Carrie Mae Weems facts for kids

Carrie Mae Weems (born April 20, 1953) is an American artist. She uses many art forms like text, fabric, sound, digital pictures, and video installations. She is most famous for her photography.

She became well-known in the early 1990s with her photo project called The Kitchen Table Series. Her photos, films, and videos often look at important issues for African Americans today. These include topics like racism, sexism, politics, and who we are as individuals.

Carrie Mae Weems once said that her main goal in art is to show the place and importance of African Americans in the country. More recently, she explained that the "Black experience" is not the only point. Instead, she wants to show complex, real human experiences and how everyone can be included. She keeps making art that shares ideas about the lives of people of color, especially black women, in America.

Her amazing talent has been recognized by top universities like Harvard University. She has received special fellowships and worked as an artist-in-residence and visiting professor. Weems is currently an artist-in-residence at Syracuse University.

Biography

Early Life and Education (1953–1980)

Carrie Mae Weems was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1953. She was the second of seven children. When she was 12, in 1965, she started dancing and performing in street theater. At 16, she had her only child, a daughter named Faith.

In 1970, she moved to San Francisco. There, she studied modern dance with a famous dancer named Anna Halprin. Weems remembered that Anna Halprin was very interested in using dance to bring different cultures together.

Weems decided to continue her art studies. She earned her first degree from the California Institute of the Arts when she was 28. Later, she got her master's degree from the University of California, San Diego. She also studied folklore at the University of California, Berkeley.

In her early twenties, Weems was active in the labor movement. She helped organize workers into trade unions. She got her first camera as a birthday gift. She used it for her union work before she started using it for art. She was inspired to become a photographer after seeing a book called The Black Photographers Annual. This book showed photos by many talented African-American photographers. This led her to New York City, where she met other artists and photographers. In 1976, she took a photography class at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Art from 1980 to 2000

First panel from Untitled (1996), a work by Carrie Mae Weems.

In 1983, Weems finished her first art collection. It was called Family Pictures and Stories. It included photos, text, and spoken words. The pictures told the story of her family. She said she wanted to show how black families moved from the South to the North, using her own family as an example.

Her next series, Ain't Jokin', came out in 1988. It looked at racial jokes and how people sometimes believe bad things about their own group. Another series, American Icons (1989), also focused on racism. Weems started to move away from simply taking documentary photos. Instead, she created pictures that looked real but were actually set up. She also started adding text and using multiple images, like two-part (diptych) or three-part (triptych) artworks.

sexism became her next main topic. This was the focus of one of her most famous collections, The Kitchen Table Series. She created this series between 1989 and 1990. In these photos, Weems herself is the main person. She used her own image to question ideas about family, relationships, and the roles of men and women. She wanted to show the experiences of black women, who were often missing from popular media. Her work helped other black female artists create their own art.

Weems has explained that her art is about more than just her own life. She is interested in power and its effects. She also explores storytelling, humor, history, and memory in her work.

Art from 2000 to Today

The Armstrong Triptych (2000) by Carrie Mae Weems.

Carrie Mae Weems continues to be a very active artist. She has created many photo projects, like Louisiana Project (2003) and Roaming (2006). She also makes installations, mixed media art, and video projects.

Her project Slow Fade to Black (2010) looks at how the images and memories of African-American female entertainers from the 20th century have been lost. It uses the idea of a movie screen fading to black. The blurred photos of artists like Marian Anderson and Billie Holiday show how these important figures can become less visible over time.

In 2023, Carrie Mae Weems made history. She became the first black woman to win the important Hasselblad Award for photography.

Commissions

Artists sometimes get "commissions," which means someone asks them to create a special artwork. For the 2020/2021 season, Carrie Mae Weems designed a huge picture for the Vienna State Opera. It was called Queen B (Mary J. Blige).

In 2024, a fashion company named Bottega Veneta asked Weems to create an ad campaign. It featured the rapper A$AP Rocky and his sons.

Exhibitions

Carrie Mae Weems's first big show of her work opened in September 2012. It was called Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video. This show traveled to several museums.

In January 2014, a 30-year show of her work opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. This was a very special event because it was the first time an African-American woman had a solo exhibition there. In 2021, Weems showed her exhibit The Shape of Things at the Park Avenue Armory.

Her first solo show in Germany, called The Evidence of Things Not Seen, was in 2022. In 2023, the Barbican Centre in London hosted her first major UK exhibition. It was called Reflections for Now and showed her photography and video art from over three decades.

Notable Works in Public Collections

Awards

• Photographer of the Year by the Friends of Photography
• 2006: Rome Prize Fellowship
• 2007: Anonymous Was A Woman Award
• 2013: Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award
• 2013: MacArthur Fellow, also known as a "Genius" Award
• 2014: BET Visual Arts Award
• 2014: Lucie Award
• 2015: ICP Spotlights Award from the International Center of Photography
• 2015: Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow
• 2015: W. E. B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University
• 2015: Honorary Doctorate from the School of Visual Arts
• 2016: International Artist Award, Anderson Ranch Arts Center
• 2017: Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University
• 2017: Inga Maren Otto Fellowship, The Watermill Center
• 2019: Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society, Bristol
• 2020: Inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum
• 2022: National Medal of Arts for visual artist
• 2023: Hasselblad Award

Personal Life

Carrie Mae Weems lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and Syracuse, New York. She lives with her husband, Jeffrey Hoone.

See also

In Spanish: Carrie Mae Weems para niños