie Mae Weems.
